Honest Servant

HONEST SERVANT

Once upon a time, there was a master who had a honest servant working for him. One fine day, the master had to send some important business letters to his clients and he was out of stamps.  He called the servant gave money and asked him to buy stamps from the nearest Post Office.  The servant took the money and immediately left for Post Office.

The master was expecting the servant to return back anytime soon.  Seconds turned to minutes and minutes turned to couple of hours but the servant did not return back from Post Office.  Master lost the patience and rushed to the Post Office to see what happened.

As he reached the Post Office, he saw the servant standing outside the Post Office.  Seeing him master got angry, went near him and asked,

“Did you buy the stamps?”

Servant replied back politely, “Yes, I did”.

Master asked further to find out whether something happened to the stamps, “Can you show the stamps?”

Servant showed immediately the stamps.

Master asked, “Then why you didn’t return back home? What are you waiting for?”

Servant responded in his humble way “You didn’t instruct me to return back to home!!  The instruction was only to buy the stamps.”

From this story, the honest servant is nothing but the Computer and you are the master who instructs it.  Computer Science Lecturer R. Sivasubramanian told this story when he started the “Fundamentals of Computer Programming”.  This story is a huge inspiration for me to debug many issues.   A big thanks to him!!  Debugging is more mental than technical.