THE CRAPBOOK

I have been in this industry for 4 years now. I would be just another guy working in the Technolgy Services (out of  1 MM). But recently I realized I have the swipe Flu. Now what is Swipe flu?

To get more understanding of it, let’s look into a day of my life at work.

 I enter the building with the identity card worn around my neck, which dances around with each step I take. I swipe the card at the reader to open the door. I swipe the card at my department door. I swipe the card when I go out to the break out area(coffee machine area). I swipe the card at the door when I walk out of the building. I swipe the card when I go out to cafeteria.I realized that my hand automatically picks up the card and swipe it at the reader every time I see a door. I am doing this subconsciously. I do it when I am walking out of the door talking to my colleague, or when I am on the phone. I don’t even realize that I am doing it every time I open a door.

 Well I realized there is something wrong when I tried opening the lift door with my card. And when I tried opening the apartment door with my card.

 I almost lost it when I tired to open my car door with my i-card.

 I talked to a colleague of mine and he said these are symptoms of something called the swipe flu.

I wish if we would have just used a register at the reception. 

Do you have these symptoms?

“You have to protect the egg from breaking” explained our trainer.

“You will have to throw it on our target kept at approximately 6 feet away” She continued “and it should not break”

“WHAT THE?? “ I thought. Even before my thought process could finish the world favorite line, she continued “You will be given 4 sheets of paper, one thread, cello tape, and three balloons. Protect the eggs!!” She declared.

I was lost, I felt like our team was lost in wilderness. I could hear the wolves. I need to protect the team…. ‘ACT FAST’ my mind rolled.

“Okay let’s use the balloons to protect the egg from the impact” I said.

There was counter opinions, changes in plan and even a 5 minute discussion on how to inflate the balloon. Finally we managed to inflate the balloons in no particular plan or shape. But fate had other plans.

The oversized elderly gentleman in our team accidentally sat on one of the balloons.

“One down” I declared. “Let’s not lose hope here” I assured the team.

The other balloon was declared lost when our extremely lovely lady in our team poked it with her extra long pointed-polished NAILS.

Her continuous sorry(s) was not helping our team. We had to go on.

The third balloon was down in action; at least we have a martyr who died for a cause.

Before anyone starts complaining on what the hell is happening, let me explain. I am in training “Managing people” and this activity was part of it. We had to protect an egg with the help of few items that the trainer has provided. We had to throw the egg, hitting the target kept 6 feet away. The winner would be the team whose egg did not break.

My last encounter with an egg was two days back when an egg slipped off my hand while I was taking it out from the refrigerator. It fell on the tiled floor and broke.

The worst part of it was cleaning. I realized that the contents of the egg cannot be absorbed by cloth nor can it be swept away using a broom. Its sticky and slimy and its worse when it’s on the floor.

Getting it out of the floor was indeed a task; I tried the above two and miserably failed. So I decided to dilute it. Dilution will help soften hard solutions, I have learnt and tried applying it. I was left with a messy floor.

I had to cover the entire thing up before my wife find out. The last resort was to use a spoon to recover the contents on to a vessel and hide the rest under the refrigerator.

I did just that.

Now back to the story, we were left with nothing but 4 sheets of paper, one thread and a cello tape.

“Hooooray” that was from our rival team. They completed the task of wrapping the egg in a protective cover. Now they can continue with the ‘throwing’ part.

We had 5 minutes left. We quickly made soft paper balls out of the sheets provided, kept these at strategic locations around the egg and used the thread to bind them. Finally we wrapped the tape around the egg-paper combination to strengthen the protected area.

“We are done!” I declared.

Now for some action, I thought. The trainer, sensing danger, quickly requested a person to lay paper all around the target (a white board). She did not want the fresh carpet to be stained with fresh egg contents.

I aimed at the target carefully calculating the trajectory and the angle at which I should be throwing the egg.

I used as little force I could to project the egg to the target.

It was a direct hit.

The trainer gasped.

The rest of the crowd gasped.

I closed my eyes.

“Hoorrrraaaay”

Was it the other team celebrating our misery? Or worse should I clean the floor myself?

I thought.

“It did not break!!!.. Clean shot !.” Said an overly excited trainer. She continued.

“Now my friends, that’s a practical explanation for team management. The egg was your team and you put in all your efforts to protect it from everything. That’s what we learn from this activity.”

EGG? Team??? Will I be a bad manager? Chucking the team under the refrigerator? Or making bulls eyes of it? Only time will tell!  

PS : The trainer took the egg back. I had plans to replace it with the one I broke two days back.

 Happy Friendship day to all !.

Got this as a forward ! People might be losing out on money, but not their sense of humor !

Got this as a forward, Original video of Harbhajan slapping Sreesanth leaked. Silly joke but worth a laugh.

Now we know what exactly happened. Well almost.

This Saturday I went off to meet one of my old friend from school at ‘The Forum’ Bangalore. Since my wife is not around for the weekend I thought of getting in touch with my old friends, renew friendship, talk about ol’ times and have fun.

The meet was pretty good at the crowded mall, that we ended up taking the Capuchino from Coffee day to the top floor. We relaxed on the steps near PVR (if you have been to forum you would know exactly where). We talked, cracked some jokes and began talking about ol times.

Time flew and it was raining heavily outside. Thinking about how to get home as I had taken ma bike, we thought of killing some time at Star Bazaar, so that I could buy something for dinner.

The smell from the tandoori counter made ma body tick, my legs click and the hands clap. For the people around might have wondered that I am seeing food for the first time. Well I was hungry, my wife is not at home and my cooking sucks. What would a hungry man do? Buy the chicken!

I bought a half tandoori chicken, wrapped in aluminum foil, and the Star Bazaar cover.

We walked out only to find that its still raining.

“Man you would get drenched.” My friend suggested.

“I wont care, but I want to save my chicken” I said.

“Oh. Guess you should wait a while longer” he said.

“No, the Chicken is calling”

With quick bye-bye’s I was off. I thought about Nikhil’s irritation of getting drenched in the rain. But all I wanted was to save the chicken. Bangalore traffic is bad, its worse when it rains. After 30 minutes of rain, water splashing, 4 signals, 20 auto rickshaws cutting me off, me swearing at each one of them, 3 BMTC buses blocking my way …finally I reached home. Wait a min I made all that up, all I could think of was to save the chicken from the notorious rain.

I reached home fully drenched (you can find the rest of the description in Nikhil’s blog ). The fresh currency notes from the ATM (oh it lost the scent), my Moto Rokr, everything was wet.

My phone was working all right, I put on some dry clothes. The phone rang, there was one unread message. It was from my friend.. thinking about his concern and how he valued our friendship I was happy.

I opened the message. It read .

Is the Chicken Safe?

I am off for a week to the land of letters, latex and lakes AKA Kottayam.

Before that let me leave you guys with some interesting news..

• A recent study has reveled that how much a mother eats at the time of conception may influence whether she gives birth to a boy or a girl. You can read the report here. If anyone can read and understand the study please drop in your comments. Is this study based on numbers and statistics? If 10% of all accidents are due to drunken driving, does that mean that there is 90% chance of an accident if you are NOT DRUNK? Also studies have proven that 62.765% of all statistics are wrong. lol
• I am going to stop watching IPL. Why? They got plans to ban cheerleaders. OH ! now you guys know why I was hooked to IPL on Friday ! (Trust me I don’t know who won that day). Some say its degrading cricket (the bookies, the money and the hype is not) I have a few suggestions.
  • Let them air the cheerleaders after IPL is over. May be a different show altogether.
  • Or I have another opinion. Let the cheerleaders be on Sony channel while Set MAX air IPL with ‘No distractions’. . So that people ‘who don’t like cricket’ or whose ‘patience run out watching cricket’ can watch Sony. (hey that sounds like someone I know. J )
  • Here is the international take on this issue. The Australian. (Read on how Kamasutra and Khajuraho temples are mentioned. I am still wondering where the moral police were when a couple at Bangalore was harassed and when couples were roughed up at Valentines day!

Update : Cheer leaders wont be banned.  J

About Ban.

Ban seems to be the favorite word among the politicians. They would just love to ban books, ban people, ban smoking on screen, ban cartoons, ban cheerleaders,ban cola, ban blogs, ban movies, ban songs and ban anything that comes in their way.

Now I guess its time to Ban Bans.

I love driving, and I enjoy reading the funny one liners (you can’t really call those oneliners !!) on the back of trucks, pickups and cabs. Here are a few signs. (that we don’t really need , yet we find them on vehicles.)

1. Your one, my one Ours one. (That will make it three !I guess he meant to say we two, ours two.. )

2. NO SMOKING ( No smoking sign board on a truck?, trust me its not a petroleum carrier either)

3. NO Overtaking (what does this mean?.. that I am not supposed to overtake this vehicle?)

4. If you can read this, you are too close. (I admit this is cool).

5. Sound Horn. (Why do we need a sign like this?).

6. Horn please okay (This is the most common one of all.).

7. Power Break ( I am sure he meant Power Brake).

8. No hand signal.

Do you have anything that I would have missed out?

Check out this cool animation movie here.

Got this as a forward. (You might have already seen this but its worth a laugh)

All I tried was to copy some files from an old CD to my Vista laptop.

I have added this to my will.

…… and the laptop goes to my younger son, who can take it once vista has copied the files. And please shut down the computer once done.

I think the geniuses at Microsoft worked day and night to write that piece of code (to calculate the time that it will take to perform the copy/move operations). The logic is good, but of no use. It would have been better if they would have just told me this “Dude its not gonna work any time soon”.

I don’t believe in the horoscopes flashed on channels or on the newspaper(well I don’t believe in horoscope all together), but can’t let go of the curiosity of checking what is going to happen to my dear life. So I do check them.  

Today on Zoom I got this for my star. “You will have a good week, but with work tensions blah blah…” and “Don’t drink and drive”

WHAT???? 

I thought that was applicable to all stars. Not just mine.