The Writing On The Wall

Is it a sign of the how addicted I am to work, or of how sad my life has become, that I find myself, at 10:44 p.m. on a Friday night, after returning from dinner with a friend, standing at my kitchen counter (I still haven't invested in furniture), laptop open, feeding in forecasts and filling in the CRM? Calling R to discuss the numbers before sending them out, my brain filling with thoughts of where those remaining numbers, the difference between the forecast and the target, are going to come from? Tea grown cold next to me, suitcase unpacked since I got back home last night, a book, face-down next to the laptop, not quite as enthralling as the calculations in my head?

Ze addiction, she is alive and well.

Oh, The Places You'll Go...

Cincinnati... Schenectady... Albany... Philadelphia... Washington DC... Cincinnati... Pittsfield... Anaheim... Atlanta... New Jersey...

Long drives. Tedious lay-overs in sterile airports. Staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night, in alien hotel rooms. Flights at every unreasonable hour. Trying to navigate to strange airports down unknown roads in the wee hours, without a GPS, and watching the sky grow light on the way.

The days have begun to blur. The one shining light at the end of this haze is, at the end of this year...

HOME!!!!!! (This is where the soundtrack kicks in, softly at first, and then rising gradually as the scene fades out. Paul Simon, singing "Homeward Bound." How cliched can one get?)

Meanwhile, quick updates, for those interested:
1. No, Paul Simon didn't happen. (JAP, looks like your curse worked, you evil person.)
2. But (HA!) Roger Waters did - the Dark Side tour, in Virginia. He is THE man. I had goosebumps through most of the concert. (I wish I'd also had some of the stuff causing the blue haze above our heads, but unfortunately, that wasn't an option.)
3. The Bartimaeus Trilogy, written by Jonathan Stroud, is absolutely brilliant. Entertaining and witty, makes mincemeat out of some other popular wizardry-related series. Please pick it up.

I try to have all updates or learnings in nice round numbers, like 5 or 10, but my day's beginning to blur again, so hasta mañana.

Cultural Confessions

For the longest time, I thought Jessica Simpson was a character on "The Simpsons".

I haven't read "7 Habits" nor "Siddhartha", nor watched "Citizen Kane."

I have, on the other hand, read "Congo", "The Andromeda Strain", plenty of Alistair Macleans, Louis L'Amours and Sudden time without number.

And watched Sleepless in Seattle, The Man With One Red Shoe, See No Evil Hear No Evil and You've Got Mail several times.

And (the kicker) I still, just occasionally, listen to Cliff Richard, The Carpenters and Abba.



(Head hanging low) I'm a cultural pleb, hoi polloi.

And now, even the song is over

Why don't we stop fooling ourselves?
The game is over,
Over,
Over.

No good times, no bad times,
There's no times at all,
Just The New York Times,
Sitting on the windowsill
Near the flowers.

We might as well be apart.
It hardly matters,
We sleep separately.

And drop a smile passing in the hall
But there's no laughs left
'Cause we laughed them all.

And we laughed them all
In a very short time.

Time
Is tapping on my forehead,
Hanging from my mirror,
Rattling the teacups,
And I wonder,
How long can I delay?

We're just a habit
Like saccharin.
And I'm habitually feelin' kinda blue.
But each time I try on
The thought of leaving you,

I stop...
Stop and think it over.

~ Overs: Simon & Garfunkel

Alien-ated

So there was a blood donation camp in my office building a few days ago. Posters were up for ages, asking, begging people to please donate. And as a good donor from years ago, I decided I would.

Off I went, on the appointed day, to the van in which the donations were to take place. Only to come back, because they needed ID. Back with the ID. Return again, to figure out my social security number - without which they wouldn't accept a donation, and which I never remember. Some time to hunt through documentation to find the number, then back again to the van. Fill out forms, extensive, long-winded forms about exposure to disease, sexual promiscuity, etc. Get finger pricked for blood-type testing. Wait for the nurse to be free to see me.

Only to discover that if you've been in the US for less than 3 years at a stretch, and especially if you come from sub-Saharan Africa, or India, or "places like those", they don't want your blood. Rationale: you've been exposed to malaria (I know malaria stays in the system for a while after you fall ill, but does it have that long a gestation period?!!) and "other such diseases".

I feel like I'm in a bad movie, where someone with a guttural Germainic accent is telling me, "So you fink you kan gif blood, eh? Vell, you're wrong. Go back to vere you kame from, filthy Indian."

Alright, so this is an exaggeration. Still, I'm feeling intensely alienated right now. Ironically, that's probably just how the INS wants aliens to feel.

Days Like This IV

1. Waking up to nasty emails.
2. Rushing through morning ablutions to get to work by 7:30
3. Missing 2 important calls on the way
4. Getting on a series of conference calls that flow into each other
5. Missing lunch, because there's no time to have it
6. For a conference call with an idiot
7. Who loves listening to the sound of his own voice and keeps on talking
8. So that one has to stay connected when one is desparate to take a leak
9. With hours of work still ahead
10. Spilling into offshore working hours

But still, China! Beckons! Woohoo!

Music to live by...

"I'm so tired,
I haven't slept a wink.
I'm so tired,
My mind is on the blink
I wonder should I get up and fix myself a drink
No, no, no..."

~ The Beatles, "The Beatles" (The White Album)
© 1968 Northern Songs

Does anybody find it strange that you can think of lyrics to match almost any mood? Or does everybody out there have a soundtrack for their lives?

What Has Frog Been Doing?

1. Getting her New Jersey driving license

How she did it: Waited and waited, procrastinating until the day before her Indian license and IDP were about to expire. Then spent a night reading the NJ motor vehicles manual, before running to the testing center in the morning. Took the knowledge test (multiple choice questions) and vision test (unless you're totally blind, this shouldn't be a stumbling block).

Aside: The cool thing about NJ is that if you have a long driving history in in some other country, and you pass your knowledge test OK, they can waive the road test - as they did in my case.


2. Digging her rental car out of 20 inches of snow.

Two and a half hours on a Sunday afternoon. Charming weekend. And to really provide us with a challenge worth sinking our teeth into, every hour or so, after all of us trying to liberate our cars had more or less cleared the snow behind it, the snow-plough would come back and push all the snow from the road into banks behind the cars.


3. Buying a car.

How she did it: She shopped around for weeks. She spoke to dealers, did some test drives, searched the web desparately for the cheapest cars, certified used cars at reasonable mileage and prices, and despaired. And finally, she walked into a dealership, test drove this one car, and said, OK, that's it, here's my cheque. Or, you know, here's 10 bucks, and I'll get a loan for the rest and come back and pick the car up.
So anyway, my 2006 Honda Civic LX will be with me on Monday! Woohoo!


4. Attendant hassles:

The problem is, when you buy the car, you need to buy insurance. And for these guys, no driving history in the US = no driving history whatsoever. (To be fair, perhaps records are not easy to access - and it's difficult to believe that there could be a driving record for each licensed driver in India. Still, in one's nastier moments, one tells oneself that this is the same mind-set that calls a national event "the world series".) Which means, high premiums. *sigh* But, the silver lining - the insurance business is not all about making money - there are caring insurance professionals out there. Like one guy Frog spoke with, who told her he wasn't comfortable giving her the NJ state minimum coverage because what if she got in a collision and got sued for more, and had to pay it all herself? No no, he'd feel really bad if that happened, knowing he'd OKed the coverage, and so he was going to give her higher coverage and (of course) charge her higher premiums. Frog almost broke down and cried, at how this individual was shattering all myths about insurance professionals. Then she told him where he could put his premiums and rung off.


5. Traveling. Like fury.

Hurrying from meeting to meeting, whirling across the east coast like a ... well, hurricane, she guesses.
See also: waiting around at airports for delayed flights, waiting around at airports for someone to provide some information about whether the flight I'm scheduled to take is just delayed, or has disappeared into the blue, waiting on board flights for delayed take-off, waiting on flights circling airports to be cleared to land, waiting at airports for connecting trains. NB: A margarita, taken just at the point where the waiting is beginning to climb over the hill of bearability and grab you by the throat, preparatory to making you grab someone else by the collar, is wonderfully calming!

You Know You're Becoming American When...

... Someone asks you how much she has to pay for the gas this month, and you say, "Gas? But we just filled the tank on the way to work."


HELP!!!!

B Flat Minor

You know how it is when you have a particular tune running through your head, over and over in a loop, stuck inside your mind without your even being aware? It plays itself out all day, barely causing a ripple in your consciousness... just a pleasant sense of something different about the day. You go about your work, letting your mind dance to a different tune. You drive home listening to the radio, but as you drive, the tune starts taking over, making itself heard over everything else until, by the time you reach home, you've turned off the radio, and you're humming it. Almost on auto-pilot, still not entirely aware of it.

You walk up the stairs, dump your bags and coat on the floor as you walk in, take a shower, make some hot tea with ginger and look out the window at the first snow of the season. Still humming. Still unaware.

And suddenly, the tune goes into Dolby stereo mode, with full Technicolour effects, and you sit up, half delighted, half nostalgic, and start humming it, na-na-NA-na-na-na, and remembering others that went "with" it.

There are times I've had awful tunes stuck inside my head - like that awful song, "no life without wife" from that awful movie, "Bridge and Prejudice" (yes, yes, I AM prejudiced). But for the last few days, it's been Chopin. Conjuring up a storm inside my head with a Prelude I can no longer identify, though my fingers, through some form of mystical physical memory (perhaps we're all made of memory foam?) remember the ebb and flow of it.

I went through a whole day of routine without noticing its sudden presence. It was only that night, reading in a yellow glow, that it came crashing through the fog and accosted me. Distracted me. Disarmed me. Twisted me around a corner and whirled me into the sounds.

And now, I can't get it out of my head. I've been googling desparately for a couple of days, trying to find some free downloads of Chopin's Preludes and Etudes. No success. Perhaps I should just get a piano and the score and start teaching myself all over again. Meanwhile, the tune goes na-na-NA-na-na-na - if you can identify which Prelude it is, please let me know.

So This is Hell

On a hypothetical Friday evening in the hypothetical month of December, a mythical woman sits at her desk at the office, poring over an 80 page document that she must - MUST - (hypothetically, of course) clean up and send out to her hypothetical client.

On page what-feels-like-three-hundred-and-seventeen-and-a-half (hypothetical documents being allowed to have "half" page numbers - though undoubtedly, imaginary numbers might suit them better), she reads the following:

"Hypothetical-company-name follows the above mentioned methodology in general for all application developments and can be further tailor made to suite the specific client requirement, whatever it is. One of such tailored execution approach is depicted below"

Incorrect. What's below is my hypothetical head after I put it through the shredder.

Karmic Chaos

Observing the behaviour of some of the people around me, I marvel at their ability to do certain things. Things I consider heinous, or at best, unforgivable - with complete nonchalance, a casual flick of the wrist, a flash of eyes, a half-contemptuous turn.

And suddenly wonder: What if my conception of things is entirely, irrevocably wrong? What if I'm the stupid one, unable to comprehend that the path I want to be on can be reached only by going through a thick web of dishonesty?

Worse, what if they're "right"? What if "lying" and "cheating" are in fact "good"? Rather like Calvin's dream of a Santa who gives toys only to naughty kids? What if my karma is upside down, inside out, right-side wrong?

Dogs & Niggers Will Not Be Served

So I went to New York City weekend before last, to meet up with S, who was visiting from London, and some other friends. And after we had eaten our fill at a cozy place down the street, we went to a pub called Uncle Ming's, at 225 Avenue B. And one of their bar-tenders not only refused to serve my friend R, but even gave us his "reason" for the same: "I'm racist, what will you do?"

Not only that, when N argued with him about this incident, he actually called the bouncer to evict N from the premises. Upon which, we all followed N down the stairs behind the bouncer, talking loudly about racial discrimination.

And here's the next twist: there were actually cops standing on the stairs, listening to us tell the bouncer what had happened, hearing the term "racial discrimination" over and over again.

Test question, to see if you know what the world is about: Did the bouncer, on hearing the story, or the cops, on over-hearing the story, ask us to go back inside? Did they apologise? Did they, as a matter of fact, do anything?

If you answered "yes", you're sadly naive. Nobody did anything.

And, eventually, neither did we. Our objective was to make the most of our evening, and our priorities elsewhere. It did leave a bad taste in our mouth though, that hasn't entirely gone away. Perhaps because we let it slide too. Perhaps we should have done something, though I'm not entirely sure what.

Any ideas?

Survival & Insanity in the USA

So recall an earlier post where I'd spoken about not wanting to room with a "ree-ree-ree" flatmate? Well, it appears I don't learn from experience. I decided to share an apartment with her in the US, and well, I sure learnt my lesson, when she almost ran out on me with a full 700 bucks. $, not Rs. Not a funny story, and below this blog's dignity to go into in detail.

That and other things have been sort of occupying the lion's share of mind-space, so things that I meant to write about have not been written about. But coming up soon (I hope) is the survivor's guide to the US - truly, How To Be A Legal Alien (with all due apologies to George Mikes and Sting).

Right now, though, there is just the unutterable delight of having my own space, warm wooden floors, soft lamplight glowing, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong crooning about the Autumn in New York, and some good books by my side. Life seems to be falling into place again.

Life, or Something Very Like It

Conversation 1
B: (to friends at large) Why don't you come over for lunch on Sunday? My cousin (that's me) will cook something.
F-a-L: Sure. We'll be there.


Conversation 2
B: (to other friends at large) Why don't you come over for lunch on Saturday? My cousin (me again) will cook.
F-a-L: Sounds good.


Conversation 3
B: (to her friends-at-large - people I barely know) Have dinner with us on Saturday night. My cousin (by now you know who this is) will cook.
F-a-L: Great.



There's a pattern emerging here, I just know it.

Update

Packing my stuff - to leave behind, to carry back home and bring back again - takes a few hours. As I'm sorting through stuff and trying to fit it into bags, I'm suddenly tired. I feel as though I've been packing all my life, all my life, packing, packing, fitting things into bags, getting on trains and planes and buses and into cars, leaving. Suddenly, I can't face packing any more. Instead, I go downstairs and stand outside the hotel and look up into the night sky. No Mars, but some stars and a sickle moon and clear air flood my head with my earliest star-gazing memories - on trips and treks, sitting outside in the cold cold air and breathing in the calm fullness of the place.

******************************************************************
My Air India flight to Bombay via Paris takes off 1 whole hour late - apparently all systems at Newark have shut down. I imagine skynet or whatever it was in the Terminator movies, or the whole Matrix phenomenon. Machines taking over the planet and deciding to shut down un unison. Incoming flights frozen in the void, temporarily bullied out of existence by Newark's IT failure... else reduced to circling the airport endlessly.

By the time we lift off, passengers' stomachs are growling so loudly that they could be doing sound effects for a whole other airplane. To prevent us from eating them, the crew hastily throws packets of chips at us. As they put dinner together, the smell of fragrantly spiced mutton curry almost drives me crazy.

After dinner, I try to sleep. But a stewardess has other ideas. Each time I start nodding off, she jumps to my window and snaps the shade shut. The sound wakes me. I open the shade again, send unpleasant thoughts and quelling looks-that-kill in her direction and try to drift off into dreamland again. (Repeat from beginning of paragraph for 4 hours to understand the true meaning of endless night.)

We're flying into daylight and into timezones ahead of ours, so dinner, breakfast and lunch all take place in the span of 9 hours. Part of the time, I read Tears of the Giraffe - the second book in Alexander McCall Smith's "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" series - set in Botswana, and highly recommended. But mostly, I'm just jumping in my seat with anticipation, can't wait to land in Bombay.

And when we finally do, I can see rain beating against the sides of the plane, and I think, "shit." So much for the anticipation, the anxiousness to be back.

Immigration, baggage claim, and out the door. The humidity hits me like a solid wall. The rain is a snivelling drizzle - the type I hate most. A is nowhere to be seen (turns out later he's waiting at the wrong terminal). I've lost my phone and can't call or message. Welcome home.

******************************************************************

After a warm, cozy weekend, I leave Bombay on a sticky grey Monday morning. A sees me off at the airport and a grey sheen hangs over the city and our goodbye. My flight breaks through the cloud cover and Bombay suddenly vanishes, just like that. No long last looks over one's shoulder. Perhaps that's as it should be.

******************************************************************

Bangalore sucks.

The Big Con

I learnt a lot today.
Mostly about how to make things up and sell them to peo... whoops, sorry, I meant about consulting.

Here's how: A couple of days ago, I went ahead and told a prospect something that I thought we could do for them, based on a briefing session by the head of consulting (HOC). And I provided numbers and everything. The same numbers the HOC gave me.

Me: Sure, we can save you 20-25% of ongoing ___ cost. As a matter of fact, we're already doing this for a, y and z.

Client___: (getting interested despite himself) I don't see how you could do that. I mean, there's not that much to do on an ongoing basis... ummm... are you sure about these numbers?

Me: (full of righteous salesmanship, basing my statements on the rock that I think my HOC is) Of course I am. In fact, let me do something: I will send you, by the end of the week, a roadmap, showing you how we're doing this, and then we can talk numbers, and see what we can do for you.

Client___: Sounds excellent.

Me: Alrighty then.

So, bursting with pride for getting somewhere selling a fairly new, unknown service, I go to my HOC, and tell him I need specifics - numbers and roadmaps - to send out to Client___. And he tells me, "Just speak to A, and get the numbers. She's the dude when it comes to this. And oh, if she can't get you good numbers, just ask her to make them up. I mean, she's better equipped to make them up than you are."

When I get over my coronary attack at hearing this, I spend 3 days chasing A and team (who ignore my pleas for information and keep saying, in an appalled manner, "you believed numbers that HOC gave you? Why, for the love of god, why? He's a consultant, he'll say anything!). Finally, with self-imposed mailout-deadline-cum-professional-suicide hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles, at 6:00 p.m. today, said team and I get into an empty conference room. We spend 45 minutes making jokes about the consulting profession (yes, they are consultants), throw some numbers around, do some tweaking, decide to call them real, and put them down for posterity.

No, the mail hasn't gone out yet - it'll be in Client___'s mailbox before he gets in on Monday morning. But next time, I'll be less worried about sending out information like this, secure in the knowledge that if I don't actually have information from consulting, I can just make them up. After all, whether they're making them up or I am can hardly matter.

Oh, and btw? These numbers are now going to be used to sell this same story to other prospects too, now that we have them.

Meanwhile, thinking of all this reminded me of one of the coolest columns ever: Fast Company's Consultant Debunking Unit. Here you go. Enjoy.

Learning

The suicide rate among cold-callers must be sky-high.

Update
This from B, 25th August 05:
Why have you stopped blogging? Spending all waking hours thinking of innovative ways to commit suicide?

On The Road Again

So before you ask, let me tell you that
a. I didn't screw up at the meeting. (In fact, I barely spoke!)
b. It went OK (we agreed to have a meeting with the real buyer, and that will be where we stand or are shot to pieces. Imagine music from spaghetti westerns here. In fact, imagine me dressed in a shabby green poncho, squinting down an office corridor, my hand hanging by my side, hovering next to my Blackberry Handheld, ready to beat my opponent to the draw, the noon-day sun beating down outside the air conditioned office... But I digress...)


I had one heck of a day: 11 hours traveling or in transit, for the sake of a one hour meeting in the middle of the day. Holy Toledo! (hah! managed it!) And since it's the journey and not the destination that matters... here's an account.

To begin with, managed to catch an express on the NJ Transit, without realising (this blog is dedicated to the retention of Queen's English, at least as far as spelling goes) it. And guess what? The damn express doesn't stop at Newark Airport... only at Newark Penn Station. What kind of dimwit country has express trains which don't stop at major stops like an airport? It'd be like a fast train on the Mumbai western line not stopping at Santa Cruz or Parla, the closest stops to the airport... oh, wait. Umm. Hmmm. (Embarassedly drawing circles in the dust with my big toe.)

So anyhow, had to pay an extra 7 bucks to get back to the airport... found my way to the right terminal, boarded. Measured out my time with Sierra Mist. And then, looking down, saw this familar shape - a huge water body, shaped like a diseased pancreas... Lake Michigan! (I still can't get over the coolness of seeing things straight out of a geography book live and in the flesh - if from a height of 30000 feet). I'm told that in winter, the lake freezes over enough for people to drive trucks and buses over it (instead of all the way around).

Disembarked at Detroit, and made our way to Hertz to rent a car to drive to Toledo. Detroit is much as I'd imagined it in my mind: bright blue skies with wisps of cloud and noon-day heat shimmering over sprawling concrete. But we weren't there for long - just long enough to rent a car and get the hell out. My boss told me conversationally that we were just 10 minutes drive from the Canadian border, and since he's lived in Toronto and keeps talking about what a great place it is, I wondered for a few moments whether he was going to make a dash across the border (what a great movie this would have been: high-noon, the good the bad and the ugly and the three fugitives all rolled into one). But he didn't, and we set course for Toledo.

Over the course of the 1 hour drive to Toledo, Ohio, I could see how easy it would be to fall asleep at the wheel on highways like this. Long, straight highways, heat-haze making me squint and not much around. The sameness of what you see can drag, pull ones eyelids down slowly. A friend of mine drives from NJ to Washington DC every week, and he tells me that music on the radio alone is not enough - he sings, to keep himself awake.

The coolest things about the drive, though were:
1. The hertz direction finder - a device that maps roads, shows you which turns to take and where you are... you programme it to where you want to go, and it guides you... so you keep looking at it, and take the turns indicated, and voila, you're there! I could barely keep my eyes of it, but eventually got distracted when we passed a sign for
2. Telegraph Road!!! There's almost certainly no link between this road, one of the major thoroughfares in Detroit, and the Straits song, but there's an ironic link between the words of the song and the economic situation in Detroit and other such towns.

And so, driving down the highway, we finally came upon a sign that said "Welcome to Ohio" and soon after, Toledo. Toledo seemed a small town - Calicut might be bigger - with tired peeling old brick buildings and a depressing air. I concentrated on our meeting, then left. I'd ordered a car from a place which ran out of smaller cars and sent me a limo! Unfortunately, the driver of the limo was a total conspiracy theorist, and for the one hour drive back to Detroit airport, regaled me with how George Bush was a CIA agent, or ran the CIA, or was run by the CIA (depending on which particular story he was telling); how if only the world knew how many murders Clinton had ordered, his image would be different, and so on... finally ending with how he wanted to go to Goa, and live in India for a year, and how he thinks India is the best democracy in the world. I don't know whether to be touched or just plain scared for the country when he lands in Goa.

The rest of my trip back was a crazy mishmash of varied versions of Murphy's law: my flight was delayed due to bad weather and we were told we'd have more information in 30 minutes, then, as I was buying coffee somewhere, 10 minutes later, I heard the last boarding call, forcing me to sprint the rest of the way to the gate with laptop, purse, wallet and coffee all over the place. Some disgusting passenger had spilt some gunk on the floor of the aircraft, as a result of which my laptop bag strap is soaking wet and smelly, and the padded part will probably discolour my clothes if I put it against my shoulder. NJ transit trains were running late, so I had to wait at the platform for 20 minutes (grumble grumble in Bombay there are trains every 4 minutes) when all I wanted to do was sink into a bath. NJ transit lines lost power while I was actually on the train, so that we were stuck on the track, with the air conditioning and lights out (grumble grumble at least the Bombay locals have ventilation).

Finally made it back at about 8:30 p.m. Staggered in, checked my mail (how I love wi-fi), and slept for a straight 12 hours.

Enjoy your weekend. I'm sure going to enjoy mine!

A for Anticipation

So I have my first client meeting tomorrow.
In Toledo, Ohio.

Scared shitless, hoping I don't screw up.

Excited, raring to go. Don't think I'm going to get a wink of sleep tonight.

Of course, given my history of work related gaffes, there's every chance that I'll screw up royally. Say something completely inappropriate, in an utterly FRIENDS moment.

So watch this space. The potential for mass entertainment looms large.

And until then, Toled-le-oo.