Tech tales

Hi,

Yesterday in Bombay the Airtel connections were down due to some reason and i noticed people spent more than 4 hours just calling up the customer care to check when the network will be up. The quintessential cell phone has taken up the most important place in our lives. Its unbearable to live without it.

Nobody prefers to walk up to their colleagues sitting 5 feet away to inform/share something – they put it in mail or use a communicator! When the internet connection is down for a few minutes, thats the only time people actually look away from the screens of their computers and notice there are humans around. All for the sake of technology which is just distancing us away from each other. I wonder “is technology for us or are we for technology”

At a seminar i recently attended, i noticed participants were more interested in mails coming into their blackberry’s and pda’s than what the speaker had to share, or which city or country the other participants were from. Lunch was another excuse to catch up on all missed calls (most of them they would realise would have been from bank agents tryin to sell their newly launched credit card- hehe) and provide instructions to office. The laptops seemed to be the only ones to enjoy undivided attention in the hall. Some participants were polite enough to lower down their laptop screens when spoken to directly (modern day etiquetty i guess).

At parks i notice couples walking – each talking on his/her respective cell phone – wats the point of spending time together? When we need opinion on something we (instead of walking up to the friendly neighbour) prefer to look up on the internet. We have no time to meet childhood friends from the neighbourhood, but have enough time to add unknown faces as friends on the orkut account. We go out for dinner and stay home for a movie – strange times we are in.

I think its time we started celebrating ” no phone/laptop day” just to remind ourselves that we still are very human.

-

Saba

Humouring the uniform :)

Hi,

I work as a consultant (gyan giver/someone who snatches away your wristwatch, asks you the time and charges you in return to tell the correct time) at one of the world’s top four consulting firms at their Mumbai office. Our main role is to develop and sell solutions on strategy and operations (which might or might not work..!). Like that of doctors – to diagnose a problem and provide solutions, but mainly what we do can be called similar to what wellness clinics do, make you feel you need a better life and then sell you somestuff exhorbitantly priced that might not work. Although not entirely similar consulting also has its share of lighter moments, one such is given below –   

 A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, ‘If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?’

Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, ‘Sure, Why not?’

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg , Germany . Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.
Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-Tech Miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, ‘You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.’
‘That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,’ says Bud.
He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car. Then the Bud says to the young man, ‘Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?’ The young man thinks about it for a second and then says,  ’Okay, why not?’ ‘You’re an Consultant’, says Bud. ‘Wow! That’s correct,’ says the yuppie, ‘but how did you guess that?’ ‘No guessing required.’ answered the cowboy. ‘You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don’t know a thing about cows…this is a herd of sheep. . . Now give me back my dog.

Saba

Welcome to Chronicles of the morning breeze

Hi,

The refreshing morning breeze flowing from the east which welcomes you to a bright new day – thats what i am..Saba…its an arabic name meaning “subah ki hava”..morning breeze. And this is my blog. Here you will know about my everyday life, my musings, contemplations, my ideals, and all other regular crap ..happy reading

 

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