No Bucket-List. Only Countdown - 3

I am changing my usual style today and starting off with my list. Today’s is going to be about ‘The Three Alternate Professions’ I usually see myself in. The boring background stuff will come later, if I feel up to it. ;)

• Racer – I love the idea of bikes and cars and speed, I speed unnecessarily on public roads and I claim to be good at it. Of course no one else has endorsed me but when you are as good as I am, you don’t need endorsement! Anyway, given this love for speed, it’s no wonder that I see myself strapped to a speeding missile with steering control and mixing it with the likes of Mick Doohan, Valentino Rossi, Casey Stoner, Michael Schumacher, Mika Hakkinen on a regular basis. But alas, as they say, all good things must come to an end and so it is with me when I have to wake up.
• Dancer – Remember dancing to music when you were a kid? Yep, I am referring to that un-synchronized movement of your hands and legs and out-of-rhythm shaking of the hips that we all did at one time or the other when we were still young enough to not care about it. Right from those days I have known two things – I can follow a rhythm and someone has to choreograph my dance always, even the aforementioned un-coordinated movement. So it’s pretty easy to imagine myself as ‘Mr. Twinkle Toes’. But make no mistake; it’s Mr. Twinkle Toes the back-up dancer and not Mr. Twinkle Toes the choreographer.
• Food Taster and Critic – I consider myself a foodie in the sense that I like anything that is labeled ‘food’. From high-brow to road-side and everything in between is a favorite. A couple of things stand in the way of me actually realizing this dream of being a FTC. My taste cognizance begins and ends with heat and spice, so I will probably miss out on all the subtle flavours (that’s what they call ‘bland food’ these days) and the fact that I am a vegetarian and am a teetotaler means that the piece of the ‘global-food-spread’ pie that I can dig into is comparatively small. But I have never let these facts get in the way of a good, mouth-watering imagination :)

So those are the three other avatars that I see myself. My main, and real, avatar is that of a ‘software professional’, which is a better way of saying that I write code for a living. Of course, I didn't set out to write code from the beginning. As I was growing up, there were the regulars like becoming a Pilot or a Doctor. After school, I did my undergraduate course in mechanical engineering. And yet here I am, 11 years after finishing college, pounding on keyboards and dealing with languages, syntaxes, bits, bytes and character-sets. “How come?” you may ask. It’s simple really. After 2 years of kindergarten, 5 years of junior school, 5 years of high school, 2 years of junior college and 4 years of undergraduate college (for a total of 18 years of 'sit-on-your-arse-and-study' kind of formal education) I was ready to stop studying and start earning. I took the first job that came my way and haven't looked back ever since. :)

If you have been following my posts these last few days, you would have noticed that this is not a “Bucket List”. No wishes here. I was going through the news-paper this morning and everybody and their uncle was on about either “2011 - The year that was” or “2012 – What to expect” or some similar thing. So the wise one and I decided that we will leave the wishing to the ones who do it so well – on nationally circulated news papers no less – and stick to general count-down lists to ring in the new year. That's why the foray into my imagination today. That being said, we are almost on the verge of tripping into the next year. Three more days to go.