The first one is the usage of the term ‘Geography‘ as a noun to refer to a particular region of the world. I’d remained blissfully untouched by this apparent misuse of the word until the completion of engineering college. Until then, geography was what I fervently believe it should always be – describing and writing about the earth.

Now, it is being used to refer to continents / countries on earth, such as the ‘Asia-Pac Geography’ and the ‘Europe Geography’ and so on. Whatever happened to using plain and simple ‘regions’ instead of saying ‘geography’?

The next thing that had me in splits the first time I heard it was the usage of the term ‘based out of‘. During campus recruit assimilation in 2004 at the only company I’ve been employed at so far, some big cheese spoke about how he was ‘based out of’ many locations during his career and ‘worked out of’ many important sounding places.

The little Hari inside my head was conjuring up images of how a person would be able to work, logically, in every place except the one he mentioned, if one were to take him literally. So, if someone were to tell you that he/she worked out of Bangalore, you’d assume that he/she would work every other place EXCEPT in Bangalore, but you’ll unfortunately realize that this is not the case.

Somehow the regular usage of ‘I am working at’ such and such office in this city has been discarded in favour of a seemingly complicated utterance.

Mercifully, these are two instances where TechSpeak is used blatantly, but doesn’t defy grammatical boundaries beyond a certain measure.

And to think of how I am accused of being sesquipedalian, when I just use big words instead of small without trying to alter the fundamental meaning of the sentences.

In turn, on receiving that link and having seen it, I was labelled a woman for forwarding links that contained pictures of cats, and this has subsequently cemented my reputation in various other aspects including that of being a chick-flick God and so on. The point of the extreme absurdity and the horrendous language that those pictures contained that made one laugh at it was totally missed by those otherwise observant people.

Now that we’ve eliminated the irrelevant back-history out of the way, I wanted to speak about LOL code and the potential impact it could have on our tech industry.

Most IT firms in our country keep a close watch on the development of technology all over the world, in order to have a jump start on their competitors when the technology hits the market newly. Building expertise in the same is financially viable for said companies in order to bid for projects involving these nascent technologies, and to establish themselves as leaders in this area.

I believe that companies that face the prospect of laying off employees who were previously employed in capital markets projects should instead focus their attention towards having them learn and prefect working in LOL code. LOL code is the way to go for the future, and here is why:

• It is new ‘technology’, and everyone likes new stuff.
• Most techies are already experts in Tech Speak. LOL speak and consequently, LOL code employs the same deviation from the normal standards of coding as do Tech Speak and LOL speak from the conventional ways of english grammar and syntax. Learning curve will not be very steep. Basically, techies will take to LOL Speak and LOL Code like fish to water.
• Companies have an excuse to retain employees it might have previously fired, and thus seem more humane in their dealings, while actually making them work towards the time when the next big wave will hit the tech industry.
• Being in its incubating phase, the potential for developers to make modifications to LOL code and customize it to make it compile and run on virtually all platforms is immense.
• It is amazingly funny, and all those who appreciate its attempt at humour would have a good time coding, thereby improving developer morale.
• How can you NOT code in a language that says – ‘CAN HAS STDIO?’ for file inclusion, ‘KTHXBYE’ to indicate return and ‘AWSUM THX’ to indicate that a condition check returns true? 

If someone who is in a position to implement this absolutely genius level idea chances upon this post, please do take it up on yourself to bring about the attack of the gramatically incorrect developers. Who knows, with the kind of expertise we already possess, the world might be our playground!

KTHXBYE.

I confess to cheaply conforming to LOL speak in my post ‘Hai World’. Additionally, some of the tech offices of the more chilled-out kind in the US use this lingo in official communication or while checking in code into the version control repository. LOL Dogs and LOL Code are further spin-offs of this phenomenon.

I would encourage all those willing, able and enthusiastic enough to use LOL speak in their lingo, so long as they don’t mess with regular english spelling and only tamper with the grammatical aspects of the language.

Moving on, Tech Speak is a relatively lesser known malaise plaguing the Indian IT industry. Instances of Tech Speak have effects on virtually every IT office within the country, but incidents of its break out have been brushed under the carpet and despite awareness of its presence, no remedial actions have been taken to stem its growth or to quell it once and for all.

Examples of Tech Speak are too many to be exhaustively listed here, but some of the gems that one can come up with are as follows:

‘I can’t able to access the central server.‘
‘He is bad at communication. He can’t able to speak properly.‘ (Reason stated for turning down a person’s candidature during an interview.)
Our country national anthem are voted by UNESCO as best. I am having proud tears of joy.

Tech speak is prevailent in all IT offices, and is something that can be remedied among the nicer guys who ail from it by correcting them nicely and guiding them appropriately. The sad part of this is that there are enough bozos and clowns around who think no end of themselves and their ‘communication skills’, who are hit by this in an even worse fashion, and are therefore past the point of salvaging.

I am highly certain that ‘fraandship‘, popularized by Orkut, is also something that originated from Tech Speak.

The first step towards addressing this is to become self-aware of its presence and acknowledging it. One way is to embrace Tech Speak much like LOL Speak has been adopted. Now, if you feel that LOL Speak is cool and Tech Speak isn’t, you’re a prudish one-dimensional wannabe. When we make Tech Speak cool enough, more people will notice it, and those that are not lazy enough will try to remedy it.

Additional measures to keep Tech Speak in check can be put into place. I had come up with this idea of creating a simple software, appropriately named ‘Tech Speak, given to firangs who work with us Indians, for them to understand the nuances of our language.

This software will act similar to Babelfish and have two fields:

• What the techie says:
• What the techie means :

Filling up the first one and pressing enter will give out the corresponding string in coherent English, thereby eliminating all possible communcation gaps.

Lastly, I recently overheard someone singing a Kylie Minogue song in Tech Speak:
‘I just can’t able to get you out of my head….’

What can I say, Tech Speak rocks!

This is happening as I type. Our workplace, which is a set of cubicles on our floor with each cubicle having a telephone extension, is under seige. Literally!

Each and every telephone in my vicinity has started ringing in synchronicity at the same time, since most of them have consecutive numbers, and this time, it is not the usual suspects in the form of credit card / personal loan salespersons who are causing megadeath (sic) level pains.

Everytime one chooses to pick up a phone, an automated message is being played with some subscription offer for something that I haven’t had the patience to listen to. What I can say with absolute certainty is that this telephone ringing menace is getting on my nerves much more than I thought it would.

If I find out who was responsible for having come up with the first automatic telephone call and consequently appearing automatic telephone message, I would, if said person is not already dead, wring his neck with my bare hands and make him pay for all my phone bills until such time that I croak.

As I have been typing this post, all the phones seem to have fallen silent. However, it is not without a sense of foreboding that I am awaiting the next wave of the attack of the killer telephones.

I wish the phones, if rung simultaneously, could simulate different sounds of music so that it would atleast seem like some instruments were being played. Of course, to keep everyone at the office happy, it would have to be muzak, the likes of which even the most rabid music hater would be able to withstand.

Once again, death to those telephone terrorists.

But then, as I sat and thought about it, I figured out that this post should be more about the things that I have had to experience when NOT at home, that have significantly prompted and further reinforced my decision to live alone, rather than with company.

As a standard disclaimer, this post doesn’t intend to offend my former flatmates, because they’ve been, for most part, the most awesome company that a guy could ask for. Nor does it indicate that I have adopted permanent Bhramacharya (by choice, although it might have to be adopted by compulsion if circumstances in the future deem so!).

My office cubicle location has never been constant for more than four months at a time. I have changed places seven times already, while having worked here in this particular office for twenty eight months or so, and I have always felt this sense of having been uprooted from the place I made myself most comfortable at.

Thankfully the floor on which I have worked hasn’t changed at all, and some cold comfort lies therein.

It is in my current situation where I am sitting and typing away on notepad in front of my system as two or three people behind me are vehemently arguing about the merits and demerits of some ‘cross-complier tool used for a particular UI framework’ like one would argue vehemently about whether Shiites or Sunnis are the ones who have the correct ideological bent, so far as choosing the Prophet’s successor is concerned.

The loud noise of conversations, combined with the somewhat horrible ‘scent’ or ‘perfume’ that some inmates in my office wear, is enough to drive one nuts. I have discovered at an early age that I am allergic to most perfumes, and in this regard, I must thank God that I am a guy, because I have heard that women have a heightened sense of smell and this fact has been scientifically proven.

Now, noise, weird odours and generally intolerable quirks of people makes me want to run away from all the madness, and a general dislike for prolonged exposure towards all but a small set of people just reinforces that further.

Office space and the air-conditioned comfort that it provides is something that most of us seem to take for granted. It is a blessing in summer, especially. However, in winters, it is not really necessary and the fact that it is a closed environment for both odour and sound just makes things worse.

The only solution for such issues reeks ominously of the suggestions put up ‘for the greater good’. Otherwise, it only seems pertinent to ignore or blank out such occurrences and live and let live.

As a post script, the guy in the cube next to me is playing some soft santoor and sarangi music, which is quite welcome, actually!

Dammit, woe is me.

The realms of anti-social behaviour entitle me to come up with snappy answers to polite bullshit conversation, and make sure that those who try and make random chit-chat are kept at bay.

I don’t want to answer people with stuff like – ‘hey, how are you?‘ or ‘did you have your lunch?‘ or something as random, until and unless the person was a real nice guy (or superhot girl) or it was someone who was a good friend of mine, though the latter would know better than to come up with random conversational fillers.

Imagine my indignation when I am just about to stand in the loo to take a leak, and some guy comes and says, ‘Hey, how’s it going?‘.

I decided to make sure he’d never ask me, or possibly someone else this question later on, and said, ‘I just started peeing, its not yet going!‘ and subsequently, chose to give him running commentary with stuff like ‘Now there is even flow, must be all the bottles of water I drank till now‘ and lastly saying, ‘Its not going anymore, I think it stopped!‘.

Betcha our man is not going to ask me again.