Archive

Chat busters

Chat is my primary means of communication with friends, colleagues, family and annoying cousins who don’t have internet access. Half the people I befriended in the blogworld are on my chat too. As a result, I chat all day.

There are downsides to chatting all day, apart from Carpal-Tunnel Syndrome. I tend to make typos. Some typos are innocuous. But some promote profound misunderstanding of my character. I was fortunate enough to save some of the biggest typos I did (so that I can use them on a rainy day when I don’t have any other interesting post).

I would like to vindicate myself of some of the unflattering impressions I may have created.

    • I may have rooted for a specific body part of yours (go tit), but I just meant to say I got it.
    • I may have accidentally made sexist comments about random women, (I like her butt), but it was a simple case of an extra “t”. I meant to say “I like her, but….”
    • I may have insulted popular people (He is retarded as an authority), I just have regard for them
    • I may have sounded like I was bagging quickies in the middle of the afternoon at work, (back in a sex) but I was just taking a break for a “sec” (without sex, of course)
    • I may have spread vile office rumors about my superiors (he has 20 people blow him). I meant to say that guy has 20 people below him.
    • Just because the PCI port seems to take anything in it, I might have sounded like I was insulting it (stick it in the PCI slut), but I just meant slot
    • I may have asked you to do nasty things to your monitor (Did you tryc licking on the icon). I hope you didn’t try that. Just click on the icon.
    • I may have sounded like I was asking for sexual favors (Can you do me). I was not. At least, not in this instance. It was just an eager-enter syndrome. I pressed enter before typing “a favor”
    69 Comments

Management is child’s play

When you receive some management training, and consequently lose some common sense, you tend to think like a manager every waking minute. If the sight anybody not working makes you wince, imagine the pain it causes to see a resource run around naked without any task assigned to him. Yes, I am talking about a toddler/pre-schooler.
If you ever had tried to assign tasks to a pre-schooler, you would have realized that pre-schoolers’ work-ethic and their view towards work assignments are very unprofessional. How do you deal with a subordinate who takes the task and its materials, shoves them in the toilet and pees on them? Very unprofessional.

If you still want to make your child work for you, you need to get creative in your assignment and the motivation you provide to ensure their timely delivery. Here are a few tasks I can suggest:

Get him to make the shopping list: Simply ask your kid, “We have bread and bananas, what do you want to eat?” He will list you all the items that you don’t have in the house.

Get him to take care of weeds: If you have weeds in your yard and want to get rid of them, show your kid how to water plants using a hose. And tell him that the weeds need constant watering. Give him 3 days to kill the weeds by drowning.

Get him to mash food: Leave the food you want mashed on the floor. Place a mallet next to it and remove yourself from the view. A few minutes later your food will be mashed along with a few other things in the room. Be warned that you may find it a little inconvenient to retrieve your food that is evenly spread across the room.

Get him to find the permanent marker: If you ever fail to find the permanent marker, put a white shirt on your kid. Leave him in the room and wait for his white shirt to turn black with the marker ink. He has found your marker.

Get rid of annoying co-passengers: If you are on a flight and the guy in the next seat is making conversation while you are trying to stay quiet, softly tell your kid, “This uncle knows how to tell a male cat from a female cat”. You can even get some sleep while those two sort out the matters.

Get him to point out the right capacitor: You are often in this situation where you have a bunch of capacitors in your hand but only one fits the circuit perfectly (I am assuming you are hopeless geek). Place the capacitors in front of your child. The one he puts in his mouth and chews is the one you want.

Get him to shred paper: Just hand any paper to him and tell him that it is a very important paper. It will be in million pieces before you can say “wait”.

Get him to find condoms: If you forgot where you kept your condoms, leave your kid in the bedroom. He finds them every time without fail. In fact, he will find them much faster if there is another person in the room, like a friend or a cousin.

57 Comments

Statutory warning

reaction.png

Warning: If you experience nausea, dizziness, diarrhea or sudden buildup of ear wax, you may be suffering from a fatal reaction caused by the blog. Technorati reports that this blog already caused more than 100 reactions:

technorati_reactions.png

OK, you got the point. Technorati used to call them, very appropriately, “links.” Now they are “reactions.” It bothers me when people use obscure terms to represent something very simple. They are either trying to make it easy for laypeople to understand or be politically correct. In most cases it ends up confusing us.

Since we are on the topic of obscure expressions, here are some more examples:

  • “Contact your health care professional“: Means “see your doctor” but why use one word when three are sufficient!
  • “A store associate will help you”: Basically a salesperson but calling him an “associate” makes him sound less sleazy.
  • Single Family Dwelling: Sounds like some kind of haunted house. It simply means “house”.
  • Administrative assistant: Means “secretary” and I don’t know why “assistant” is less offensive than “secretary”
  • There will be work force actions: You will be searching for a job soon
  • Concession stand: Means the popcorn and soda stand outside a movie theater. They make it sound like they are selling food at dirt cheap prices, calling it “concession,” when in fact soda and popcorn cost more than a month’s salary.
  • Senior Citizens: Old people. It’s funny to note that a lot of these senior citizens are not citizens
  • “I need to freshen up“: Women don’t pee. They freshen up.
  • In-flight refreshments: Peanuts and half a can of soda.
  • “They consummated their relationship”: A delicate way of saying they jumped in the bed and did it until the bed broke.
  • “Oh, she is just an Adult Entertainer, honey”: Whichever way you call a “stripper”, you are screwed after this.
42 Comments

Make most out of your next group lunch

If you have the refined art, you can turn every little pleasure in life into a business opportunity where you can save a buck, make a buck or be an absolute cheapo.

Take, for example, group lunches. These days any tiny reason is good enough for some workless co-worker to pipe up saying “Wow, we should do a group lunch.” It could be anything from leaving employees to somebody losing virginity, it doesn’t matter; we do group lunches.

As you know, all participants, willing or otherwise, split the check (bill) evenly in these group lunches. So how do you get the best bang for your buck? Here are some tips I have seen used in real life. Yes, people do really use them.

1. Make the suckers pay for dinner: When ordering your lunch, innocently order two entrees, as if you thought one was just an appetizer. When the food arrives, feign surprise and say, “Oh boy. That’s a lot of food. Can I get it to go?” And, of course, don’t offer to pay for it separately. There. You simply made rest of the people pay for your dinner.

2. Spice up your drink: As you would notice, people don’t order alcoholic beverages at group lunches. Their loss. Order a beer. You don’t have to get up on the table and shout that you are getting a beer. Do it quietly. With one wave of hand and a quick word with the waiter, you made your group pay for your beer!

3. Eat lunch like a prince: Of course the age old trick of ordering the most ridiculously expensive food on the menu, which you would think twice to order even in your dreams. Same goes with drink. Don’t just order Coke. Find some fancy European crap - something that sounds like Fancio Italiano Crapo. Don’t worry; your colleagues are paying for most of it.

4. Bon Appetizer: If you have an esoteric taste in appetizers, just place two orders for the appetizer without consulting anybody else. You will ostensibly share it but in essence you will get most of it. Jackpot if you go out to lunch with a group of mostly vegetarians and you eat meat!

5. Eat the tip: When the check arrives, claim you have no cash and put down your credit card. Then take the check, add tip, split it evenly and round the amount to the next dollar for convenience. As you can easily guess when you add all the contributions you will end up with more money than what you have to pay. Just sign the credit card receipt for actual amount + tip. The remaining couple of bucks are yours to keep! (I swear I saw this happen).

41 Comments

These bigots!

Statistics is a bitch. Take, for example, the fact that statistically I only have one relative per 1000 square miles in India. But all that is completely thrown off when I go to my town. In my hometown, my relatives are more densely populated than dust mites. Every time I step outside, i am bound to meet at least one of them. I mean my relatives, not dust mites.

On my last visit, this relative of mine sneaked up on me on the street. To avoid this person I wouldn’t hesitate to jump into the sewer overrun by the pigs, whose company I would probably enjoy more. But he didn’t give me a chance. Our conversation ended like this:

He: I heard that Indians are discriminated against in the US, is that true? The white people treat us like second-grade citizens?
Me: I don’t know about rest of the US but it is not true about where I live. In fact, white people are the minority in Bay Area and people often joke that they are the second grade citizens there.
He: People of that country don’t understand what great country we come from. They don’t understand the value of our culture. Even a dirty Negro thinks he is better than us.

I stood there with my mouth open. I didn’t know where to begin to correct him. I politely informed him that “Negro” is a politically incorrect term and that implying blacks are a “lesser” race than us is infuriating. I regret that I didn’t quite know how to tell him he was the biggest racist I ever met and he personally is “lesser” than the pigs I referred to earlier.

37 Comments

Fall Fashion

If you haven’t seen the video of Miss. USA falling in the Miss Universe 2007 pageant, you should get out from under your rock more often. Check out the video.
I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. People seem to be surprised to see her fall. Consider the following facts:

  1. She is wearing heels that look like stilts
  2. She is probably starving herself for weeks in fear of gaining a few extra grams
  3. She is wearing a dress so tight that being able to walk is almost against physics

If think about it, the above facts are in line with the norm in young people these days. So we can expect to see more and more people fall on a regular basis. That’s why I propose that Miss Universe Pageant introduces a new event called “Fall Fashions”, where contestants show how gracefully they can fall and how elegantly they can recover from it. They will be judged based on:

  1. Perfect and soft landing on their ass
  2. How quickly they spring back to upright position
  3. How broad a smile they plaster on their faces, however artificial it is, as if nothing has happened.

Miss USA could’ve scored 10/10 in this category!

16 Comments

Twisted DNA is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache!