The Computer Master

(I know this post is a bit late, but I spent all day looking at job listings and it took me a while to shake off all the corporate speak and actually get an idea for this post.)

I've always loved using and learning about computers and the internet, but I always heard that one cannot really understand how a computer works unless they can program. However, I never had the opportunity to learn to myself, and so I resigned myself to being insufficient until last semester, when I finally signed up for an intro programming class. I was really excited. I imagined myself learning faster than everyone and making computers my slaves by the end of the semester.

I did not end up making computers my slaves. I ended up making them my resentful assistants at best. 
Over the course of the class, the material slowly slipped away from me. My programs started malfunctioning in bizarre ways when I tested them, returning results just wrong enough that it was hard to believe they weren't taunting me. Trying to fix them only broke them more. But even as the programs I turned in got less and less functional, I held on to the idea that at the end of the semester, I would rebound from all my mistakes and show everyone (including myself) that I really had learned something, that I really could to get a computer to do what I wanted it to.

The last lab came along. I failed the final homework assignment spectacularly and I was desperate to seize this last chance to redeem myself. The problem we had to work on seemed huge- we were supposed to write a program to solve a maze- but I gritted my teeth and started working through it. And it went well! I watched in astonishment as my tests returned what they were supposed to. Could my big last hurrah actually be happening?

Finally, I tied all my components together. They all worked, so there was no reason for the sum of their parts to fuck up. I tested it, expecting the proof of my miraculous grand finale.

The program told me to stay where I was.

I had been tasked with writing a program to solve a maze. Instead, I had written a program that analyzed the maze, got overwhelmed, and gave up and went into the fetal position.

This was all too ridiculous. I sat there in the middle of the computer lab silently dying with laughter while all around me my classmates coded away seriously. Maybe I had really written an intelligent program- it was just so intelligent that it recognized the futility of trying to do anything.

It felt like such an appropriate end to my godawful computer science career that I considered getting up and leaving right then. But, because I am a Good Student and also because I was getting more certain by the second that I would fail the final exam, I got a TA to work through the program with me until it got over its all-encompassing apathy and solved the maze. 

I did pass the class, somehow. And I do like programming. I just happen to be really, really, really bad at it.