Lessons Learned

Audio cable saves the pride

Superficial knowledge never comes to rescue. I realized this with experience. In the summer of 2005, I was in silicon valley doing internship for one of the top notch IT companies. The company was doing very well and was every programmer's haven. I considered myself extermely lucky to get such a nice oppurtunity. On the other hand a serious handicap was that then I was totally new to C++. Being a C addict, It took me a lot of time to understand the concepts of OOP. There was a friend of mine called Alex, who was a software engineer in the same company .The guy had come straight from undergrad school and was a C++ Guru. He taught me lot of fundamental stuff and one day he asked me "Madhu!, Have you ever done C++ programming before?". I said proudly that "I am a systems guy". He was amazed and since I could grasp ideas fast it made him believe that I was also one of the stallmanian who worked only with operating systems and compilers. Things were going great until one day, when he came to me complaining that his he can't hear sound when he plays CDs from the CDROM. Immediately he came to me for help. I tried configuring alsamixer etc etc...just bullshiting my way thro. I did no nothing each options were and basically fishing around stuff. Two hours later I bite the dust..."A SELF PROCLAIMED LINUX GEEK FAILED TO CONFIGURE SOUND". I went to my cubicle and sat down and vowed to forget this bitter experience. Next day Alex comes and says "Madhu!. Sorry man the CDROM drive's cable failed and it was not able to transmit sound to the sound card". Immediately I felt pouncing on him and saying that "Ofcourse !! because whatever I did was correct". But the correct side of me told me to be a man and accept the fact that superficial knowledge never helps. And people are impreseed by honesty than BSs.