in hindsight
this post was originally written way back in may. but i held it back for various reasons. not anymore. so, the person i’m talking about here can stuff it up their crotch, if they have any issues.
i have an issue with speaking hindi. i don’t. not because i can’t… but because i’m not good at it. but i have a bigger issue with people who’ve been speaking it all their lives, and then “forgetting” it as a result of meeting a phirang. and an even bigger issue with people who try to shove hindi down my throat (or pull it out of it?)…
yesterday, i came across both. almost simultaneously.
the first was this person who’s so rude and thick-skinned, it isn’t funny. and on top of that, extremely daft and in denial of the fact. probably grew up in jalandhar or some hick town, didn’t speak a word of english until reaching delhi, and dehaati at the core. but of course working with a bunch of phirangs changes all of that doesn’t it? get a fancy half-accent, learn some posh words, make some others up, and speak hindi like one of them. nam-ass-tay, i say.
and while trying to deal with that one, i get a call from my not-so-favourite company, airtel. well, he said he was from airtel… but was one of those collection agency cons. why don’t they just say they’re calling on behalf of airtel? too demeaning? anyway, this bugger goes on to whine that i should pay the money via him, instead of paying directly to airtel, and he was downright pissing off. i asked for someone who speaks english, and airtel being a big company and all that, someone in the company would speak english. but all i get is a “kaisa aadmi hai tu? hindi nahin aata?” excellent way to keep your customers happy, i think.
getting jobbed…
i’ve been tied down. finally. i have a job… a real one. and i guess this time it’s going to be for a while. i have finally given up my self-employed ways. i’m still with plus minus zero, just not as much as before.
i now work at cyberclay. you wouldn’t have heard of it before… it’s a start-up web 2.0 company, but it’s due for many great things ahead if things go as planned. and as for my role there, i can’t really define it. but it’s interesting… more about cyberclay and me in the months to come.
and now, a job posting: we’re hiring people who know web 2.0 technologies. any/all of the following: php, javascript, mysql, ajax… and things like that. most importantly, you must be smart. and must realize there’s more to life than working in a place where they give you a badge to wear to work. i still don’t see how that’s a job incentive. contact me for specifics.
worm steals spacebar off airtel keyboard
the guys at spamco are getting pretty high tech they now have robots working for them, checking to see if there’s any abnormal activity going on with my computer…
Dear Customer,
Our robot has detected an abnormal activity from your IP adress on sending e-mails. Probably it is connected with the last epidemic of a worm which does not have official patches at the moment.
We recommend you to install this patch to remove worm files and stop email sending, otherwise your account will be blocked.
Customer Support Center
there’s something oddly familiar about this… it reads like the emails i get from airtel, when i give them hell…
Wevaluetherelationshipbuiltwit
hyouandtrustthatoneodd,
unfortunateincidentwill not come in the way of this association. May we
reiteratethatweshareyouranguish and have taken adequate action to
ensure the non-occurrence of the same in future.[sic.]
that’s the cookie cutter apology off an actual email from my favourite phone company of all time.
for heaven’s sake, even the robots at the penis-enlargement mail order department are smarter than the retarded apes who work at india’s largest telephone company.
dissertation, my ass.
came across a paper titled “a universal pronoun in english?” by a student of linguistics at stanford.
and the pronoun? your ass.
to quote him: “We refer to these expressions collectively as your ass. Your ass is not simply a possessive
pronoun + NP (PossNP) construction since, primarily, it is semantically non-compositional…”
one of the examples he gives: “…my ass handed the old chick her ten fuckin’ bucks…” explained as “…the speaker presumably handed the ten dollars to the woman with his hands (not his buttocks).”
read the entire thing here. it’s a downloadable pdf.
and drop by the author’s page. andrew koontz-garboden now teaches linguistics at manchester.
the image was photoshopped… not
i came across this set of rules, while reading up on photoshop cs3. interesting ones, almost like a course in english to not get your ass sued 101.i have a few questions for the company, adobe® :
- can i say “this image was photochopped?” or “… photocropped?”
- if i’m in a conversation with a friend, can i drop the ® bit while talking? i promise to use it in my written correspondence with them.
- if not, how does one pronounce ®?
- how can i go about making it sound casual and unforced?
it’s difficult to sound cool while saying, “that nipslip of britney spears is totally fake. the image was enhanced with adobe® photoshop® software.” they really have to cut us some slack somewhere.
