The incident

This is another story of one of those insignificant little incidents that happen at the work place. It may or may not affect your life in a significant or not so significant way. It started of as a regular dull day at the office, no meetings, everyone glued to their computers, no activity, no nothing. But then all of a sudden something happened. It was evident from the way that the entire floor came to life that this was something big. I heard the people chatter on the otherwise dead silent floor. It stirred my curiosity. I Looked around and there was a confused look on everyone's faces. The confusion was gone within seconds and it gave way to a more blissful look. There were smiles everywhere, people who seemed like they were glued to their seats got up and started chatting with the others in their cubicle. Their faces had the same expressions as that of a prisoner, A prisoner who had spent the last few years in jail only to wake up one morning and find the prison gates wide opened with nothing standing between him and the freedom of the outside world. It was the expression of freedom indeed.

I looked at my computer screen and there it was at the bottom right corner, the saving grace of the day, a little message that read "Network cable unplugged". It felt good to be unplugged. Unplugged from the responsibilities, unplugged from work, unplugged from the corporate world, it felt too good to be true. Never had a "network cable unplugged" message made me this happy. But then like all other good things, this had to come to an end. We watched in horror as the red cross at the bottom of our screen gave way to a "local area network is now connected" message and brought us back to reality. The prisoner was unlucky, he tried to get away but was chased down by the guard dogs and dragged back to his cell.

The new year greeting dilemma

It's that time of the year again, the time when cellphone companies overcharge you for sending that 160 characters new years message to every friend, acquaintance and nemesis on your address book. But now since we are all working people the price is not the dilemma i am talking about, The dilemma is choosing the right message.

There are some unwritten rules that i like to follow when it comes to forwarding greetings, the most important one being - A person must not receive the same message from 2 or more friends belonging the same friend circle, it is acceptable only if the 2 friends sending the same message are from different friend circles. I know it might be a little difficult to accomplish but i have a plan of action. A technique which i like to call "message recycling"

The process is pretty simple, the first step is to identify the different "friend circles" that exists within your friends. This helps because if you receive a message from person A, you can quickly identify based on the friend circle which other friends person A must have send the message to, and you can avoid forwarding the same message to them. Instead, you have a fresh new message to forward to other friends who do not know person A. And if you get a message from person B, who is not in the same group as person A, you can forward that message to person A and his group. Sounds simple doesn't it? It will get even more simpler if everyone starts following the same process, we will have a lot more unique messages to choose from.

Anyway, i found myself in a similar situation today so it was time to scan the inbox for potential good new year greetings to send to people, unfortunately all of them were pretty lame so i had to improvise. I thought of sending just a "happy new year!" but it was too short of a message. A couple of minutes later heres what i came up with - "Happy new year! since everyone else is saying it". You know your new years greeting was a success when you get a reply saying "That is the funniest newyears greeting ever! not! stop being such a wise ass all the time"

Christmas? is it?

Its 12:00am , 25th December. They say its Christmas, but something just doesn't feel right. For some strange reason it just doesn't feel like Christmas this year. I spent a good hour pondering but i still have no clue why. Sure, the streets are lit up, there's a Christmas tree set up in one corner of the room, there's a star shining bright outside the window, the SMS greetings are pouring in, but it still feels as if something is missing, the festive mood has not yet set in. It feels just like any other ordinary day, like Mr. Grinch came out of the story books and stole christmas for real.

What makes it worse is that people who you hardly ever speak to normally will want to wish you a merry christmas. Once you're done with the text book response of "wish you the same", you are burdened with the task of keeping the conversation alive, even though both of you know theres nothing much left to say and you have nothing in common to talk about. It can get really ackward and uncomfortable at times. Thats one of the reasons I don't like festivals much, you have to wish everyone, even those you hardly speak to, just because of this abstract little thing called courtesy. Anyway, I will stop here for fear of taking away whatever christmas spirit the readers may have left.

PS: for what its worth, heres wishing you a merry christmas!

The zinger and me

I finally gave into the temptation, the advertisements were too much for me to handle. I just had to try it at any cost. After 2 weeks of trying to convince different sets of friends, success finally came my way when my college friends agreed. Fate would finally find it in its heart to let my taste buds meet the much awaited zinger burger. The date - 21st December 2008, the place - KFC bandra. Getting there was not easy, despite it being December and winter being the expected season, it was drizzling. Being me, i decided to go by bike and eventually learnt it was a bad idea, the roads were so slippery that it was like riding on ice. But there was no way i was going to let that stop me from getting to the delicious fried chicken, i had waited long enough. After 1 1/2 hour of riding through traffic jams and roads which were so slippery that they could give banana peels an inferiority complex, I finally reached my destination. Without much hesitation we stood in line to place our order. I tried convincing the guys to order a bucket of chicken along with the burgers but they all said they weren't hungry. What kind of guys aren't hungry for a bucket of fried chicken anyway? After failing to convince them I ordered for the zinger meal which consists of a zinger burger, a piece of fried chicken and a glass of coke.

True to their tag line, the chicken was finger lickin' good. It was mouth watering, juicy, delicious and totally worth the 135 bucks by which it made my wallet lighter. I left the place a happy man, and a little heavier than i was when i got in. Having chicken without a chilled beer to drown it in is a sin, so we hopped across the street to Mumbai times cafe and ordered for a pitcher of beer to accompany the fried chicken that must have been getting lonely in our stomachs by now. The ambience of the place is really nice. It was a treat to the taste buds and the retro-reggae-rock genre of music that they kept switching between was a treat to the ears, albeit a little too loud to hold a conversation. Despite having the word cafe in its name, we were not allowed to sit for long as there were people waiting so we headed out to spend the next few hours at carter road discussing the weekend getaway plans. A couple of hours later we were done with our usual "intellectual" discussions and we decided to go on a bike trip the next weekend. But keeping in mind our groups fondness of canceling plans, the chances of it materializing are slimmer than an anorexic supermodel. That being done, I rode on home, this time on dry roads and reached home at 12:30am.

I feel like blogging - Things that annoy me - part III

All this while i have been blogging about my short trips, its been a long time since my last ranting session so here i go. There are so many things to complain about that its hard to decide where to begin.

Lets begin by referring to my last post about blocked ears, my ears still show no sign of giving up their strike and are adamant on remaining blocked. At least the right one is. It gets irritating when you are forced to hear every word that you speak, every bite that you take while eating, the bristles of the toothbrush rubbing against your teeth every morning, its just annoying. All this because of a cold. I wonder why our doctors haven't managed to find a cure for the common cold, is it because they are all too busy working on cancer? or is it one huge conspiracy between the pharmacies and doctors since the common cold is a major source of their income? But they say every cloud has a silver lining. My silver lining is i get to pretend that i can't hear people, especially the annoying ones.

Now that i got that out of my system, lets move on to the next thing that bothers me - work. I have to wake up early tomorrow to attend a training session on six sigma. Six sigma has been made mandatory for us and we have innumerable training sessions to attend where we eventually end up learning how to throw coins into a waste bin. At the end of it, we need to do a project to get six sigma certified. My idea was to do a project which measures the amount of time that can be saved if we quit learning six sigma, but i have a feeling that it will be frowned upon.

Another new development at the work place is this 2-3 week program, A new way of improving employee fitness. Its really simple, they just shut down the washrooms and water cooler room on our floor under the pretense of renovating it. This forces us to run downstairs to the 4th floor every time we need to get a glass of water or need to use the washroom and then run back upstairs. It must be amusing to the person sitting on the 4th floor between the staircase and the washroom doors to watch people walk in through one door and enter the washroom and then again walk back out of that door and then out through the main door and back to their floor. They can even maintain a log on how often each person goes to kill their boredom, if any.

The one drawback of being in the IT industry

We have all heard of the good things about IT, how it has created job opportunities for many, how it has changed many lives, and so on. But there's one side effect when you have the label of "IT" on you. Some time around last month, while i was at home minding my own business, My dad comes to me with the phone and tells me that one of his friend wants to speak to me. I was wondering why a person who I had never met before wanted to speak to me. Turns out, he had computer trouble and wanted me to fix it. Since he was a friend of my parents they couldn't say no to him, and since they were my parents, i couldn't say no to them. So i had to get off my lazy butt late on a Saturday afternoon and go check what was wrong with his computer. On the bright side, he did have a good looking daughter who was roaming around the house in an extremely short pant, but that still didn't make up for the fact that i had to leave my place on a Saturday afternoon. Wait, may be it did.

That was incident #1, Incident #2 begins when i was leaving my house at 3:10 for a 3:30 movie at inorbit. I was already running late and then while going downstairs, i meet a neighbor who asked me if i was working at a call center. I don't know what it is that makes them assume that any all youngsters whose work timings are not 9 to 5 work at a call center. I promptly said that i work at TCS, not a call center. Then he says he just got a new computer and wanted to know if i can check it out. I was trying to cut the conversation short and had no intention of checking out his new computer. I tried the "walk away while you talk" tactic and ended the conversation and was off to inorbit. In case you're wondering, I didn't make it in time for the movie and had to wait for the 6:30 show.

The reason i am posting this today is that the same guy#1 called up today saying he couldn't log into any sites and i was force to go check it out again. The reason was his net was not working. When will this end? Do i have to mess up their comps for them to stop calling me?

How to write a letter

This weekend was one of those where there are no plans at all, the type that’s spent wasting away at home. I stumbled upon a link to this Google group we had during our college days. We used to have a lot of fun posting messages to that group during our exams, everyone used to stay online for hours, replying to each others posts, fighting, and having a battle of wits. Among those posts I found one with an apology letter that we wrote to our profs. We were caught for not writing notes, throwing paper balls when the profs back was turned, and making a lot of noise. The dean barred us for giving the exams unless we wrote a letter apologizing to the prof. So there we were, around 20 of us, sitting on the stairs of the auditorium, writing our first apology letter. There were another 2 letters we wrote later in the year, but this was the first. All of us chipped in with the best words from our vocabulary, and the result was - One really professionally written apology letter, I am not even sure that the profs understood it completely. Click on the picture below to read it.

There were times where we had around 200+ posts every week, with people ripping on each other for any stupid reason. To give you and idea of the stuff that was usually going on in the group, heres one incident. There was this one time I was pissed off with a "Mr. X" and thought he was being really self centered and had a little of the "I am better than you" attitude, so I made a couple of stupid jokes on Mr. X. Here is a sample of the jokes.

Q: Why did Mr X cross the road?

A: He wanted to proove he was better than the chicken

A duck and Mr X walk into a bar

Duck: quack

Mr X: quack quack i can quack more

Q: What did Mr X say to the apple and the banana?

A: I can talk and u cant.. im better

Ps: Mr X isnt a bad person, we are still friends and meet up on weekends.

College days were fun. After reading for around 2 hours, i still have a lot more to complete. Reading the posts brought back all the memories of the last 2 years.