A fictitious guest writer named bhOndOO has agreed to keep our site active with humorous articles during the end semester examinations. He claims to be a student researcher at IIT Madras. Find all the articles of the series here.
bhOndOO reads smails of the following two talks to be held by Microsoft Research in ICSR the next day: Search – The New Turing Test by a General Manager and Computing – 10 years in the future by a Principal Research Scientist. bhOndOO is a great admirer of Microsoft as he believes that it makes an end-user’s life easy. Hence, he is very eager to attend the talks.
However, bhOndOO has the memory of a Goldfish. He had once managed to forget about a quiz while chatting with one of his friends (mentioning gender would be redundant here). Thankfully, the professor decided to conduct one more quiz and take the best two scores out of those obtained in the three quizzes for the purposes of grading. And it really did not matter in the end.
He recalls a concept from Wireless Communication and Networks (CS6120) called Piggybacking and smiles. Piggybacking literally refers to carrying someone on one’s back or shoulders. He thinks of probable victims who would attend the talks starting at 15:00 the following day.
He thinks of Gullu, “Very probable, but he will make sure that he does not remind me.”
He thought of Shami, “But she may forget it herself!”
“Chandu hates Microsoft.”
“Barry… will be sleeping in the afternoon.”
“BenJi… sounds a good victim.”
bhOndOO talks to BenJi and BenJi agrees to remind him.
On the day of the talks, bhOndOO wakes up and the first thing he remembers is, of course, the talks. He quickly notes it on the back of a piece of paper and drops it inside his shirt pocket. While going for breakfast, he locks the door and notices that there is a reminder note (written on the back side of a page of bhOndOO’s rejected journal paper) on the door. He thinks of BenJi’s promptness, smiles and goes to the mess. 9 out of 14 students he meets there remind him of the talk. He is a bit surprised. He comes back to the room and checks the back of his shirt and trouser to check if anything had been stuck on his back. As a security measure, he changes both.
He gets ready and goes for his morning lecture. About half of the students in the class remind him of the talks as he enters. bhOndOO feels embarrassed, and keeps quiet. He is unable concentrate on the lecture. At the end of the lecture, the professor declares, “This is a reminder for all those who wish to go for the talk by Microsoft.” Though the declaration was meant for the whole class, bhOndOO is annoyed since the professor kept looking at him while declaring.
Even more embarrassed now, bhOndOO leaves the classroom and goes to the CS DCF. He opens his Gmail account and finds 127 new mails!
After reading 2 of his emails, bhOndOO, not knowing what is going on, leaves the department and goes straight to his room. He closes the door, lies down on the bed and starts thinking about the incidents since morning. He doesn’t remember when he slept off.
As he wakes up, he feels as if he had been sleeping for many days! He looks at the watch and sees the time to be 1:30. For a moment, he is unsure whether it is afternoon or night. “Did I miss the talk?” He sees sunlight outside the room-window and feels better.
He goes for lunch and quickly comes out of the mess. This time, almost half of the students in the mess remind him of the talks.
At 14:30, he starts for ICSR. On his way, he sees many students looking at him, some smiling at him, some girls giggling at him, while some saying, “All The Best!”
“What the hell is going on!”
He finally reaches ICSR and attends the boring talk cum advertisement of Microsoft products, comes back to his room and opens Gmail. He goes through all the 125 remaining and the 76 newer emails and deletes those. He then looks for any new messages on Facebook, and then for any new smail. He finds a mail from himself titled “Please help me!” — that he never wrote:
Hi all,
It has been a long standing dream of my father that I join Microsoft Research Labs. It is for this company that I came to Chennai from Kota. I have been working on a project that is nearing its completion and is very valuable to Microsoft. I tried to contact some people from Microsoft to show them a demo, but nobody replied.
Tomorrow, at 15:00, a General Manager and a Principal Research Scientist are coming to ICSR for their talks. I don’t want to lose this golden opportunity, especially for a simple reason that I may forget. I want to grab this opportunity to get in touch with them to show them a demo of the wonderful program that I have invented. This will help me make my father’s dream come true.
Therefore, if you care, please remind me of the talks tomorrow if you see me.
I look like this <hyperlink to my photo>.
Thanks a ton!
bhOndOO
Note: All the stories published in this series are works of fiction. bhOndOO and the other characters in the stories bear no reference to real individuals.
