Sunday, August 30, 2009

Ghonchu talks on the telephone

Ghonchu entered his office for the first time. He saw a glass door in the distance which seemed closed. There was no gate-keeper and no apparent way to open the door. He walked towards it with trepidation and wondered how would he enter. However, as he went closer the door opened on its own. Unnerved but relieved, marveling the tech-savvy organization, he entered the office.

After entering, and completing some formalities, Ghonchu went to his new cubicle and looked around. 1.5 meters high, it gave him the protection and freedom to do whatever he wanted. However the drawback was that he couldn't see anyone (read girls) passing by.

He sat on his desk and looked around. A number of things were lying on the table - the computer monitor, a telephone, a water bottle etc. Impressed, Ghonchu praised his company for taking good care of the employees. Nobody from the adjacent cubicles was paying any attention to him. He opened his favourite website : www.orkut.com.

Within 10 seconds of opening orkut the telephone rang - trrrrng trrrrng. Ghonchu jumped one foot on his chair and looked at the telephone as though it was a snake. Ghonchu's train of thought went as follows :- "This is a very techy organization. They know I opened orkut.com which must be banned. They are calling me and going to scold me or worse even expel me."

Ghonchu quickly closed the website and looked at the phone hoping it would stop on its own. However, the telephone continued to ring, trrrrng trrrrng. With shaking hands, Ghonchu lifted the telephone.

The ringing stopped soon after.

Ghonchu said 'Hello' in a quivering voice.

He heard a 'hello'. After which, there was a silence for 10 seconds. Ghonchu thought they were deciding on what punishment to mete out to him.

After another 10 seconds, Ghonchu mustered enough courage to then say 'Yes?'.

He heard, "That cannot be done. It won't work."

Worried, Ghonchu said, "It worked for me, but I am sorry. I won't do it again. Maybe your site-blocker didn't work properly."

The reply came, "What? No, even that isn't possible."

"But, orkut did open."

"See, if you add this feature, it would mean a lot of change to the code. That would be difficult. The entire thing would have to be rewritten."

Ghonchu blinked in perplexity, slowly as realization hit him, he cautiously got up, saw the person in the next cubicle talking on the phone. He sat down quietly, kept the phone back on the hook and reopened orkut.com.

Interesting...

A couple of interesting things which I observed at my office :-

- Whenever, people around here wish you to look up something - they say 'bing' it. On a couple of occasions, it was actually a conscious effort, something like 'goo..bing it'.

- Recently, during a presentation, the speaker gave an example of what might go wrong with a program. His words were as follows - "Let's say a program crashes. A program like uh..uh.. google talk may crash" .. and so on. Again, the pause was palpable.

Interesting though :-)