Crazy Phone Lady

16 Jul

Posted by Aditya as funny stuff

I’m watching my favorite show (Koffee With Karan ) on TV, when the phone rings.

There’s a agitated lady on the phone.

Lady: “Hello? BSNL? My phone has not been working for….”
Me (interrupting) : “I think you have the wrong number”
Lady: “Oh! I’m sorry…”

and I hang up the phone. 3 seconds later, it rings again. It’s the same lady.

Lady: “Hello? BSNL? My phone is not working…”
Me: “Ma’am, the number you are dialing is the wrong number!”, and hang up the phone.

I return to the TV show. It’s a juicy episode with Rakhee Savant, and she’s bitching about Kareena. And the phone rings again.

Lady: “Hello? BSNL? Listen, don’t play games with me, OK? I know this is the right number. Don’t try to avoid me. Do you know who I am?”

I realized that this lady was not going to let me watch the show unless someone listened to her complaint.

Me: “Welcome to BSNL’s automated fault booking service. To continue in English, press one.”

beep

The lady had actually pressed the ’1′ on her dial pad. Interesting. I thought I’d have some fun.

Me: “To register a complaint, please press the last 5 digits of your Driving License number after the beep. BEEP”

I can hear the lady furiously rummaging through her bag looking for her Driving License. After a while

beep-beep-beep-beep-beep

She had actually found it pretty fast.

Me: “Because of all the SPAM we have been receiving, we will now perform a check to see if you are human. Please enter the result of 35 multiplied by 4 divided by 12″

I can hear the lady shouting out to someone in the background.

Lady: “Prakash, quick! What is 35 times 4 by 12?”
Prakash: “What? Why do you need that?”
Lady: “I’m registering a complaint for our dead phone”
Prakash (sounding somewhat confused): “But why would you need…”
Lady: “JUST ANSWER THE DAMN QUESTION”
Prakash: “err..it’s…aaaa…elevent point….errr…”

beep-beep

The lady actually enters 1-1 on the dial pad.

Me: “Your complaint has been registered. Thank you for calling BSNL”

The lady sounds pleased. I can hear her speaking to “Prakash”

Lady: “I like BSNL. They have such a high tech system. They didn’t even have to ask me for the number of our landline that is dead. Cool!”

3 Comments

Song of the Software Engineer

15 Jul

Posted by Aditya as funny stuff, poem

The dawn comes after a long night’s rest,
Waiting for me are 32 bugs and feature requests.
It is a glorious morning, and the rest of the day surely follows
Lucky me, I’ll spend it in a cubicle farm without windows.

I drag myself out of bed, getting ready for the day
Greeted by the pollution and the autos that bray.
The journey through the traffic is always such a drag,
Startled, I remember: “Damnit, I forgot the office badge”

I sneak in through the door behind a collegue with glee,
The day is just starting, but the boss has already spotted me.
Thundering, he asks me the status of bug 4572-GSA,
I have no idea, but still say “It’ll be ready later today”.

The whole day doesn’t seem to end! In school, there was at least a bell
I survive the day, but soon it’s time for the weekly conf call from hell.
I spend the meeting praying no work gets assigned to me,
Oh Crap! we don’t even have a god for the software industry!

The day is finally over, I leave behind the “on-site” savage hoards
Getting back home, I still have a date with the traffic at silk board.
I hit the bed, trying to think of what the hell I’m doing
This is my life, full of ambition, purpose and meaning.

2 Comments

Blog Feed

15 Jul

Posted by Aditya as funny stuff, misc

If you’re thinking of subscribing to my blog, you can use this feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/PointlessWanderings

1 Comment

Slam Books

15 Jul

Posted by Aditya as funny stuff

I had this friend in college who hated filling out slam books. But that that didn’t stop people from asking him to fill them anyway. He’d get frustrated and fill it with all kinds of crap, but his entries ended up making him very popular. Here’s why:

[Extract from a friend’s slam book that this guy filled out. It was this girl’s slam book, full of mushy hearts and pink roses]

Name: borgtron2004.x432

PetName: PetName

Your most cherished possession: My Batmobile. Are you kidding? My miserable existence has been defined by the lack of anything of any remote value. I was going to say my slam book, except I don’t have one.

Friendship is…. Nodding my head when you’re talking about how your stupid cat chased your stupid nephew and how cute it was. F^*%#$@ stupid.

You will remember our time together as: Quite honestly, I didn’t even know you existed till you gave me this stupid slam book. And what time together? You sat in the first bench all through the year. And I was in the last bench. How is that together? We were as far apart as physically possible in the class!

Your greatest regret: Knowing you. No wait, it’s filling out this slam book.
What does Love mean to you?: Last One Very Entertaining

Hobbies: Avoiding people who ask their slam books to be filled. Obviously, I have some way to go before I can claim to be an expert.

Your advice for me: Lookup “deodorant” on wikipedia. Seriously.

Phone: 100. Ask for a “Inspector NinTaleBajji“.

Email: billg@microsoft.com

2 Comments

Wedding Reception

15 Jul

Posted by Aditya as funny stuff, mylife, thewife

I was (un)fortunate enough to be invited to a wedding yesterday. I didn’t even know the guy or the bride. My wife got invited, and I was only tagging along. Anyway, that’s not the story.

It was a reception, and we duly joined the long queue to go on stage to wish the newly wedded couple on their happiest day. Except, it was not their happiest day. The dude looked like he was starving since morning, and his bride looked like she was going to faint. They could barely keep a smiling face for all the uncles and aunties that were supposedly blessing them. After each guest left, someone from the background came in with a glass of water and some paper towels for the two, much like in a tennis match.

Anyway, soon it was our turn to go and greet them. As we walked on stage, the two dutifully put on their fake smile. My wife and I extended our congratulations to them and wished them happiness.

The two of them just nodded. Still smiling, they looked at each other.
Obviously, they had not recognized us.

They must have thought we were some random people who’ve ended up in the wrong hall. My wife was visibly embarrassed. But not me. These kinds of things don’t embarrass me easily. I’m lucky that way.

The four of us were just standing there, looking at each other, hoping someone will do the introductions. My wife gave up at this point and said: “Didn’t you recognize me? I’m from Kumarans, we were in the same class”.

At this point, the light came to him, and he tried to profusely apologize. He also made a shameless attempt at a coverup, saying something about my wife having lost weight and looking much different. We thanked him for inviting us and complimented him(fakely of course, for the sake of symmetry) about how beautiful the wedding looked and walked out of the stage.

Wife: “That was really embarrassing!”
Me: “I wonder what’s for dinner”
Wife: “It was so awkward. How could he not remember me? I was so popular in school!”
Me: “I hope they have South Indian food. It’s really good. He’s from Bangalore, isn’t he?”
Wife: “He said I’m looking ‘very different’. Do you think he meant it in a good way or a bad way?”
Me: “The North Indian buffet will be good too, especially the soups. I wonder who is catering the dinner.”
Wife: “ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME?”
Me (somewhat stunned): “What? Can you please repeat the question?”

Needless to say, the wife proceeded to hand out a lecture. I think it was something about how marriage is about communication and empathy, but it could also have been about what a jerk I was. The interesting thing, anyway, was that the food indeed was a North Indian Buffet, well worth the Rs 60 I had to shell as entry fee (for the bouquet)

0 Comments

Don’t recycle paper!

12 Jul

Posted by Aditya as funny stuff, gyaan

Recycling paper is bad for the environment. Really!

There is a lot of hype today about recycling and saving the environment and reducing global warming and things like that. As is often the case with hype, reality and facts get distorted. Sometimes, it’s useful to step back to examine some of the claims in more detail.

Many people believe recycling paper is good for the environment. The logic, according to its proponents, is that recycling paper means we don’t have to cut trees to make new paper.

Trees are arguably the best known way of carbon sequestration. That means, they can very efficiently capture and store as wood the CO2 that your car just dumped into the atmosphere. As a bonus, they use photosynthesis, which is free energy. Trees are essentially solar-panels that capture CO2 back from the atmosphere.

But here’s the problem: Once a tree has grown to its full height, it reaches an equilibrium where it can’t capture and store more CO2. If we cut this tree down and plant a new one in its place, the new sapling can capture more CO2 from the atmosphere.

That, of course, leaves us with the problem of what to do with the tree that we just cut. We can make paper out of it, but the problem re-presents itself as: “What do we do with the paper once we’re done reading it?”. We can bury it in landfills, but that’s kinda expensive, and land is not abundant, what with 75% of our planet under water already.

What is the best thing you could do with it? Burn it as fuel, of course! Release all the stored CO2 back into the atmosphere for the new sapling that you just planted.

Now we’ve come full circle, but here’s the interesting thing. We got energy by burning the paper, but this whole process doesn’t cause global warming. The CO2 gets recycled back into stored wood in the new sapling, which, when it has grown, we burn to get electricity and release the CO2 back and the process repeats. This is just a clever way of using solar energy to generate electricity.

Recycling paper, on the other hand, requires energy to be supplied to the recycling factories. We usually obtain this energy by burning coal or natural gas, which releases more CO2 into the atmosphere. But now there is no tree to capture all the emitted CO2 back, which, of course, results in Global Warming.

Recycling paper actually causes more CO2 to be emitted! Stop recycling paper!