It was one of those lazy midsummer afternoons when the entire human race seems to be in a private war with its own eyelids. In the lab, everybody was fighting heroically to stop the oculomotor nerve from pulling down the shutters for the day. The room was full of project groups, computers, false ambition, and the soft despair of people who had eaten lunch and immediately regretted not being born rich.
I was sitting waaay behind the frontline geniuses of our project group, strategically placed at a safe distance from productivity, along with my partner, trying to tie up the loose ends of our source code.
And when I say “my partner,” let me clarify before anyone who has alreadu read my blog post First Love starts drawing the wrong conclusions. I mean a real girl. A human being. Not a computer. Not a UNIX box. Not even a monitor with emotional depth. A real girl. One of those Latina-flavored, desi edition, Version 1.0, Build 1982–84 kind of specimen who could make a fellow forget both syntax.
Now, our project partnership had a very clear and professionally negotiated working contract, drafted mostly in my head and ratified by zero legal authorities.
Clause one: since she was allergic to coding, in the way aristocrats are allergic to manual labor, I would handle all the coding while she did all the documentation by herself.
Clause two: she would not yawn theatrically after lunch while I was trying to look serious and competent in front of the source code.
Clause three: she would let me play the first holy round of Solitaire without looking at me as if I had personally derailed the economy.
Clause four: she would allow me a brief, private moment with my inbox before work began, and resist the temptation to lean in every thirty seconds with that dangerously repetitive, “Are you done?”
It was a fair arrangement. Some would even call it romance under administrative supervision.
The lab, meanwhile, had only one database server for everybody, which meant all of us were pooling onto that poor machine like villagers drawing water from a single well in a drought. Queries took forever. Results came back with the urgency of a government file moving through six departments. But we loved that long wait, because that was when true multitasking happened. Email. Chat. Solitaire. Mild flirting. Philosophical staring. Career damage.
The whole lab was filled with the sacred soundtrack of computing: clicks, clacks, keyboard tapping, mouse abuse, chair squeaks, and the occasional sigh of a student who had just discovered that his query returned nothing except emotional emptiness. Nobody was interested in any activity that might burn extra calories. Even breathing felt negotiable.
So there I was, checking my emails.
And as we all know, disaster rarely arrives through the front door. It begins with one click.
One innocent click.
One tiny detour.
And suddenly, I was no longer checking my inbox. I was speeding down the Information Superhighway, changing clicks at every bend like a man with neither discipline nor destination.
Somewhere in the middle of this digital wandering, my project partner moved closer.
Very close.
Dangerously close.
Close enough for the internal system alerts to begin screaming.
A lazy, very lazy afternoon was now receiving more function calls than the code ever did.
At once, my Standard Operating Procedures began auto-activating.
Call Function func_Override_gulp_drool()
Call Function func_Stop_Acting_Weird()
Call Function func_Say_Something_Funny(void)
Call Function func_No_Pickup_Lines()
Call Function func_SHUT_UP()
Call Function func_BEHAVE()
My internal processor was overheating.
My RAM was full of nonsense.
My social stability had entered undefined behavior.
And then it happened.
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!”
My project partner leapt out of her chair as if launched by military-grade panic. She stood there frozen, eyes wide, mouth wider, finger extended dramatically in my direction.
At me.
Pointing at me.
For one horrifying second, time stopped.
F1… F1… F1… F1…
Esc. Esc. Esc. Esc.
The clicking and clacking in the lab died instantly. Every head turned toward us. The entire room came alive with the kind of stupid excitement only found in engineering students, gossiping aunties, and people who are delighted that someone else’s afternoon is going worse than theirs.
Their tired eyes suddenly shone with interest. Their faces lit up with those wicked little grins that say, “Ah. At last. Entertainment.”
Even the lab in charge, who had until then been moving through the day like a tranquilized buffalo, came charging toward our system at full speed.
No afternoon fatigue now, mind you.
“What?” he asked her.
“Look! It’s…” she said, still pointing toward me.
Towards me.!!!
I would like to state for the record that when a girl points at you and screams in a crowded lab, your brain does not immediately assume “insect-related emergency.” No. It rapidly cycles through every shameful possibility in alphabetical order.
Did my zip betray me?
Was my shirt open?
Was there food on my face?
Was I sitting weirdly?
Did I accidentally say something out loud from the pickup-line rejection folder?
Then the lab in charge leaned in, squinted, and said, with the calm observational tone of a village elder discussing livestock,
“Oh yeah. It’s big. And it’s got little hair on it.”
At this point, the crowd had fully arrived.
People were standing on tiptoe.
Someone nearly climbed onto a table.
The whole lab was now emotionally invested in whatever horror had apparently emerged from my direction.
“Will it bite?” asked someone from the crowd.
“No, it’s harmless. Shoo it away with a textbook,” came another voice, full of false courage.
I, meanwhile, was still sitting there in suspended humiliation, trying to understand how, in the space of three seconds, I had become an object of zoological interest.
Then my project partner, still visibly shaken, said the most beautiful sentence I had heard that day.
“I am sorry. I have Arachnophobia.”
Arachnophobia…
Praise be.
At once, the fog lifted.
There, on the CPU near my leg, was the real culprit: a spider, quite, tiny one…Not one of Google’s web crawlers. Not a metaphorical one. Not some symbolic manifestation of my love life. Just an actual spider, strolling out from the CPU as though it had every right to enjoy a quiet afternoon walk in the lab.
But there is something uniquely damaging about a girl screaming, leaping out of her chair, and pointing in your direction while an entire room assumes you are either the problem or the wildlife.
For one glorious, horrifying second, I was not a programmer. I was an incident.