Gaurav's Blog

This can usually be found on Twitter.

The original article used to be hosted over here. I've put it here cos I think it's awesome. If you're the original writer, and you don't want it up here, please leave me a comment with you're email address, and I'll take it off.

I worked in London as a contractor for a number of years. I spent most of my time either in work or being stressed about travelling to and from work. I'd usually spend 14 hours a day away from home and my beautiful baby daughter.

I was travelling home on a train and it stopped in the dark in the middle of nowhere for an hour, with no reason why. Then an announcement, as the train began to move, that there had been a fatality on the line and that all services on the line had been suspended. The train pulled into a station and we all got off and walked down the platform intending to find taxis home.

I was impatient, and was about the third person off the train.

As I walked down the platform, I began to see, in the half light, that someone had dropped some meat on the platform. I thought "that's fairly stupid, someone will kick themselves when they get home and discover that their shopping bag has ripped and that their steak has fallen out somewhere". In retrospect, I find it amazing that my mind was trying to protect me in this way.

As I got closer to the meat, the image began to get clearer. It was steaming, and covered in little pipelets each of which had a drip of blood at the end. The strangest thing was the pattern covering it. It was all wrinkled, and gray with red smears on it.

I started to retch.

I started to vomit.

It was a brain.

I looked up. The rest of the platform was covered in various bits of body. Arms, legs, bits of lung.

It was just so wrong that we (15 of us in all) had been forced to walk through that. I saw a policeman, got angry, punched him. He didn't complain, odd, perhaps he was in shock too. It was the wrong thing to do; it didn't make me feel any better.

On the news the next day, I learnt that an 18 year old had seen his train waiting at the platform, and had just run across the tracks behind it in the hope of catching it. He was hit by an express train (the Flying Scotsman) passing on the central track. It was doing about 120 miles an hour.

An 18 year old!

I don't waste time anymore. I don't program for programming's sake. I do XP because it allows me to spend less time at work and more time with my beautiful daughters (we have three now). I don't waste time doing anything more than once. I don't waste time doing things for no reason.

A month later, I quit my contracts and we moved to New Zealand; now I'm a consultant over here. I show people how to do XP, I teach Java, I swim, I play with my girls, I eat, I have a life. I plan to plant a tree. I keep thinking about a book, but I don't really have time for that, I'm too busy enjoying life. I only work where I know that I'll enjoy it.

This post was posted by Unknown at 2:21 am