Betrayed by machines?

… it wasn’t the most fun but part of it was hilarious, I’m not gonna lie.

So, I go to visit a friend one afternoon who lives on the 9th floor of a ten storey building.. I ain't the laziest bug on the planet but there aren't too many reasons to convince me to take the stairs for that height, particularly when a lift is available.

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It's an old building and the lift isn’t the most reliable one by its looks. Now, it might sound a little unnecessary to mention that the building has no basement or underground parking or anything, but you'll see. I enter the lift at the ground floor and so does a Chinese guy who by the way is also a visitor there, just like me,, and hes going to the same floor as me. Coincidence. Anyway, the door shuts and the lift starts to go down. wait a sec.. there is no down!!! Ironic isn't it. Well, it takes us like a foot and a half down and then stops. So we are stuck in the lift which I must say is not sufficiently ventilated.

Perplexed, we look at each other, and then look around for some alarm button or something for use in emergency. By the by, was it an emergency,, the lift taking us downstairs when there is no downstairs? Anyhow, I come across a 24-hour help line for emergency cases which I immediately dial.

"Hello" they lady at the other end says in a hard-to-understand Chinese accent.

"uh..Hi, is this the XYZ lift company" I say.

"Yes"

"Oh, ok, I am stuck in a lift operated by your company"

"Whats the address"

I dictate the address to her.

"What building is it?" she asks.

"uh, what?"

"What building is it? which company"

"umm, I don't know, its ,, a student hostel", I try to explain.

"A student's hospital?"

"oh no! no!, a student HOSTEL!!!"

"Are you a student there?"

I am getting angry and impatient, "No I am not a student here".

"Then what are you doing there?"

Now I know what you're thinking,, I was thinking the same 'WTH does it matter?'

'I am just a visitor here' I manage to say relatively calmly.

'Ahh!, you're a visitor., ok, what's the address?' she says.

and I repeat the address knowing the its going to be a long time before I get out of there. She gives me 20-30 minutes timeline which I admit I didn't trust a single bit. And thats why I ring the friend I am visiting, and apparently he's pretty relaxed about my situation. Its not a big deal for the guys living there I guess. He fetches one of the building staff and I am out in like 5 minutes.

Moral of the story machines often betray us, but then again, so do humans.

P.S. I have been living in the same building for about 10 months now and have used the same lift hundreds of times perhaps and not once has it imprisoned me since.

One more mistake and.. off you go to a German concentration camp

I've learnt the longer the post the less the chances of people reading it through,, so I'll just make em short onwards.

Today @work, German ambassador was visiting our institute, me and my colleague were supposed to present demonstrations of our recent work (the awesome work that we do :P). My boss delivers the news of the visit to me and my colleague a couple of hours before the visit. The last time we had presented our work to a visitor, my colleague's demonstration had crashed in the middle of the visit and my boss was obvisouly angry,,.,very angry. So today he turns to him and says "If anything goes wrong today,.,I,,, I will,, I will send you to a German concentration camp!"...the rare ocassion when it was obvious that he was joking.

A few minutes before 'Her Highness' the ambassador was about to enter our office, my boss says "We are coming in, Standby!",, as if we are in a battlefield. He sure lives upto being the son of a military man, doesn't he?

Need directions?

Came across this some time ago..(Sorry for the bad quality though)

↓ the memory lane...

Yesterday, while I skimmed through some dusty old pages of my memory, I came across an incident which I thought was worth sharing (well, just because it was freaky). Its a long one, but trust me, you would like it. Here it goes...

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I spent the first two years of my undergrad in a university hostel after which I moved to Rawalpindi from where I used to take the university bus to get to the university and back home everyday. Some of the fellows who took the same bus later became very good friends of mine. I remember we used to take the bus back home a couple of hours after noon and by the time we reached Rawalpindi it would still be quite hot in summer. One of those summer days the weather was somewhat pleasant and before we could enter Saddar, our bus was hit by a van from behind. Luckily, no one was injured. Since it was a government owned transport and there were supposedly some standard operating procedures in place that needed to be followed before the bus could move on with the rest of its journey. Most of the people rightly guessed that it would be a while before the bus could move. Me and my friends got off the bus to take public transport to our homes but with the weather relatively pleasant we decided to walk for a while. Instead of walking along the the main road, we agreed on taking the less polluted roads through a residential area which was probably  a shortcut for all of us back home. This was somewhere near the Rawalpindi polo club, if my memory has not gone blurry, and there lived some quite rich people. Often one could see the name plates at the houses stating ranks of retired military personal and their children with prefixes of Dr. and Engr.

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As we walked and talked and giggled at jokes that now sound naive and somewhat stupid, the cloud cover that was making the weather mild and pleasant disappeared and we started feeling the heat of the sun. Naturally cursing our decision to walk and jokingly blaming each other we diverted our course and starting walking towards the main road. All of a sudden an old man wearing an extraordinarily white Shalwar Kameez  emerged from the wide brown gate of a bungalow we were passing by. One could not see a single gray or black hair on his head and he was not bald either. A few wrinkles on his forehead and at the edges of his eyes coupled with his eyebrows pointing upwards at the outer ends made him look somewhat scary. He was clean shaved and the heavy circles beneath his eyes represented his old age. His eyes had some sort of anger which meant something along the lines of we having been caught red-handed committing some heinous crime. Finding such a scary-looking angry old man in such hot weather on a summer afternoon was quite unlikely. Well, us walking there and then, was also more than improbable. But it was anything but weirder than the old man walking straight up to us and saying what he said. With a strange grin on his face he spelled two words, "h-e-a-l-t-h-y and w-e-a-l-t-h-y". Without pausing he went on to say "what are these words". It was not a question he asked because he wanted to know, it was clear that he knew very well what they meant and was testing us for something and he seemed pretty damn sure we were going to fail whatever the test was for. Baffled by his appearance, his walking up to us, his facial expression, the anger in it and his mode of addressing us with no intro to the context or the conversation, none of us could say a word for a few seconds. With his patience shrinking, his expression turned sterner and he rephrased the question. However, it still did not answer the question we were asking each other without saying it 'what is the point?'. A few moments passed and my stubborn expression implying 'Say anything, who cares' pushed one of my friends to say the two words with a pronunciation of -th- as in they or mother and tell him what it meant. The crazy old person looked relieved as if we had been proven guilty. He then corrected us by explaining us that it was pronounced  with  a -th- as in therapy or throw and how most of the people get it wrong. He went on with his speech for a few minutes. With nobody around in the heat of the summer day and the awkward situation, it felt creepy and we all agreed by conversing through our eyes that it was time to leave. Just as abruptly as the conversation had started we concluded it keeping the level of politeness as high as possible. After all he was an old man and deserved respect no matter how crazy he seemed. We thanked him for correcting our mistake, promised we would pronounce it correctly from then on and said goodbye.

For the next hundred meters or so none of us said a word or looked back and we all knew why not. After we were clear enough from the place we looked back and the old man was not there, he had probably gone back into the house. We all burst into laughter and tried to keep it down and the comments about the incident continued till we all reached our homes.

Maybe the old man was crazy, maybe insane, maybe he had read too much, or maybe he was just too old. It could well be a million other things, and I wouldn't know which it was. But I do wonder if the those friends of mine actually remember the incident or not. Maybe I should ask them the next time we talk. Maybe I will. I definitely will.

Do I know you from somewhere?

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Finally, I get time to come down here and post a recent incident. Its the night before Eid day, 'chand raat' as it is called in some parts of the world. I get a phone call from a fellow country man whom I didn't really know by name but had met a few times. As I answer the phone he explains to me who he is and I have a feeling that I have identified that person in my head but am not really sure. Still I assure him that I recognize him and will wait for him outside the building while going for the Eid prayer the next morning, as this is what he was calling for. I feel bad about it, that some guy who knows me calls me and I can't even identify him. The next morning as I am about to leave my apartment, my phone rings and its him again. I answer as if we are pretty good friends and I tell him that I will be down in 5 minutes. I come downstairs accompanied by three other friends who share the apartment with me and we shake hands with this guy. I ask him shall we leave and guess what does he say? He says that he's waiting for Shahzad bhai who is coming down in 5 minutes. I look at the sky and burst into laughter. I tell him that its me, I am Shahzad bhai. He smiles as the awkward moment passes.

what my boss thought of me

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About over a year ago I lost interest in shaving my beard regularly and so I grew  long beard. I had it until about 4-5 months ago. I experienced different kinds of comments at it, some hilarious, some offensive, some judgemental and some simply sweet and adorable. However, today for the first time I got a glimpse of my boss's views about it. While taking a photograph, for a paper or something, of testing in the lab some algorithm that we had developed he commented: "...at least now you don't have the rather intimidating thing that made you look like son of Osama Bin Laden...". I didn't know how to take it :P was it supposed to be funny or offensive or just ignorable?

A thing of beauty is a joy forever. How about a smiling face?

Have you ever seen a person hundreds of time and never seen him/her NOT smile? Well, I have and trust me its a treat to see that person every time you see him/her.

A few days back things were crazy at work, real crazy. I was working late to get some things done as my boss was kind of getting on my nerves with them. By the way why are most bosses such a pain in the a**? Anyhow, I managed to finish the job just after midnight. Then I realized I still had a chance to catch the last bus back home. I rushed to the bus stop and in a couple of minutes there it was. The last bus and the ever smiling face. The bus driver. After such a hectic day at work and skipping dinner and too little sleep for the past few days I was both mentally and physically exhausted. All I could think of way what to eat before I jump into bed that I loved much at that instant. As soon as I saw the lady driver's smiling face I was so refreshed that its hard to explain. The entire ride back home, I kept smiling coz I felt good. While getting off the bus, I waved goodbye to the lady unintentionally, maybe in acknowledgement and she waved back maybe in appreciating the acknowledgement.

The next day I had to leave work a little early, and as I waited at the bus stop I was preoccupied with a number of things I had to do. The bus arrived and guess what, it was the same bus and the driver as last night, and more importantly the same smile as always. I smiled back and she uttered two words 'early today?'. Its remarkable how she could remember so many different people on a job where all she sees is people. I really appreciate her smiling. She is a really nice aunty. God bless her.

Non-voilence

I could not help but relate almost all that this guy said to about Mexico to whats with my country Pakistan, right now. And I am specially sharing it for a friend of mine whos learning Spanish. (I hope he understands it rather than reading subtitles like me).

Being (in)considerate

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After the first year and a half of my undergrad I moved out of students hostel and used to come to the university by the university operated bus service. Unfortunately (or fortunately), my bus stop was the one where the bus picked up first in the morning and dropped last on our way back. Four of my friends used to take the same bus as me. From playing cards, to making fun of everybody, to debating world peace related issues, to discussing business proposals (which now seem particularly naive), we've done a lot of things. One of those days when more than one of us was in a philosophical or trying-to-understand-all-that-is-in-life mood, one of them asked me what the 'most bad' (I intentionally avoided the use of worst) thing in the world was. From the tone of the question I was sure he had a better answer than anything I could think of for an instant reply. Atleast his confidence said to me 'Come on man just say anything and I'll tell you what I have come up with'. So I just replied with 'an unpious or a bad woman'. He then gave me the answer he was getting so impatient to say. His answer I believe is much better, it rather is the best answer possible. He said the 'most bad' thing in the world is "shirk" i.e. the deification or worship of anyone or anything other than Allah.

I don't know if everything can be classified on a scale of being bad as to which is worse and which is lesser of a sin but I felt that one thing among the next-most-bad things is being selfish. I thought about it again and again at various points in time and realized that there is no scale to quantify an act as selfish or not either. What you might consider as an act of selflessness may appear to me as my right and your obligation. I had to modify my opinion about this too. So I finally reached a conclusion that there is nothing as worse in the world as an inconsiderate person (after of course the answer put up by my friend mentioned above). Being inconsiderate, though, is also a shaky definition however I am certain that it is a direct result of selfishness. If everybody is considerate, we perhaps can do even without tolerance. I am not sure if I have been able to express what I wanted to as well as I would have liked to but it was worth a try. The message to be explicit is "Be Considerate".