Sunday, October 12, 2008

The Date

Amongst many other things that I'm good at, I'm also good at numbers. Adding them, subtracting them, multiplying or dividing them, memorizing them i.e. memorizing phone numbers and dates especially. It all began with my early obsession of cricket; i had this habit of looking at the score and calculating the current run rate, reqd. runrate, batsman's striking rate, bowler's economy rate, balls remaining, runs remaining etc all by myself, mentally. also, i tried to do this fast enough to beat the television display for the same...
Whoa whoa hold it! before you get the impression that i'm a whiz kid, a super geek, let me clarify that i always TRIED, whether i could MANAGE it or not is an all together different story, a sad-story infact. Nevertheless, as a result i'm quite above average when it comes to numbers. So it's quite natural that if i like you, i will have ur phone number and ur birthdate stored right up there in my brain - in the same vip closet where i have lots of other important data stored; like the date on which i was ragged for the first time, the date of the first adult movie i ever saw, the date on which i was vomited upon by a kid in PMT and so on and so forth. Ok! that's pretty much the background that we needed to proceed.
Now, to part B of this story - Let's start with a truth, the incident that i mention below hasn't occured recently but back before a considerable amount of time. Unfortunately, revealing the precise chronological details would be, what do ya call it?? A breach of privacy. Not that it matters now but still... Anyways, so here was this girl joining my team. Surprised??? surprised that this thing is gonna be about a girl ?? now c'mon if you know me, you oughta know that it HAD to be about a girl. what else do you think could have motivated me to come out of my self imposed exile from the blogging world and write this piece?? so this thing is gonna be about her... and about me... it's gonna be about us... :) That last line gave me a romantic tickle :)
Alright, when i have it established that this piece is gonna be about a girl, i suppose you deserve her description; here it goes - brown eyes, fair and lovely, curly locks, dimple on the left cheek, about 5.2 to 5.3, a good body to go with it and lastly, a smile so innocent that it would give a baby run for it's money (if it had any in the first place). Within first couple of weeks, i had realized that i wasn't making enough ground as compared to some colleagues, who had already started hanging out with her individually, whereas i was still stuck at team lunches, team meetings and common forwarded mail trails. to my dismay, these guys also had the advantage of sitting very next to her. Nevertheless, destiny gave me my chance when i read about her birthdate on the intranet. not that i was searching for it in particular, i just wanted to checkout how she looks in a passport photo to validate my mom's theory that beautiful girls don't look good in photographs. so was checking out her intranet profile when i found out about her birthdate, it was just a month from the day i saw the profile. I was pretty sure that no one else in the team knew about it and going by her nature, the probability that she would tell people about it was very low. I sketched out a complete plan and also followed it to perfection. here was the plan - we had a team meeting at 3 pm so i was gonna write a mail wishing her at 2.45 and then move to the meeting room to make arrangements for a cake cutting ceremony. Every team has one or two members who are very excited at the prospects of such celebrations and know everything about which cake to order and where to get the candles from etc etc; likewise i also had a female colleague assisting me in all this. so we started executing the plan, i wrote her a mail wishing and asking her to come to the meeting room 10 minutes early, where we all were waiting for her and upon her entrance, we all went into unison singing 'happy birthday to you' - she was totally shocked and embarrassed. This is where she gave me a glance which, as i later realized, was quite meaningful. Everybody then started wishing her and asked her to cut the cake. She did oblige; albeit, with a shocked look on her face. Obviously, she did hear it from everyone how i was the one who arranged for this and all that stuff. She later come upto me and thanked me personally with a mischievous glint in her eyes. the whole celebration thing was spot on, i was patting myself for hitting the bulls eye and thanking god for having gifted me my numerical memory. The triumphant euphoria and excitement stayed with me till i went back to my seat and opened my mail box to find a reply from her to my birthday wish mail which went like -

Hey AB, who told you it's my birthday today?? it isn't... my b'day is next month.. is this some kind of gag.. why do u want me to come early to the meeting?? kisi aur ko bhejna tha, mujhe bhej diya kya mail??

Warm Regards,
XXYYZZ

I was shocked to say the least, on reading this. I promptly visited the intranet page again to confirm the date; it still showed the same info and certainly there was no question of my making mistake in remembering it. As i was staring at the screen blankly, her mail made some sense - "My b'day is next month" and then in a flash, it dawned upon me that the date format on the intranet page wasn't ddmmyy but was mmddyy. I certainly don't possess the vocabulary to express my feelings upon this realization. i would be lying if i would say that i was embarrassed, to be frank - i was BLANK!! :-) As i was busy coming to terms with the embarrassing confrontations that were lying ahead of me, i received another mail from her which went like -

Hey AB, what's all this about man?? looks like you confused my birthdate with someone else but i didn't want to disappoint you and everybody else so played along. anyways, thanks a lot for your effort. It was nice knowing that someone would do that for a colleague.

P.S. - I understand the complexity involved here and so wanted to tell you that, this will stay between us, unless you tell anyone :-)

Warm Regards,
XXYYZZ

Well.. later i promised her that she need not tell everyone, i would do it and so here I'm telling it to everyone. It might be a tad too late than she expected but then Better late than never. :-)

Eventually, she left the team a week before her birthday and the last few words I exchanged with her were, I'm happy we celebrated your birthday in advance, you see - Better early than never :-)

9 comments:

Amit Patil said...

your narration sounds to be communocating with yourself but not the readers in first phase of blog

somewhat descriptive/ narrative in the middle..

nicely drawn in the end..

Amit Patil

Hemant said...

nice one

but as always descriptive tu nahi sudharega :)

story was really cool

AB said...

@amit - hi amit, i was trying to make a conscious effort for that self communication kind of writing. thank god someone noticed :)

@hemant - thanku sir... and thanks for ur patience despite of my descriptive style :)

Rana said...

good...kept the grip till last line of blog

Anonymous said...

Where is God!!!!plz save us.

SachinT said...

Man, if I would come across a situation that i can buy only 1 book out of chetan bhagat's next book or yours, i will be confused.
I loved it.
Soooo light and crispy.
As i said earlier also, u got a good style.
Keep writing!

~Sachin Thakare

AB said...

@rana - mandal apla abhari ahey :-)

@anonymous - they say, god helps those who help themselves.. so try helping urself - it might work..

@sachin - baapre!! shant gada-dhari bheem shat :-)
thanks for being so generous in ur praise :)

parikrama said...

I have been debugging too many codes and user issues lately (or like for past 10 years). The moment i read about the date mixup.. my dimaag ka batti went Tiiinnnnggg! Date format ka problem hogaa :)

AB said...

@parikrama - having been around for 10 years, you wud certainly know that a species exists by the name of BAD DEVELOPERS who keep doing the same mistakes over and over.. guess i represent that ever-lasting species :P
on a serious note - i guess excitement did me in, in this case. as they say - people believe what they want to believe.. must have been the case with me :D