Job of Agencies

When I was working as a VB6 developer some 7 years ago, I thought I was doing the most useless job in the universe. But then when I became an information security consultant, I thought VB6 wasn’t that bad after all.

When I worked for the software testing department, one of my jobs was checking the software compliance of other software with the our home-grown software for extra features. Unfortunately, vendors were upgrading their products so rapidly that the software I was testing was literally obsolete before the compliance results were even written up, every time. My job, for all practical purposes, was testing software that no one could use no matter how hard they tried. It was the most useless job in the whole of universe.

But it was just my thinking at that time. Today, just after I woke up, I switched on TV and got images of President Musharraf making a speech over his win in the presidential elections with an intelligent frown on the forehead, and with one squinting eye towards the Shujaat. Just behind President Musharraf, there were some men from Secret Service detail. Their job apparently is to protect the president against would-be assassins. That sounds like an important job until you ask yourself this question: “What kind of assassin would prefer Shujaat as president?”

Now one may argue that as the vice of Musharraf is General Ashfaq and not the Shujaat, but I would let you know with all due respect that the script has been written, and in the future the civilian would be a president of Pakistan no matter what, with Benazir as prime minister and General Ashfaq as the chief of army staff, with all the real powers. So what better a choice than Shujaat? But is it really better? Place a hand on your heart and tell me do you prefer Shujaat over Musharraf?

Here I am not really starting yet another attack on the President Musharraf. Far from it. I am not either making any anti-Musharraf statement here or anti-Shujaat for that matter. It’s simply an early morning observation that no one in Pakistan, MMA, PML-Q, PML-N,PPPP,MQM or anyone else, thinks that policies would improve if Shujaat had the top spot.

So I think that no one in his right mind could attempt an assassination upon our President, and I would say that even no one in his wrong mind would do that. So I now believe that my job as software compliance tester wasn’t the most useless job in the world.