Month: August 2008

The QWERTY disaster!

It all started when my company decided to give me a Blackberry in an attempt to make me work round the clock! Although I’d been “out-of-touch” with the a “physical” keyboard on phones for quite sometime, little did I know that the consequences would be as disastrous as it turned out to be. The signs of the impending catastrophe started to creep out during my attempts to get used to the QWERTY keyboard and the miniscule keys in it. I must have made a dozen calls to my colleagues, while trying to familiarize with the phone, (some of them even multiple times). And they were courteous enough to call back and find out if everything was fine!

Then I got locked out of my house by promptly leaving the keys behind when I stepped out, while I was playing with the new gadget! To make matters even worse, I left my “i”Phone (which I’ve started liking even more now) on the charger, which meant that I was left with just this new phone, with no contacts on it and a wallet in my pocket with no money in it 😀 . It took me another 2 hours to get a hold of my roommate, who had to be pulled out of his office desk to hand me the spare keys.

And NOW… I’m locked out of the blackberry itself! I made an attempt to change the password and the miniature keyboard that it had, somehow managed to make me type a random password twice to confirm it! (Now what is the probability of that happening!) One more attempt on logging in would erase the entire data from my phone!

Why do I get a feeling that I’m hating my new phone already?! 😀

Alarms and snoozes

Since the day I was born, and if that’s too much of an exaggeration, since the day I remember, I’ve always had problems waking up in the morning. When I was at home, my mother used to be my alarm. She used to literally shout at the highest possible decibels, “snoozing” at not-so-constant intervals and that finally made me wake up after almost an hour! Ever since I’d been living alone, I made it a point to avoid waking up in the morning, unless the situation was beyond just dire. I must say, a large part of the reason was the fact that I used to sit up late, not realizing how late it really was. So if it ever got to a point where I had to wake up at “odd” hours between 6am to 9am, I made sure that I stayed up all through the night just so that the complications associated with waking up could be avoided. That had been the case for the past few years.

But in the past one month, since I entered my new job, I’ve been faced with a situation where I had to be at the office by at least 8am! I realized that this had to be a routine, rather than the “dire” intermittent situations that I was used to in the past and since then I’ve been looking for ways to wake myself up in the morning, because I could no longer afford to sit through the nights. Thanks to my phone, I guess I now have a fool proof snooze solution which made sure that I woke up within at least an hour after the first alarm went off. Here is how it works.

I “try” to wake up by 6:00 in the morning, which means that my alarm has to start the process of waking me up, at least by 5:00. The snooze function in my alarm works every 10 minutes. So I have alarms set at 5:00 and 5:15, so that after 5:15, there is an alarm that goes off every five minutes, simply due to the phase difference between the two snoozes. 🙂

Well, over the past one month, I’m getting used to waking up in the mornings, so much that I’ve been able to slowly reduce the gap between the first alarm and the actual time I woke up, by 15 minutes. 😀 . Hopefully I can see a day, when an alarm at 6:00 will make me wake up at 6:00!

Fishing or Hunting?

A large majority of the management books follow a common law – the number of iterations of an idea is directly propotionate to the number of pages. In other words, the ideas keep repeating as the number of pages of the book increases. Most authors have an uncanny knack of writing pages and pages about something which can be expressed in just a few sentences. That’s perhaps one of the reasons why I tend to avoid such books. It reminds me of the history teacher I had back in school, in my 6th grade (or 6th std. as it is commonly referred to in India), who spent half an hour on the first sentence of our history textbook by twisting and turning the subject and the predicate! “History is the story of civilizations”, said the textbook. She went on to “elucidate” this as – “Story of the civilization is history. So history tells you the story of every civilization……” I do not wish to quote the entire speech that went on for half an hour, but hope you got the point!

Coming back to management books, the reason why I brought this up was because, recently, I came across a book which took me by surprise – one for the fact that it was shelved under the management section in the book store, and two, it had a “page size” which completely went against the common trend seen among the management books. The Art of Influence by Chris Widener was different simple due to its size! Like I always did in a bookstore, I spent the next fifteen minutes reading the first few pages of the book, by the end of which I knew I had it in my shopping cart for that day! Embedded in the storyline, where Marcus Drake, a graduate from Northeastern University spent a few days with Bobby Gold, a millionaire, was four golden rules of influence, revealing the differences between “the science and art of business”. The most catchy of those rules was the one where Gold asked Marcus, what he preferred – fishing or hunting. “Hunting”, came an almost prompt reply to which Gold replied, “When you hunt, the animal runs away from you, whereas when you fish, the “victim” comes to you”! The 150 pages that the book stretched itself to, was gripping in its own way and I must admit, this was perhaps the first management book that I read in one go or better still, I managed to complete! 😀

Off to New York City this weekend. I guess it will be a relaxing weekend after a “hectic” week at work.