Context Sensitivity

Before I get to 2010, let me quickly pen down, in chronological order, three of my very small stories from 2009 that taught me an interesting lesson. They show how important it is to watch what you speak and how heavily our language relies upon established context. Context Sensitivity is the reason we don't have too many computers that can talk back to us. If you, like me, have spent a year or more writing a compiler, you'd readily agree that human conversations are true evolutionary marvels! Of course, when we don't watch our mouths, even we, make mistakes....

************ Mangoes and Girls ************

Early 2009, I went in a inter-team outing to the mountain winery at Saratoga for wine tasting. It's amazing how perfectly acceptable it is, in modern professional culture, to drink (read binge) in front of your managers. I don't drink, so hopped in a conversation with a group of desi folks with a can of coke. The discussion went on for a while on Alphonso mangoes. How they are small, yet very tasty and how many people own their own orchards. I felt there was this one new guy who was getting distracted (read high). Now the group had many older folks who had children and the conversation drifted to teenage daughters and how hard it is to discipline young girls etc. Perhaps this guy just wanted to impress his managers or he was just plain drunk, but he had clearly lost context. At a pause he decided to break the silence... still with the context of Alphonso mangoes, he boldly went to give his take on teenage girls, "Ya... but I like to taste them when they are young and not very ripe"

************ Donuts ;) ************

Sometime mid 2009 was our product release date. Typically on such occasions the director of one of our teams, a fair healthy looking lady, would buy sweets and send out emails to invite people to her office (on the thirteenth floor). This release date however, it was a manager from a different team who decided to place donuts in her office (on a different floor) and send out the email. Now I am in a team which knows both managers. Soon after the email was sent, I was talking with the fair director lady (the one who did not know about the free donuts yet) in her office on the thirteenth floor. A happy guy walked into our conversation. The director lady paused and looked askance at him. In the most sweetest of voices and with utmost humility and gentleness, but to the wrong lady, he requested, "Ma'am, may I help myself to one of your donuts please?" !!

************ Mental Snowboarder ************

For Christmas 2009, I went with friends to the Kirkwood Ski resort at South Lake Tahoe. Having skied before I decided to learn snowboarding. People say skiing is easy to learn but hard to master and snowboarding is hard to learn but easy to master. They are right! What they might not tell you is that it is an impartial sport -- every part of your body hurts as you fall, roll over, crash, and it's not just your butt or knee, as you might imagine. For the first few hours, to me, the snowboard was like a magic carpet. Not having mastered turning yet, I would shout out verbal commands hoping it would make my "carpet" move in the right direction, "LEFT LEFT, ok RIGHT ok RIGHT". Fellow skiers and snowboarders would mostly just ignore me with nothing more than sympathetic glances at my deranged state.

But on one such run, one little expert-snowboarder kid kept staring down at me as I went on my mostly useless verbal command spree. I wished he would go away but he kept staring at me. I wanted to say "Shoo!" but before I could, he suddenly shouted, "You are coming loose". Thinking it was rather rude of him to make fun of my pitiable mental state, I found myself sarcastically snapping back, "YA, I KNOW, BIG THANKS!" It was only after my next fall, did I realize that the poor kid was merely pointing out that my back leg's snowboard strap had, indeed, come loose!

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(Lesson to self - Be context sensitive or risk being insensitive)

HAPPY NEW YEAR!