A dumb experience with a 'Smart Card'

Recently I was travelling from my native back to Chennai when I happened to meet my onsite coordinator from my previous project who was going back to Chennai in the same train as mine. I had not seen him in person before (Oh well he was in the US busy outsourcing work to us) but I recognized him from a team pic I’d seen sometime back.

Talking about onsite coordinators in the IT field, they’re these special people at work whom we would’ve never seen but interestingly spend hours talking to- about some client requirement of course. But yes, a software engineer on an average spends a minimum of 5-6 hours a week talking to his/her onsite coordinator. It is sometimes interesting to think that you can actually argue, fight and make up with someone you have never ever seen. Yeah, interesting role these onsite coordinators play in our lives! :p

Now, coming to my story, I met my onsite coordinator SK at the station, talked for five minutes there, boarded the train and reached our destination and got off at the Chennai Central station on a Monday morning. We did not see each other while getting off the train (we happened to travel in different compartments) and I just made my way to the local metro station right across the road to catch my train to work. The Chennai metro let me tell you is incredibly efficient and you got trains coming in every 10-15 minutes to take you anywhere in Chennai. But I must say the ticket queues can be pretty frustrating at times. There have been times when I’ve had to strain real hard to find out where the queue ends (Ya ok. Go ahead and blame my height for that! But it is indeed a tedious task to get the ticket!)

To provide some relief to the people waiting in long queues, they introduced train ticket vending machines in important stations and my station had two of them. You get these magnetic cards called ‘Smart Cards’ which you can recharge and use to vend tickets from it. Generally, there won’t be huge queues in front of these vending machines. So I decided to vend my ticket from the machine as I sneered past all those people who did not have ‘smart’ cards and were waiting in the long queue for their tickets. As I walked towards the machine, I found SK there waiting in the queue. Out of courtesy I waved my smart card at him and said I’ll help him get his ticket too. He happily got off the queue and we walked up to the vending machine. I noticed one of those machines was not working. Giving SK a confident smile, I used my card in its twin and the worst happened! It gave me a message in red saying ‘Sorry this machine is out of order’.

To me, it read ‘You really look like a jackass now!’ I gave SK a sheepish smile. He seemed a bit annoyed at me. He had almost reached the ticket counter when I deterred him from his mission and steered him into attaining absolutely nothing! Oh yes I would be surprised he wasn’t pissed at me for that!

Yet again, I suggested to him that we go and join the queue which had by then increased kilometers-fold. I guess he wasn’t open to any more of my suggestions. He said he was gonna take a bus back home, trying to hide all his irritation. I picked up my backpack and sadly walked to the end of the queue trying my best not to look at a single person whom I had sneered at before.

Things never work when you really really want them to. I have experienced this kind of a thing many a times before and this incident was just a repetition.

Smart cards they call it!

Ha! I don’t think so.

Or why blame the card. They should make smarter machines to use them I guess!!!!

GO GO GO!!!!!!!!!

I often like to think of myself as a “superhero” woman, kinda like a Charlies angel or a powerpuff girl- fighting crime and arresting the bad guys and all that. I got an opportunity to be one recently but damn! I wasn’t that great at it.

I was coming back from work one day. I drive my bike from home to the bus stop as it’s about a km away. I was riding back home on my bike when I was stopped by a girl, probably my age. She jumped right in front of my scooter and obviously I had to stop. She seemed completely hysterical and was talking over the phone in telugu which I obviously dint understand a word of. I wondered what her problem was and why she stopped my bike. Well, I dint have to think for long about that cos the next thing she did was jump onto my scooter as pillion without even bothering to ask and asked me to drive!

Well, now I started getting a bit worried especially cos suddenly the news of the abolition of sec 377 of our penal code in the papers jus flashed in front of my eyes again! What the hell did she want???? For a moment I thought that all my worst fears about the new act were coming true.

Again, I dint get much time to think about what was going on. She said “GO GO GO.. A guy snatched my bag and he went that way!!”. Phew! Honestly I was happy to hear that...hear that it was only that. Still in a trance I drove in the direction she pointed at to “chase the guy who snatched her bag” (What was I thinking!). This happened like a 15 seconds drive away from my home. Just as I took the turn to the lane where my home is, we saw a guy on a bike taking the next turn and disappearing from our view. This mysterious girl sitting behind me yelled “That’s the guy. Follow him!!” All this while, she was calling different people over the phone and telling them that her bag was stolen (Again, I dint understand a word she said but I presume that’s what she said cos you generally don’t call up people at such times and talk about the cute guy next door)

Suddenly I felt like this superhero Charlie’s angel and I drove fast to chase this guy. As I raced past my house or rather the sight of my house woke me up from my daze and my brain started working again. “OMG what the hell are you doing chasing a guy on a bike!” I told this girl that it wasn’t really a good idea for us (2 girls- oh yeah I’m strong but this girl was a skinny little insect) to chase a guy on a bike. She wasn’t ready to listen though. Then I told her it would be dangerous if he was armed. Man! it was tough convincing her but after listening to a bunch of my made up scary stories, she finally agreed .

I enquired what she had in the bag and she started listing them out in this exact same order
1. A lunch box
2. A water bottle
3. A notepad and pen
4. Around 150 Rupees in cash
5. I was eagerly waiting for her to talk about a credit/debit card in her list..... but the last thing she said was a pack of biscuits!!

Now, that wasn’t funny. She made me take out all the valour I had in me to get a bag with a bunch a stupid stuff and 150 bucks! I’m so glad I dint follow him further. But out of curiosity, I asked her where she keeps her cards. She said she never carries her cards in her purse and that she only carries money!!!! (with a dumb smile)

Initially I thought she was being stupid but after hearing this I felt pretty stupid myself and felt sympathy for the guy who managed to steal her bag! He probably would bring it back and give her some money seeing the pathetic state of her purse.

Anyway let’s see the good in it.... ahhhhh theres pretty much no good in this one. Jus managed to get a blog post out of it. Fair enough!