Quatre-vingt-vingt

I have always been amazed by the amount of work my poor brain gets up to at night, and have always suspected that I dream in high definition with amazing graphics and Dolby stereo sound that could give major media and production houses a run for their money! Be it tsunamis, or crashing planes, sky surfing sky scrapers, or encounters with the good old souls of the dead, I could count on my dreams for some genuine blockbuster entertainment. Not quite sure if the plots conjured would be everyone’s cup of tea though, so I’d refrain from connecting probes from my brain to YouTube just yet.  It’s not just high quality entertainment though; sometimes it’s productive stuff as well. Years back, as a software developer staring for hours at a black and green screen going through thousands of lines of code, I remember coming home late at night with unresolved ‘abends’(IBM mainframe error message for abnormal termination of a software program) and then dreaming up potential solutions. Can’t say any of those revelations worked….but, well, one thing leads to another, right:-P? Anyway, just to be clear, I’ve never put on my CV – Skills include dreaming up solutions, though now on second thoughts maybe I should have ?! Would have probably got me more interview calls, at least for shock/weirdo value.

For quite some time there has been a lack of impressive broadcasting in my dreamland. It’s like someone had tuned my channel to the real world equivalent of daytime entertainment!  Boring. Always on, but boring…like back to back replays of some American comedy series complete with canned laughter <<hahhahaha>>. (I’ve always wondered what would happen if all canned laughter was banned by say a new world order. << hahhahhaha>>) 

A few nights back, though, it seemed as if my ‘dream channel’ was re-tuned, for a bit, maybe to the French equivalent of Cbeebies. Now, in real life, I’ve been learning French for about two years. And, even though I am supposed to be upper intermediate level ( oui bébé oui !), amongst many things that I find difficult about the language like ‘verbe conjugaison’, ‘les pronoms’….ummm….‘les adjectifs’, ‘les temps’, ‘pronominal’, ‘negation’, ‘prononciation’ etc etc….I also find counting after 69 a bit challenging :-D French being French, doesn’t have a word for 70 (seventy) or 80(eighty) or 90(ninety).I can’t understand why! I mean they have words for twenty, thirty, fourty, and fifty, and then they got lazy? So, the geniuses start doing this after 60s. For 70 is said as 60+10 ( soixante-dix), 80 is 4 x 20s ( quatre-vingts !), 90 is (4 x 20s) + 10 ( quatre-vingt-dix). I mean seriously! 

Would it have been so difficult to just make a septante, octante, and nonante !!!

Anyway, so at French class – in the real world - when the teacher asks us to ‘prenez votre livre Pg. 198’ (i.e, Page Cent quatre-vingt-dix-huit), which is  literally translated in English: ‘take your book, Page Hundred four twenty ten eight’, my brain processor ‘abends’. I do have a little workaround though which goes like this - Flip through the pages intensively, and while doing so track someone who has settled for one, take a snapshot of the pictures on the page they’ve stopped at, and then frantically locate it in my own book. A few times, now, the teacher has caught me in the midst of my struggle, and has had to show me the page number on her book to put me out of my misery, to which I never ‘merci’ her as it would be an acknowledgement to the whole class of my disability or let’s say limitation with the French numbers.  Now this little system of mine has worked quite well for me so far. And why fix what works, right?  I mean in real life, how many situations am I going to face where my life would depend on ‘prenez votre live pg. 198’ right ? Well, if my life did depend on it, then I wouldn’t make it. Sometimes you just have to accept your fate. I had made my peace with that….

Until that fateful night when my dream channel got switched to a french language class. In my dream, I was instructed to ‘prenez votre livre Page Quatre-vingt-vingt’. Even in my dream, I knew the drill. So, I looked around to see what page others had stopped at, but to my utter horror and despair the pages in their books were a blur. It’s a dream, so shit like that happens. I knew that too. I found myself in unchartered territory and in a state of panic I decided I had to deconstruct the Quatre-vingt-vingt for myself. This was it. It was going to be now or never.

I said the words out aloud. Part one- Quatre-vingt  which I translated to English  - Four Twenty and then did a mental multiplication 4 x 20 = 80. Voila ! We got an eighty. Now, what was the next part? -Vingt. Cool, so plus 20 to 80…..What ???  n’existe pas ! That’s 100 – for which the French do have a word, thankfully. I wanted to protest, but was released from my dream. Hate it when that happens! I realised I'd been tricked … in my dreams.... bloody clever…but so not cool! On the brighter side, I've finally got a grip over French numbers beyond 69....and I worked that out in my dreams...in a matter of seconds....well it was seconds in dream time, who knows if it took me all night in real time with me muttering away quatre vingt vingt quatre vingt vingt..... 

In any case, I am hoping I don’t need a refresher course anytime soon.

Change and I

Of recently, I have been wondering how I have been doing in the face of change. I've always thought that I am a person who gets bored with the status quo. I once told someone that if I did not move I’d become a vegetable. Quite harsh.  But such was my determination to make a change at that point in time. Time and again I've found that thought reminisce.  Sometimes, I know what needs to be done.  Most of the times I'm clueless – searching for outlets and answers.

On the surface of it, it’s all good – the me adapting to change thing. But then, I wonder am I really good at change?

Sure, I pull out all stops to make the changes that I want. When they work – its bliss, when they bomb – well there’s heartache but again there is some condolence in the fact that I tried, and then I try again. The cycle is something that many would identify with. For me, to begin with -the little seed of an idea that gets implanted in my head at some point of time. A phase when that idea grows slowly but surely until it becomes loud and clear and impossible to ignore. Then there is the phase to act upon. Quoting one of my favourite authors ‘when thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy’. This for me entails planning and analysing. Weighing the pros and cons. Factoring in everything I could think about. Applying to multiple scenarios I could possibly conjure. And then there is the final decision – which sometimes defies sane analysis and hedges on that four lettered word – hope. Such self-invoked change journeys for me have so far and mostly proven to be ‘right’ and worth the pain and upheaval. But then again, I question myself – have there been far too little or have they been big enough to make any significant change? Am I guilty of designing these changes and further controlling them to be close enough to my comfort zone? To be brutally honest- well maybe yes.

Then there is the whole other category of change. Stuff that gets thrown at me. Things that I have no control of – the impact of changes made by others that upsets a status quo that I didn't want upsetting, or even worse goes further and damages my  own meticulous plans. These are the suckers. Unwanted guests who insist on staying. Over time, I've realised that these are the real tests of how good a person is in handling change. I usually go through the whole cycle of resisting, ignoring, denying, and then finally accepting it (albeit reluctantly) and moving on.  Even if it’s in my head, all this has to happen. It’s almost as if I am testing each scenario applied to the change for what works best for me.  But what I often forget is that even these unwanted changes present possibilities and open up avenues that I would normally not have thought about. Almost impossible to recognise when you’re in the heart of turmoil, but the sooner you make peace with the situation, the more chances to spot these opportunities. And then, in time, plant the seeds of these new  ideas into your own head, nurture them and then eventually turn an external disruption into a change you own and want to realise.

Change is the only constant in life, they say. External disruptions and self-initiated changes form a cycle if you think about it. I would think that those who accept changes wholly - thrive. Those who don’t -get stuck. And (note to myself) is it really worth it-getting stuck?

The scent of a place

Last summer when I took it upon me to find my new place to live, I searched far and wide. I did not know what I wanted, but I knew for sure that it would feel right if it was right. After trawling through hundreds of advertisements, seeing close to a dozen, one hot Sunday afternoon I finally walked into what felt and maybe even ....smelt right.

I still remember reaching there, and the door was half open. I pushed it a bit more to have a quick peek, the first thing that hit me was ...well that smell. Ah! it wasn't good, it wasn't bad. But it was there. Even while I was being shown around, I couldn't resist thinking about what was that smell that I just couldn't place. Well, within half an hour, I had paid the deposit and had the keys in my hand. Two weeks later when I moved in with my bags and boxes, the keys would not turn. The van driver asked me if I was at the right house. And then, the lock turned, I flung the door open, and whiiiiiiif...there it was. Of course I was in the right place, I could have been blind-folded and I would still know I was there!

As I settled in, along with other stuff, I bought a little army of cleaning agents and air fresheners. That would do it, I thought! Over the next few days, I left the windows and even the doors open, vaccumed every nook and corner, and even washed all the upholstery (which was a big pain). Surely, it could not be that difficult to get rid of a little odour? But it persisted. It couldn't be neutralised, it couldn't be overpowered, not even with my strongest perfume. Every evening, as I entered the house, it was there. Subtle, not strong, not unpleasant, but surely present. What bothered me was I couldn't understand what it was, and even more that no one really noticed it but me.

Well, as time passed, I found myself making peace with the scent of the house. Okay, so it (the house) was here before me and it had some right to maybe have a bit of its own odour personality. So, I stopped trying. I retired the cleaners and fresheners and just let it be. And then the realisation – well maybe I had started liking it. Maybe I had always liked it, just did not recognise it, and waged war on it unnecessarily! Well, maybe it was the reason I actually agreed to place my deposit on a place in 30 minutes? (Okay, now that would be pushing it a bit too far...J) But, I found myself looking forward to it. Now, it was something I knew. It was like the new normal, just part of everything else in this world, just where it should be – in my living room.

As months passed, and summer gave into autumn and then winter, I had stopped noticing. I don’t quite remember when was the last time I’d entered the house and had been hit by that waft. It isn't there. Gone, just like that, without me having to do anything. And now, I sort of miss it. I could still never place it, but if I tried really hard, then.... it was like a concoction of an old library and a dark damp chapel with wooden pews, with a hint of old stowed away books, heap of dried leaves, a bit of incense maybe, and then that something that of course I could only recognise but never describe. (As a friend once suggested – no- it was not fungus, definitely not a dead body:-P) Well, whatever it was, it’s gone, and I’ll never know how to get it back.

It did for some time, at least, feel like the scent of home.

Why “hardworking” is hardly a compliment to me.

Almost a decade back I joined the workforce. Until then, I was conditioned with advise such as “study hard, work hard”. It all felt right, so much that any good that came without struggle and burning the midnight oil seemed unworthy. I took these convictions with me to the workplace, and starting off in the software industry gave ample opportunity to slog hard. You were a good employee only if you came in first and left last. Even when it was really busy, you never said no, no matter how loaded you were anyways. I was starting off and had to prove a point, more to myself than to others, that I am hardworking.

I lived in my hardworking world for sometime, until I worked on a project that changed my perspective on hard work for ever. I was leading a team to deliver a software work-package. We had a decent team, a very supportive manager, and were all set to make a delivery on time, and that’s when the bugs showed up. Design flaws actually that could jeopardise the entire delivery. We were stretched for time, and so we started patching without looking at the whole picture. While we patched up one side, the other fell apart. Soon we knew that we couldn't deliver on time, but the pressure to meet the delivery deadline was huge. More than anything there was a reputation to keep up. So we kept patching all weekend, till we had a mummy for a code delivery.  When we finally left the office, there was a feeling of accomplishment. We met the delivery deadline. In your face – onwards testing team, we did it against all odds.

A few weeks later when I sat with management for the project review, I was expecting bouquets. What else ! There may have been a few good words, but what struck me hard, was when I was told that I and the team should have taken time to work out a systematic controlled approach to solve the problem instead of randomly patching and hoping it worked. I was then told something that would change my perspective on hard work for ever. I was told, work smart and then maybe you wont be spending weekends in the office. Of course that made no sense at that that point of time. Well, you don’t strategise when you are drowning....do you ? You kick and shout and scream. That’s what we did, and I still wanted my bouquet. What can I say – I liked bouquets – who doesn't !

I no longer work in software development, but it stayed with me, however, the work smart thing. When I finally started to see some sense in it, the never ending challenge was – how ? And what is working smart anyway ? Over the years, I have tried different approaches hoping to get close to one that might be smart. In doing that, I’ve realised that it’s actually easier to keep going without stopping, reviewing, and tuning plans, sometimes even scrapping them. Here are a few pointers  I use which I find beneficial. Of course, there is no recipe, and you do have to use your own judgement based on context.

• Planning ahead – for things that could go wrong. Having buffers in any plan is crucial. It doesn't need to be advertised as a buffer, but it needs to be there. 

• Frequent checkpoints – it’s easy to get carried away with the flow of things, but I have been surprised at how checkpoints bring back perspective.

• Delegating – I don’t have to do everything, even if I am in control. Agree on who is doing what and then let them do it.

• Being realistic with deadlines – This is a dangerous one to play with, but depending on circumstances, it could be better to shift a deadline. After all delivering something dead to meet a deadline is no good to anyone.

• Saying no – Not necessarily ‘No’, maybe ‘Not now’ or in other words- prioritisation. 

It’s quite funny that trying to work smart may after all seem to be harder than just working hard. 

For me, trying to work smart hasn't eradicated long working hours altogether, they are still needed when they are needed ! But it definitely improves the chances of getting things at hand done, correctly, and with lesser fumbles and tumbles.

And for the compliment “hardworking” - well, whenever I get one, it gets me wondering – what have I done now – or rather not done !!!