The Brain & The Strain

Work!! work! work!! The last 4-5 months of my life has been only work. I don't quite manage to understand it always and that makes things even worse. I am not a techie and I am not passionate about the stuff that I work on, yet the sheer magnitude of work has meant that my poor tiny brain had no option but to store it in the limited memory available . Memory?? I wonder how much it would be? I guess it would be limited to some KB. My inbox size has however exceeded it's limit thanks to the n number of mails and the freebie documents that come along. The first thing that I need to do in the New year to delete all the unnecessary mails ( I usually don't do this on a regular basis) and free my inbox.

Going back to my poor tiny brain, its capacity and its likes and dislikes. ( For a moment, let me treat brain, mind, heart, soul and conscience as one and the same :) ). I believe the mind usually takes in stuff that it likes and leaves the rest. Given a choice, it won't like to take in anything that doesn't appeal to it. But sometimes in cases like mine, the brain has little choice. After working for all the Open hours ( eyes open ) in front of the computer with those Mainframe jobs and abends, it tends to carry with them even when in its asleep. Well, this is what happened to me in the last few days ( what actually happened and what I understood seemed to be quite different)

What Mom said : Hey , get up, you have been asleep for more than 10 hours now

What I heard it as : Hey, get up the batch has started more than 10 hours ago and is stuck with a job abend, you need to resolve it ASAP.

What Dad said: Get up now, you have been sleeping like a log .

What I replied : What's your problem mate? All the 3 output files are coming out fine as per the expected results. I have already sent out the abend log ( I was thinking that it was a damn testing team guy complaining about the results, My poor Dad is no tester and hence couldn't make head and tail of it )

Satya was my room mate in Melbourne. This is what had happened when he tried to wake me up. He had reached the office that day and was calling me on my hotel room number

What Satya said: Hi Good morning .. have you woken up? When will you be coming to office? Your PM is waiting in the office for you.

What I replied: ( I saw the time and it was 9:30 am. I was working on some damn Mainframe screen the last night). Hi Satya.. Good morning. Can you do me a favor please ? Please check if everything is fine with the "9:30 screen" ( The brain seemed to pick up the things that it saw last "The time 9:30" and the "screen" and made a combo out of it). At the other end, Satya was non-plussed. My PM let me sleep for another 3-4 hours when he heard of the "9:30 screen".

In one such instance when my Mom woke me up for the problem in the batch ( the 10 hour thing ) , I got up and immediately switched my computer on. I was trying to figure out what was going wrong. The only other thing that was active in the Brain's memory was the India-South Africa match. The brain ordered the fingers to do an F6 and open the cricinfo page. The match hadn't started for the day yet. For a good 5 minutes , I was trying to figure out how a cricket match is run by a Mainframe batch and if there was something that I could do to kick off the match. What could be the Mainframe job to get the Cricket match going ? How does it normally happen in a Live Production scenario? My mind was jammed with all such thoughts. It was only after the "Colgate Gel" effect in my mouth that I realized that I was going nuts. Ah ...My Poor tiny brain... you seem to more confused than I am!

The "5 Things" Thing

And so I was back to office today. Back to the good old office at Hyderabad. There wasn't any life at the office, with most of them on leave. The ones who came were sleeping with their eyes open, staring at the computer. I made sure I left the office by 5:30 pm and more importantly made sure I had Pani-puri and chat with Ana. Pani-puri rocks! Nothing in Melbourne came any where near that!

It was the usual topic with Ana. The "objectvity" one. I went blah blah again saying that one should always do what one loved the most. I believe that every human is gifted with at least one natural talent. For each one us, there exists a "work" that one would love to do. For Sachin Tendulkar it was Cricket and he realized that when he was a kid. For many mortals like me, this "passion" might not be quite obvious. Most of us don't even make an effort to find out what that "passion/talent" is. It would be just within you, it's only that you haven't made any effort to listen to that voice. "Apne Dil ki Suno"... Oh... I do sound like a Naseeruddin Shah in an art movie.. Don't I?

I came across this "5 things that you don't know about me" theme in a couple of blogs. I couldn't quite get the funda of beig tagged and the online theme but I do feel this would be a cool topic to get back from my long haitus. So here goes my list.

1.) Confused :

I am confused about girls, love and marriage. I have a blush on every other girl that I come across. I have had 8 serious blushes in my life...Huh..apart from these there are girls who glitter, tickle my heart and disappear before I verify the source of the funny tickle. Ah.. well.. if the word "Blush **" has confused you that let me tell you that I have coined this word and it has been generated has a result of all the confusion that I have had about the 3 things mentioned earlier.

** A Blush is the equivalent of Sigmund Freud's Crush. The Blush phenomenon is all set to rock the world somewhere between 2010 and 2015.

2.) Love afternnon naps:

I can stay late in the night upto 3:00-4:00 am without any kind of discomfort. However it require someone/something special to deny me the 2-3 of heavenly Sunday afternoon nap after a heavy meal at home.

3.) Hate curd rice

I find that most of my crushes( read blushes) love curd rice. I love all of them but I hate curd rice. I love pickles ( Avvakai). I gobbled around 3 bottles of that during my 6-week stay in Melbourne.

4.) I write more than I read:

Yes, I think I have really got to improve my reading habits. I don't even regularly read a newspaper. However I can't hold on to my felings for long and scribbling on a notepad/blog-site about my feelings gets me going.

5.) The dimple factor:

I am one of the biggest fans of Preity Zinta on earth . I can never really get tired of going ga-ga about her cute dimples. The dimple factor also helps me clear some of confusion that I mentioned in point one.

And I thougt I should make one honest confession apart from these 5 things. Hmmmm.. it is a bit embarassing for me .. but I guess it's ok since it is supposed to be a confesssion. I don't know how to tie a tie-knot. My Dad has been doing it for me all through the last 2.5 years. :)