A Visit to the Doctor!

People often recall their first dentist appointments of their childhood with quite a fondness. So do I. It was quite a harrying experience, well not for me but for the attending dentist and his staff, and his patients and my mother. I write it so because it so happened this way.

And so I recall my story.

One fine sunny morning, I wake up and was brushing my teeth, as all good kids and adults do every day. And I notice that my incisors which had still not fallen, the permanent ones were beginning to grow over the old ones. I found it quite funny as now I would have a double set of incisors, an anomaly which at the moment was quite hilarious to me.

Laughing all the way, I tell my Dad about it. And his expressions I imagine because I can’t remember must have changed from curious to serious. As it still does every time he examines me. Doctors have this funny habit. But yeah, so cometh my mother next and she too had her time putting me under her scanner.

It was decided that the very same day, we would go over to the dentist and get the deed done. Now my milky incisors didn’t have any intention to come out just because they were of inconvenience and they had to be pulled out. My mother to some extent and my dear sister in every possible way tried to tell me that it was going to be painful. I somehow managed to not listen to everything that was being said, and I was quite forward looking to what the dentist really looked like. As such till that time I had never visited any other doctor. For all the world, doctor still equals “my dad”.

The clinic had a weird smell, I didn’t like it. But there were quite an awful lot of magazines lying on the table in the waiting area- Reader’s Digest, India Today, M. Oh yes! I still remember, I think at that age it was all about looking up the illustrations but it still felt good. The names were quite familiar, especially Reader’s Digest. I had quite a time for the next 20 minutes sifting through them. My mother I believe was nervously looking at my prelude to such a visit.

Our turn came. The doctor greeted us both warmly; it’s again quite amusing how every doctor knows every other doctor in the area. Engineers for instance have a penchant for living in an ignorant bliss. So I sat down in his large comfy chair. And he peered down my mouth with his weird looking strap-on his head. I still don’t know what they call that. But it was interesting all the same.

Now this is where from where onwards, things start going down the road where in I didn’t feel comfortable. The doctor took my mother aside and planned some conspiracy. He called his assistant, well one was already there. And prepared a syringe which was really bigger than any other I had seen. Even at that age I was familiar having quite used to being around them, that is when I was not at the receiving end.

So now the dentist wants me to open my mouth again and I see from the corner of my eyes the syringe coming closer. Bang! The mouth shuts like trap. I had had enough of the amusement and wanted out. I knew that syringes hurt. They used to hurt a lot when it was my backside and the mouth wasn’t going to “not hurt at all” as the doctor promised. I had seen enough. Now I don’t exactly remember how he prised my mouth open but my mother still recalls that it took his 3 assistants, the doctor himself and my mother included to hold me long enough for the doctor to give me a local anaesthesia and pull out my teeth at the same time. And imagine if you can, I created such a ruckus that some of the patients who were in the waiting area were actually kind of curious to the events unfolding inside as one or two of them were trying to look through the semi-transparent glass wall that separated the two cabins! My mother still recalls how the doctor had broken into a terrible sweat!

Now having the deed done and my mouth feeling numb, I was quite not myself as the anaesthesia and the screaming had me feeling tired and sleepy. My mother promised me ice cream, and that is the last I remember of that visit.

Years later, when I visit the same dentist again for getting a cavity filled. The first thing that he asks me is whether I would be screaming again!

Windows never ceases to Amaze!

These past few days I have been working towards my scholarly paper which hopefully will culminate into a thesis. The problem at hand requires me to implement a system. I will not talk anything about the system itself, but rather the programming part. Programming furiously, I had designed a system ground up after reading a paper on the same. It was a tough task, more so on the GNU C++ compiler, which is rather strict in adherence to some technical specifications- more specifically the ways I could call an object constructor and initialise the object.

It was a little irritating at first, but I like programming and it only required a minor change in my style. Plus I really had no other option than to oblige. Majbuuri ka naam Mahatma Gandhi.

While compiling the program, though it seldom happens with me, but this time it happened big. The dreaded word “Segmentation Fault” appeared on the gnome-terminal. Now, since I was using an older version of Linux the debugger plugins simply won’t install. Attaching the gdb manually is a little too mundane for me, plus the extra code I would have to write would only have bloated the program and given more headaches. What to do?

At time like this when faith in Linux is shaken, I always look towards Saint Bill Gates. Windows to the rescue!

Now the funny part happens, I fired up Orwell Dev C++, and put all the critical variables in the watch stack. But every time I compiled and ran my program, somehow the IDE would crash every time, without any sufficient explanation.  There had to be one. I double checked by writing a dummy “Hello World” program, the compiler install was intact. There had to be another reason.

And then one of those Eureka moment happened, when realisation dawns upon you.

Windows have a feature of DEP (Dynamic Execution Prevention), which when translated into English means, whenever a program tries to access memory locations other than its own, the Windows OS shuts down the program as a potential malware which could cause harm. Due to Segmentation Fault, my program was accessing memory locations which were out of bounds, hence the sudden IDE crash.

Sometimes I forget how amazing Windows OS is. But moments like these remind me why it’s still the most popular. Speaking of Windows, I recently and finally acquired Windows Phone 8. A proper review of my phone Lumia 720 shall soon follow. But in one word it is simply beautiful.