An Anecdote Away 1: Expressive Errors

An exceptionally expressive soul with a stoic stanced exterior is a puzzlingly perplexing problem. I call it the esp... for reasons that seem and feel obvious... to me. But as has been proved earlier, on many occasions, I cannot say with a certainty that it is obvious to others. 

Thus arises the need, nay want, to explain. However, just how an explained joke is a joke no more, this too meets the same fate. So, I would not describe too much than is actually needed. 

There's another reason too. I am pretty sure that this piece, or any other piece penned by me, would not be visible to a majority of people- many will actually not see it, and many will choose not to. Of the countable few who will see it, most would not read past the first couple of lines. And by the time we reach the crux, or even the beginning of the crux, there might not be any readers left. In essence, it might just be me or someone like me who reads it; they would understand anyway.

So, here's the beginning. It was one of those subject labs which was considered (probably still is) as one of the most difficult and complex labs. It required application of both software and hardware components embedded into one. And hence (possibly) it seemed daunting, because the presence of both aspects, actively, in humans is also a rare sight these days. Hence, to relate to aspects of this lab might not be an easy task.

In one of the sessions of these labs, we were to hand out problem statements to each of the lab participants. The norm I prefer to follow is to test the waters yourself first before sending anybody in. So, one saturday afternoon, one of my colleagues and I decided to give each statement a try. There were 6 statements, in total, to test. The first 4 were executed without hiccups of any sort. When it came to the 5th statement however, that was not the case. 

For the 5th statement, we wrote the lines of code, made the necessary configurations and turned our eyes towards the screen that would show us the output. But, it wasn’t what it was expected. It showed a "different", "unexpected" value. I was thrilled to say the least. My soul was experiencing exploding streams of happiness. My stance, however, was calm. I was smiling which was a vast vast understatement of how excited I felt at that moment. I was able to utter a meagre "wow" that assisted my smile.

My colleague looked at me and had an expression that was "expected" at that moment. The output was unexpected and hence is considered an "error", something that is not meant to exist, something that should be discarded, removed. My expression might not have made sense. So, she asked me why I was happy/calm about it. The output was so irrelevant and had to be fixed. I knew what she meant but I didn't quite understand the reaction.

Maybe the output was irrelevant in that context, but it still felt like a desirable necessity. If everything goes as they are expected to go, if everything is done to fit the relevance code, everything would be so linear, so redundant, and so against the basic nature of the very universe we live in. Why can’t we celebrate irrelevances, differences, unexpected-ness-es!!

There was no way I was going to ramble these lines there. So, I just said that even though it is an "error", it still is so beautiful and interesting. And that made me happy. She was kind, and hence smiled back with a "you are optimistic" reply. We did not dwell on it further and after a couple of minutes of modifications, the experiment showed the expected outcome. We winded up the 6th one too and called it a day.

I still have a photo of that unexpected result on the social media page of this website. It might be insignificant, but still doesn't feel insignificant. It feels like it had a meaning and a purpose. The day that it was... irrational and beautiful. 

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