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Showing posts from August, 2010

Everything Else Is Rubble

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The administrative office in front of the main building. In this age of endless information, I sometimes pause and realize something strange. I am drowning in information, but starving for memories. Every day, my mind absorbs hundreds of headlines, messages, videos, opinions, and notifications. Most of them vanish without a trace. Yet when I stop for a moment, memories from forty years ago return with astonishing clarity. Today, for some reason, my thoughts wandered back to my school and its teachers. I remember my kindergarten teacher, Ms. Carol at Little Angels. She was Anglo-Indian, impeccably dressed, and absolutely determined that every letter I wrote should sit neatly within the four lines of my notebook. Not touching the ceiling. Not falling through the floor. Perfectly contained. I don't remember what I had for lunch three days ago. But I remember those four lines. My first-grade teacher, Ms. Alice at BP Indian Public School, was...

Please wait...

It's been quite a month.  My wife and I share a 1500 minute mobile family plan, and I can bet on almost anything in the world that a significant amount of that time has gone towards customer support.  It has been a month of inquiring with customer representatives, showing an abundance of patience, and putting on a brave front as though you have just been hurled aside in a battle.  I can say with a measure of absolute confidence that it is no easy task to listen to the same cacophony over and over again while you are kept on hold. The wait is almost endless, and worse, there is not even a flicker of light at the other end of the line.  The customer representative just compounds your agony further, and at the end of it, you are left wishing that the wait time music lasted a touch longer than the outrageous solutions received. Almost every other customer support call begins as though you are about to leave a voicemail message.  The drab monotone almost kills you....