The Pilgrimage to Voltage and Grace

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There was a time when I believed my world would remain small — a quiet town, a modest workshop filled with hums of relays and the warmth of soldering irons. I dreamed of coding machines forever, writing logic and database queries side by side: PLC ladder beside SQL, and somewhere in between, the elegant simplicity of Pick-BASIC. I thought that would be enough — an engineer’s monastery of bits and volts.

But life, with its divine humor, sent a wind stronger than my plans. In 1998 the crisis came, and with it the quiet hum of machines slowing down. Budgets tightened, projects paused, and many of us — young engineers without formal degrees — were kindly released, not for lack of skill, but for the mercy of balance sheets that could no longer stretch. The factory endured; it survived the storm with fewer hands, while I, one of those let go, carried its memory like a blueprint folded in my heart.

I did not weep — not because I was strong, but because tears would short-circuit the keyboard I still carried. With my brother beside me, I boarded a bus to the great city — a place of concrete and uncertainty, where nobody cared about logic diagrams or rung addresses. All I had were my notes, my faith, and a stubborn belief that somewhere, electricity was still waiting for me.

The city was harsh, yet honest. It stripped away the illusion that skill alone sustains a man, and taught me that humility, communication, and patience are also circuits — invisible, but essential. Every rejection became a resistor, every new opportunity a capacitor charged with hope. And in that long debugging session called survival, I found a new form of logic: leadership.

Years later, when I finally looked back from the desk of a Head of ICT, I realized I had not abandoned my dream — it had simply expanded its scope. The relays became routers, the ladders became networks, and the old rungs now linked people instead of coils. The same discipline that once kept a motor turning now keeps a company running. And the same God who once blessed my trembling hand before a start-up test still whispers in every line of code I approve today.

I did not lose my path — I simply discovered that the path itself was alive. Each wire, each byte, each decision was guiding me toward this moment: to become not only the programmer of machines, but also the caretaker of minds, systems, and souls that depend on them.

— For every young engineer who thinks failure is the end, remember this: sometimes Heaven rewires your circuit so you can carry more current.

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