Miscommunication

A few days back a colleague asked me to review an email that he was about to send to an engineer working for a company that outsources to us. Let’s call the colleague X and the intended recipient of the email Y. X sent me the email and X and I were going over it at my desk. I knew what the email was about so I skipped the first paragraph and was reading the rest of the email, when X asked me, “What is copulation process?”

I was taken aback at hearing this question from X. I did not understand the relationship between the mail we were reviewing and the act between a male and a female of the homo sapien species except that the word mail is a homophone of one of the entities in the heterosexual act of procreation. Also, one would not normally expect X to talk about such subjects, since X apart from being vegan, has never shown any signs of interest in the fairer gender. Thus he keeps away from all things feminine just as he does from all things bovine.

I asked X, why he was asking the question, to which he replied that Y had mentioned it in the last call that X had with Y. Now this was completely shocking, because I’ve been working with Y for about 18 months, and speak to him once a week, every week. He has never in the afore mentioned time frame spoken about anything other than work, only deviating from the task at hand to exchange pleasantries. Seeing the bewildered look on my face, X pointed me to a line in the first paragraph of the email that X had written,

“When I gave the XXXXXX¹ file to the Copulation process, it generated YYYYYYY with the following errors…….”

On reading that line, I realised that the process in question was compilation² and not copulation! X misheard what Y had said and since X’s knowledge in such matters is non existent, he thought copulation was some fancy jargon for something technical.

I proceeded to correct the offending line and suggested some other changes to the email. I told X that copulation had nothing to do with the task at hand without explaining to him what it was and X went back to his desk leaving me with a big grin on my face and blog post in the mind.

¹ The names of the files have been changed to protect their privacy, since they face the risk of being thrown out their /home directories if the files they share the directory with found out that they had been inside the other

² Technically speaking the process in question was assembling and not compilation.

Dodecahedral calendar

Made my own dodecahedron calendar today. See this link for more info (via lifehacker).

Came out better than I expected it would, given my ineptitude at cutting and sticking. When I cut something in a straight line, it comes out looking like a cartoonist's representation of a thunderbolt and I am as adept with a glue stick as is nerd hitting on a hot blonde - it leads to quite a sticky situation, but the whole thing just comes unstuck.

Useful addition to the table and completely worth the effort :-)

new Keyboard

Got myself a new keyboard yesterday. The move was motivated by the deviant behaviour of a couple of key keys in my old keyboard.

The enter key:Once it was hit, with one's finger, it would as its name suggest enter into the space available so that it could make contact with the necessary bits of the keyboard, to allow the computer to recognise that the enter key had been pressed. Then quite unlike its alias, it would decide not to return from that position, thus giving giving me more "enters" than I had asked for.

The 'right' shift key: Quite the wrong behaviour, from this one. Once it was pressed and shifted out of its position of rest, it simply refused to come back, thus giving me lowercase with CAPS LOCK on, inverting cases and never once making a case for itself for good behaviour and bringing upon the keyboard capital punishment.

Things back to normal now!

It was five past midnight

Last night, which was the last night of last year, I, like many other people was celebrating the onset of the new year, occupied in the most natural of all nocturnal human activities - sleeping. I had gone to bed just a little after midnight, thus ushering in the new year in semi wakefulness. At around five past midnight, when I had reached sheep number 7, the calm of the night was broken by the call of Bell's invention. After time had decided to bring in the new year, the phone decided it was time to ring, in the new year.

A call on the land line is quite a rare occurrence given the many cell phones at home, and a call after midnight an even rarer one. I let the ringing continue hoping that ignoring it would make it stop and having a hunch that in all likelihood, the call wasn't meant for anyone at home. As I reached sheep 15 the ringing stopped and I was beginning to drift off.

Just when I had bid good bye to the sheep, the phone rang again. I thought that whoever it was must be quite desperate to get whoever he/she was trying to reach given the time of the night and thus decided to do something about the phone. I got my behind off the bed and picked up the phone and said "Hello".

The voice that greeted me from the other end was sort of high pitched, the type that one does not associate with grown up men. My brain dumbed down with the onset of sleep, for a moment thought it was a woman. At that thought synapses fired, the neural net was suddenly abuzz with activity sending signals to the rest of me to become alert, and suddenly the journey from the bed to the phone seemed worth it. That burst of alertness provoked more thinking and this is the unfortunate bit, the rational me realized in a despair inducing burst of logical deduction that if the voice was indeed that of a young woman, then the call was certainly not meant for me.

After reaching this conclusion the brain decided to begin the shutdown sequence again. At that time, the voice at the other end asked for "Arumugam Sir" and the tiny number of awake grey cells in my head, realized that it was boy and after realizing that, the gray cells went to sleep. I said "wrong number" and hung up, dragged my body to bed and dozed off.

Yawn!
PS: Happy new year!!!