He-He-He-He-mails

   I sit here yawning at the end of yet another weekend...This week did drag along, and I am glad that it’s over! But man, its December already! Has this year been flying or WHAT! :-| I don’t even remember living through all those months...If you ask me, I am kinda stuck somewhere between April and June. April , because a lot happened in that month this year...I hit 25, changed my job etc. Reminds of this bald astrologer who happened to look at the lines on my palm in a family gathering a decade back. He smiled, rubbed his chin and declared...” You have a government job waiting for you..You will get one at 25..Your second job”. I giggled as I pictured myself in the avatar of a loyal IAS officer, complete with a starched cotton sari etc...I giggle now, as I look at my present avatar, sitting cross legged on a chair and typing like a mad woman into the computer screen :D I give the astrologer half the brownie points though...at least he did foresee a job change at 25 ;) In his defence, I must say, his predictions were quite accurate...Especially the one where he said I was a budding genius, a prodigy, an enigma waiting to be cracked and a treasure of true talent waiting to be unearthed..LOL..Can we even question that NOW? ;)
    Astrologer aside, let’s talk about my job change. When I was switching companies in April, I intended to take a backup of all the blogs that I had written on my first company’s internal blog site. And since there is a lot of intellectual property blah blah, I just let it be and walked out of the campus without a backup of ANY kind. Not even my official mails. Can you imagine that? I can be quite a dumb blonde when I want to! I have no idea why I did that...I just forwarded few mails from my archives to my personal email id and left it at that. And to think I had created a zillion personal folders on outlook, carefully segregating mails into weird classifications! I don’t give a rat’s ass about ANY of those mails :D But, but, but, I swear at myself when I think what the hell was I doing when I missed taking a backup of the ‘FUNNY’ folder on my outlook. By ‘FUNNY’, I do not mean giggle-and-forget forwards..Nope..These were ‘actual’ official emails. ‘Real’ funny ones! Ones which were sent out or received during times of utter crisis, production go-lives etc. Ones which were not meant to be funny in ANY way, but turned out to be so, thanks to all the insanity induced by the nervous wrecks who were working on the god-damn ‘Priority-1’ issues.
   Without taking any names, I will treat you to some samples, some timeless gems that refuse to leave my mind even now.
   Sample this.
   The client worked with multiple vendors and my previous employer was one of them. Another software firm from India was also a vendor for the same client. We managed their sales software and the other firm managed the client’s database and servers.
   A P1 issue struck us on one fateful day and there was a long chain of back and forth emails being exchanged between us and the DBA from the other firm. And the whole world was copied in those mails, The ‘CC’ section looked like a novel :) It was ‘THAT’ big!
   We did some kinda fix at our end and wrote back to the DBA, asking for a server restart. The guy doesn’t respond for 20 minutes. Now, when you have people sitting on your neck, 20 minutes is a LOT of time! Finally, when my team mates and I were busy raining the choicest of cuss words on this guy, a mail pops up. He had written back. I quote him EXACTLY. This is what he wrote.
“Hi,
I am in the process of getting this done. This will take some time. Could you please bare with me for some time?
Thanks.
Mr.DBA”
    I have a keen eye for grammatical mistakes. Not that I don’t make any. But when there is one, I can sniff it from a mile. When I read this mail, I was guffawing like a mad cow, cackling like a hyena and thanks to all the jittery nerves, this mail seemed funnier that it actually was. The guy wanted us to “bare” with him while he got it done.
    Before we could even recover from this mail, another one came by. It was a jackass from the ‘CC’ list. He said one word. “Sure”. And that cracked us up too..The DBA and the CC guy “baring” was not a pretty picture! :D
    This mail chain went out for some more time and as long as it lasted, every reply that followed the DBA’s “bare with me” mail seemed funnier than the previous one in our gutter heads and helped in easing out the tension that was gripping us until then :)
    Ok, in the second sample, “I” am the jackass. I wrote this mail and sent it out to a senior client guy, whose experience in the industry was equal to my age. Thankfully for me, there was no one in ‘CC’ or ‘BCC’ and for all I know, if I don’t spill it out now, I can die with this secret..But, what’s the fun in NOT sharing a funny thing? We need to laugh at ourselves sometimes ;)
    Now the client guy was an old man, who was around when Mainframes were ‘THE’ thing and was around even when I started my first job. So you can imagine the kind of experience he comes with. This old man was no bossy fellow, but instead, was a very sweet guy. We hit it off really well and once we had that rapport between us, our mails were very casual, albeit official :)
    One evening, some user ran into some issue and immediately shot a mail asking for a quick resolution. Now that meant staying back and winding this up. I did that. Finally, at around 10-ish everything was back in place. All the while, there was a regular email chain happening between the old guy and me.Next morning, when I opened my mailbox, there is a chain mail happening between some colleagues, discussing how I owe them a treat for some reason and how I must keep aside 10K from my salary to treat these lazy bums to some awesome lunch. I giggle and was about to type a reply when the next mail arrives. From the old guy, the client. It said “Thanks for all the help. Everything works fine now. Can we have a call with the user at 11 AM your time?” I was relieved to see that everything was fine now and went back to my previous mail to type a reply to the chain mail.
    I sent a reply to the group of colleagues. And then started typing the reply to the client. ...
Wait. No. This is not happening. Dint I just reply to this mail? OMG. I then click on SENT ITEMS.
    I am done..totally! How do I recall this mail..frantic search for that option ensues. And before I could figure it out, I get a reply from the old guy.
“Oh! Is someone having a bad morning?”. I cringe.
    Guess what. Instead of replying to the chain mail, I had typed my reply on the client’s mail and sent it across to him! And it read “ In your dreams ! Not happening...No chance!”
    This certainly was meant for the “keeping aside 10K for the lunch treat” gig :-| And like my luck might have it, it sounded like a perfectly rude reply to the client’s email :P
    I dialled the client’s number frantically and spent the next five minutes explaining my situation, while he went ‘Ho Ho Ho Ho...Ha Ha Ha Ha” like Santa Claus at the other end of the line...Luckily for me, he was a jolly good fellow :D
    My “funny” folder in Outlook was home to some more of those “real” goofy emails, gathered during my three years at my first job :) Thankfully, I was the recipient of the rest of the emails and not the jackass who wrote it :P Out of the zillion mails, these deserved a place on my pendrive on the last day! I still wonder how I missed them out :)
    Dear Funny Folder, I miss you! In your loving memory , I am considering creating your sister folder on my present Outlook and hopefully I will never WRITE any email that will bring your sister to existence :P I just hope there are enough people out there who would be generous enough to contribute to make her a reality ;) :D
   

The One-Upper Syndrome

     The moon rotates around the Earth and the Earth rotates around the Sun. That is the natural course of the Universe. If you have paid attention in your 6th grade geography class, the name Copernicus will ring a bell. This guy suggested a model of the Universe that was centred around the Sun. I kind of bought his story, until recently.

     Yeah. Nature has thrown me away from the natural course and put me in an orbit that runs around a certain person who is so full of herself, that 5 minutes with her and you will find yourself forcefully drawn into her world, which again, is full of herself. If you have had the good fortune ( use a pinch of sarcasm here) of bumping into someone who thinks the world about themselves and expects you to think so too, you will understand my plight by the time I end this post.

     Let us call her The Queen. Not because she is one, but because, if she ever stumbles across this mean blog, she will at least give me credit for giving her a fancy name :P Now Miss Queen is someone I HAVE to stumble into everyday. A typical conversation with her, as expected, begins with her and ends (if it ever does) with her.

    Even when we are stuck in a large group, she has what it takes to divert the conversation towards her. Sample this

Person 1: “ Bush kept talking about Osama bin Laden. And now all of a sudden, the guy is forgotten. No one talks about him anymore.Wonder what happened to that guy.”

     Before Person 2 can respond, Miss Queen almost gets hysterical trying to figure out what she can say to talk next without giving the other people a chance.There she goes!

Miss Queen : “ Oh Bin Laden. “I” hate that guy. “I” think he must have shaved his beard by now and wandered into the US again. Btw, you know what, “I” hate men with beards. Does’nt it itch ? Wonder how girls can stand them. “I” would dump a guy if he ever grew a beard.”
      And just like that Bin Laden vanishes into thin air and the conversation is lost in an overdose of HER opinion. Not that I would care. Because I generally turn a deaf ear to all that she says.But it does get to me sometimes. Especially when she gets into “one-upper” mode. If “one-upper” sounds new to you, here is how the urban dictionary describes it.

One-upper : An annoying person who responds to hearing someone else’s experience or problem by immediately telling a similar story about themselves with a much more fantastic (or terrible) outcome.

Picture this :

Girl 1 ( talking about her weekend getaway) : My husband and I drove down to County Resorts for the weekend. It’s such an amazing place. We had a great time there.

Miss Queen :  Oh County Resorts? My grand dad has a membership there. We get a free vacation there every 6 months. But we choose not to go. Such a cheap place.

      How mean is that? I have half the mind to punch her nasty nose and break it into two. If only I could get away with it!

     One week with that woman and I knew there was no stopping her. I did try to be politely tolerant of her antics. When that dint work, I resorted to plainly ignoring her. That’s the worst way to treat a person. Ignoring them. But such people just ask for it. And I give them what they ask for.

     Miss Queen is only a recent example. There are many such glowing examples of interesting one-upper personalities from the past who are freakshows of the first order ! The worst kind of one-uppers are the negative one-uppers. The ones who want to stand first. Even if it means standing first on the loser scale :p I mean seriously, what do you do with such people?

      If you tell them you got a cavity filled, they will jump and say that they got a root canal operation done. If you say your neighbour got a nose job, their neighbour would have got a nose job AND a boob job . If your friend downed 3 tequila shots at the party, their friend would have downed 6. And if you broke your ankle on your biking trip, they would have broken their ankle, their hip and their neck :-| There is simply no end to their bragging!
       How do you handle such jerks? Some of my friends try reverse-snobbing, which is aimed at making the one-upper feel guilty. If she brags about an expensive dinner, you talk about the hunger in Uganda. So basically you just burst her bubble right into her face. But again, that would mean stooping down to her level. And I am not too keen on doing that.

       But I must admit, it is quite challenging to just sit there and tolerate such freakshows. So on the most recent onset of her bragging session, I put a brake to her enthusiastic onslaught and told her I was having a bad headache. “Uh-ho” she said and stopped for a few seconds. I thought my trick had worked. Only until she blurted out “ I had a bad headache in the bus today. I felt like I would faint if it continued”. Inspite of it’s inappropriateness , I could not hide my grin. I simply picked my coffee up and walked away as I guffawed like a crazy cow. She is just beyond repair! So now instead of banging my head into the wall each time she does that, I simply try and find humour in her situation. I can choose to either get peeved or I can simply choose to chuckle over her mental illness. I choose to do the latter. And I see that I can stand her better now :P

       I am sure you would have come across one-uppers too. Trying to mend them or trying to beat them in their own game is an absolute waste of precious energy. It’s like rolling in the mud with a pig. Not only will you get dirty, the pig will actually enjoy doing it. Why give them the pleasure ;)

      Here’s a chuckle for you. And I take leave with that :)

There were three women sitting around the table, talking and bragging.

The first beautiful, dressed lady said "My husband bought me a new mink coat and a trip to Europe. "

“Oh !Thats nice!”.The second lady replied.

Trying to out do her and one up her , the third lady said "my husband bought me a 5 carat diamond AND that mansion up on the hill, Oh, and a Rolls".

" Oh !Thats nice!”. The second lady said again.

Noticing that the second lady was so quiet, the other two prodded her.

Finally she said, " My husband sent me to etiquette school" .

“Oh really? “ The other two women said. "What did they teach you there?"

"Well, instead of saying “f--- you”, they taught me to say “ Oh! That’s nice"

 The other two shut up :-D

Have a great week ahead ! :)