BASIC Instinct: Going Loopy In Doorways

Yesterday, I wandered into a visual FOR-NEXT loop.

It’s not a kind of roundabout. It’s also not a trap made by nimble-fingered Boy Scouts (although it is a kind of snare, shaped exactly like your brain).

It’s much more dangerous than that.

FOR-NEXT loops are an artefact from the earliest days of BASIC programming, back in the days when hair, sideburn and beard combos made computing geniuses look like hairy windmills, when pedalling down the motorway in Encore Ironhide’s shoe (no, look) was socially acceptable, when graphics were ASCII and computer games were a kind of visual radio. Home computing required heroic mental and physical effort. Geeks were like gods (not rock-stars).

FOR-NEXT loops were simple, powerful and inexorable. They were machine-code event horizons: there was no escape from them. They would capture energy and whirl it around for n numbers of repetitions, and once something fell into their grasp, it was there for exactly n. Oh, you could fling yourself out of a FOR-NEXT loop, but spacetime itself would tear and the Unseen Dimensions would bulge out in their greasy wriggling awfulness as your computer mewed “OUT OF MEMORY” and something with too many fingers scrabbled wetly at the back of your neck. It was ugly. So you didn’t.

Occasionally, I see things that lock my thoughts into a similar state, careering round like Ben Hur on a chariot. There’s nothing I can do but wait until the race has ended. I cannot break free.

This time, it was an arrow on the door of my local Co-Op supermarketlette. It was one of those arrows they put on doors to signify the direction you can push to open it – except in this case, there was an arrow on each side of the door. I was faced with the one that was wrong.

…but then I got thinking: do these arrows always mean “Push this way”? Can’t they also mean “This way out?”

…but that raised the question of who the hell wouldn’t realise that “Out” was through a clear glass door onto a well-lit street where cars were flashing past every second? Admittedly this is Yorkshire, but even so.

…but then I wondered if it was pointing upwards, drawing attention to the sign above it?

And so it went on. I exhausted every possibility within grasp of my intellect. This took about 8 seconds. But don’t mock – they were 8 furiously-thought seconds, enough to douse me in perspiration. And 8 seconds may sound piffling, but the thing was – I was blocking the doorway.

Imagine leaving your local supermarket, dragging your screaming toddler and a supermarket carrier bag so heavy the strap is cheesewiring through the fingers of one hand, knowing your spouse is parked on double yellow lines outside and not wanting to get a ticket because it’ll cut into your piss-money for the month.

Imagine someone standing right in the way, blocking your exit, for 8 seconds.

See? Intolerable. In fact, it’s murderously long. And this was in Tang Hall – the Bronx of Old York. If my life was pulp fiction, I’d be outlined in chalk by now, with the imprint of a 3ltr bottle of White Lightning on the back of my head. It’s an urban miracle that I’m here.

But there are more of them out there – intellectual man-traps like supercharged versions of Canadian politeness paradoxes (the kind that will have two Canadians in perfect control of their mental faculties dying of starvation on either side of a doorway, each unwilling to put the other out, unless of course they wished to be put out, etc etc. until blessed death).

They wait for me.

And it’s only a matter of n.

Image: kurafire