Send me a blue boy!

A communication professional's job is like an abandoned drum, almost all other functions in the company beat it in the way they like and they expect it to sound awesome, all the time. When talking about overlap of job functions, the confusion will be more than what the poor police men had with the cross dressed sadhu. We do human resource jobs, administration jobs, sales jobs, marketing jobs and many more. For instance, once I sent out a mail to announce the launch of new job referral portal for HR, of course with all relevant links. And next day onwards, I started getting at least 4-5 resumes per day, in my inbox. In short, communications is not anymore a supporting function, it's the super function which unfortunately can't fly to reach everywhere.

But the fun part of the work is, however, cannot be overlooked. I'll talk about just some mails here.

Recently one of my colleagues, an internal communications manager, told about this interesting mail that found its way to her inbox. She often (mistakenly) gets mails for another colleague, who has a similar name and this one was the weirdest of all. The mail read "Send me a blue boy for a day'. Though a  bit startled, she figured out what the mail was about as she went through it. Apparently, sender of this mail wanted support from a helper, who wears a blue uniform to work. My colleague wrote back that it is a demeaning term and refrain from using that, besides informing about the wrong recipient. We had a good laugh on the unintended humor sense of the person who send the mail.

This in turn reminded me of a couple of mails I got while I was in a factory location. One was about visitors wearing shoes inside the factory premises. After telling that it is mandatory to wear a pair of shoes inside the facility and those without shoes will not be allowed inside, the sender emphasized it by telling 'to avoid embracement at the gate, please make sure that visitors are wearing shoes'. It sounded like "Hey you are not wearing shoes, give a hug and go inside'. Err, not sounding right, I know.

Second one was about...well you read the rest to believe it. The mail's subject line was ' Rooming charges: issues' and I instantly got a feeling that it is about some new guest house or sorts. The mail was addressed to the manager of mobile service provider and it read "please refer our meeting on ..........., regarding the rooming charges. It has been noticed by most of our employees that the rooming charges are not levied as per the..."

Besides this, there are extremely caring colleagues who promptly forward virus alerts 'directly' from Norton and McAfee and some others tell the tale of a lost pen gifted by dad. While HR departments of organizations are trying hard to deal with attrition, there are mails on a daily basis telling adieu, bye and sayanora. All of them has a 'sad part' telling that if they had hurt anyone during his tenure with the company, that was completely unintentional.

Though typos are commonplace, these examples do not fall under this category.
PS: If you find any typos in this post, those are merely coincidental ;)

Photo courtesy: Michael of Scott's photostream on Flickr

Valentinium

It's again that time of the year when advertisements tell you how platinum (gold is passe) bonds you better than Fevikwik, or love. I saw red flood on my Faceook timeline and some others were expressing their anti-valentine rage.

Honestly, I am not very sure about which side I belong now. I always thought and still think that the hype about Valentine's day is a consumerist proposition. If I want to celebrate love on a day, it could be anyday and furthermore, if I need to celebrate it on a special day it could be a birthday or an anniversary. And I personally think that I'm not supposed to say someone else should celebrate it or not. I just don't see the point and that's all.

Evidently, we (me and wife) finished our V-day celebrations before the 14th. I gifted her on the week before, I took her for a long bike ride on the weekend (11&12) and her gifting for me was also before the V-day. Were these all part of our Valentines day celebrations? Yes and no, these just happened around the day and so constituted our V-day celebrations. But then, we were not in a hurry to finish everything on or before the day. We might plan something similar in a month or two, again. So we have multiple V-days a year.

My message is clear, always express your love and make the person you love feel special. And if you want to celebrate it once in a year ONLY, it's your call :)

This one is for you Simi. I do not have diamond or platinum, this is my Valentinium for you ;)

Photo courtesy: plrang, sxc.hu

Thought for food

Life is full of surprises, you never know where and with whom you will be ending up with. Moreover, you could never predict if you are going to get in to a kitchen and cook someday. Seriously, now I think that there is some correlation between this blog post and me, or is it?

Tasty food has always been a major interest for me and I have always been very specific about what I eat. Though a non-vegetarian for the most of my life, over the last few years I'm trying to practise vegetarianism. Anyhow, the point is, I love food and the misconception was that I thought I just love to eat food.

My mom and dad are great cooks, so at home it's always a huge variety of delicacies. Sometimes they make so many dishes that I confine myself to one or two. As I said, I'm very specific about my tastes and at home it was served, without fail.

And then I ventured out of home and realized that serving specific to my taste buds will just be an occasional privilege now. The college mess was mostly a mess, but introduced me to delicacies specific to North-West India. Initially I hated the sweetness in sambar, yellow colored poha and all those green colored dishes, but as we explored Pune, we found places like 'Simply Idlicious' and 'Steamy affair' to name a few. My appetite was more than satisfied whenever we went out searching for restaurants. Over those two years in Pune, I slowly shifted from a hardcore non vegetarian to a 'mostly' vegetarian. Also, in those two years I realized that there is a difference between a food lover and a connoisseur of food.

Then the time came when I had to stay all alone. Food in a platter, whenever I needed, became a dream. I had to have samosas and vada pav for breakfast, apple and bread-peanut butter for dinner, while I'm living alone.  My cooking was limited to boiling water using the kettle, for preparing the cup noodles. As the days progressed I was more repellent towards the idea of cooking and was happy with restaurant food and ready-to-eat items.

Nevertheless, Bangalore had something else in store for me. I, now being a husband, started helping out my wife in kitchen. Started with making chapathi's, I'm getting in to cooking in a larger scale nowadays and I realize that cooking is one of my interest areas. I'm turning in to a connoisseur of food from a lover of it. I started cooking my own dishes and began experimenting with groceries and spices. Though it's just a start, I'm sure I will go a long way in cooking ;)

So is there any moral for this story? No. But you never know where you will end up, one day.