Poetic Resignation

(Posted as received through a forwarded email)

The name is good, the brand is big
But the work I do is that of a pig

The work or the brand; what is my way?
I don’t know if I should stay.

To work, they have set their own way
Nobody will care to hear what I say

My will be NULL, they wont change their way
I don’t know if I should stay.

The project is in a critical stage
But to do good work, this is the age

This dilemma is killing me day by day
I don’t know if I should stay.

The money is good, the place is great
But the development is at a very small rate

Should I go for the work, or wait for pay
I don’t know if I should stay!

The managers don’t know what they talk
The team doesn’t know where they walk

That’s a bad situation, what say?
I don’t know if I should stay.

I can go to any other place
But what if I get the same disgrace

I can’t keep switching day by day
I don’t know if I should stay.

The -ves are more, the +ves are less
Then why have this unnecessary mess

No more will I walk their way,
It’s all done, I won’t stay.

Thanks & Regards
Hard Working Employee

Ahhh, The Cold War for a Damn Mobile

I recently went on an out of control shopping spree, and bought myself a new mobile/cell phone. The last time I did some impulsive shopping was more than 1 year ago when I had treated myself to a cell phone. Hey, don't start judging me, for a middle class Joe like me, buying a mobile is still a luxury purchase worth celebrating, but this time I had to buy one for my wife, but then the devil whispered some sweet poetry in my ears and I decided to keep the mobile for myself. Big mistake, I know now, and thus I unknowingly invited the silent, not speaking to you, door banging, cooking utensils clanking, poisonous sarcastic replies to simple everyday questions, wrath of my lovely and beloved wife.

Now the background story of why I was pushed into purchasing and listening to the devil, well one of the twins somehow threw my wife’s mobile out of our 4^th floor balcony without any warning. We only got to know what had happened when at the night my wife wanted to send a sms to one of her Saheli and the mobile was nowhere to be found. We searched high and low, through thick and thin, I even suggested lodging an FIR, to which she gave me a very pathetically degrading look which translates into “You are such a cheap ass” etc. I don’t know if she drugged me or I was talking in my sleep or something but to cut the story short I generously promised to get her a new mobile ASAP.

After a heated argument between me and my conscious, I finally gave in and went to Abdullah Haroon Road to buy a mobile. Since my purchase range, to put it politely was very limited, I went for the sleazily advertised Qmobile E900 SOAP. It was available in Black and White colors and I opted for the white and paid Rs=6500/= for it. I rejoiced on my way back to home, feeling very rich because of the purchase that I had just made.

The mobile is exactly what it is: a poor man’ touch screen phone, nothing more and nothing less. The camera takes sucky pictures and the video camera records videos that blow big time. It is being advertised as a 3 mega pixel camera when in reality it has a .3 mega pixel camera. I think they deliberately forgot to add the” .” before the 3. The touch operation is good except for the fact that sometimes unlocking it becomes a huge pain in the ass. I think there is a point on the screen which needs to be precisely pressed for the phone to unlock and this keeps you on your toes every time you try to unlock it. The screen is good with the brightness and contrast and responds well to the touch.

The sound player and the video player too are good, but the signal reception is shaky in crowded or underground areas. The sound quality too is good and the volume is not like other deafening Chinese phones (I was later told by someone that Qmobile is Korean or Taiwanese).The battery works very well when charged and keeps on working for at least 2 whole days. The yuckiest thing about this phone is the user manual which comes with it. It was supposed to be written in English but the writer though otherwise and wrote it in a language which appears to be English but fails miserably to make any sense.  

Since I was using the same phone for the past 1 something year, greed got the best of me and I decided to keep the phone for myself. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I am not an animal. I offered her to use my old mobile to which she politely told me to shove the phone where the sun don’t shine, figuratively speaking.  Fortunately for me she does not use curse words otherwise this would have been her exact reply.

So this was the start of the cold war which went on for some days after which one day I remembered when a couple of years ago I had to sell my mobile for some reason. After i sold my mobile my wife offered me her mobile which I then used for almost a year, during this whole time she was without a phone and she did not say a word about it. 

I started feeling guilty about the whole episode and she graciously accepted my apology and the phone, thus ending the war and start of a lovely dovey, happily married life once again. The End

 

And Miles To Go Before I Sleep

I have embarked on a new journey; I am off to discover new lands through uncharted waters. My latest expedition requires me to take on new roles in a very challenging but equally rewarding environment. My only hope is that my destination awaits me at the end of this voyage, and not another passage towards my purpose of being.

It has happened before, and I am afraid it will happen again. You know history has this god forsaken habit of repeating itself. Every time I felt I was near my goal, I found myself to be ages away. Every time I got the celebrations going, I ended up mourning myself, and my efforts. The path I have chosen to walk on unfortunately has no foot prints to help me on my way. I am alone, sometimes lost and at times right on target. The twists and turns are occasionally baffling, and sporadically justified.

I have built all the suspense and managed to stir some emotions in your, the reader’s mind, only to inform that I have left my previous company and have successfully migrated to another one. Damn those were some big words that I formally wrote and hence now I have to do something equally crazy and casual to satisfy my prehistoric, Neanderthal brain before it goes KABOOM!

My tiny brain is not equipped to handle serious situations or serious emotions. It is a collection of jokes, useless rants and musings, non sense making ideas and creativity that sucks and blows at the same time. For me creativity is not thinking out of the box, I refuse to acknowledge the existence of any such box, and I deny my involvement in its creation. I have never quite understood the concept of having a box and then thinking out of it. If you originally wanted to think out of the box than why did you choose to own it in the first place? It makes you look dumb and the box dumber, and people will undoubtedly doubt your creativity based on the choice of you having a box, and then opting to not use it to its fullest potential before blaming it for not being creative and stepping out of its boundaries.

In my thirty one years of existence I have observed children to be the most creative of all creations. Just yesterday I found my youngest daughter of 1 and a half year, in the bathroom lying on the tiles, enjoying the sensations coming from the wet floor during this cold season. For her, this was the height of creativity, since this was the first time she was doing something like this, and I as her father joined her to experience the joy she was enjoying and participate in the celebrations. My wife on the other hand wasn’t so thrilled by seeing all this and deemed us both as being crazy, typically in the same fashion as the world labels creative people as gone cases.

Fortunately for me my new job allows me the freedom to be creative, well not lying on the bathroom floor creative, but it does allow me to spread my wings and fall flat on my ass. Hopefully this time, this job manages to fuels my creative passions and channels my creative energies for a positive outcome.

SEO

For most people SEO is a short form of SEOUL or SEOUL spelled wrong, and that is the exact scenario in Pakistan. People who only have basic knowledge or no practical knowledge what so ever are branding themselves SEO Guru's and Pundit's, and the rest of the IT graduate herd are blindly following and happily  paying them for absolutely nothing. Well the so called, self proclaimed gurus, champions and pundits are making a fool of the students and that does require some effort on their part so i will retract my earlier sentence and rephrase it by saying the students are paying them to make a foll of themselves and a joke out of the SEO industry.

Never in the history of the I.T industry has more garbage ever amassed than the amount of trash which is being gathered and spread right now all in the name of teaching SEO. You see SEO is a very tricky business, and proper awareness is no where to be found. Basically SEO is all about content and the placement of content, keywords, titles etc. Since Google is armed and powered with all sorts of tools, you have to be a thorough professional and think things through while devising and implementing a SEO strategy for your website. Google can differentiate between good and bad, coped and original content. It knows grammar and has a vocabulary better than most of us. Now my question here is, if the content on your site is poorly written and poorly placed, how can you expect your website to rank high? When i see the self proclaimed SEO gurus and masters and read some supposedly insightful information written by them, more often that not there are grammatical, punctuation and spelling mistakes in it. Now since they are SEO gurus dont they know the value of content and the worth of a well written piece of text?

The web is littered with true and false information about SEO principles and techniques, but since SEO is more of an art and less of science, it requires creativity, quick wit, patience and writing good content skills. The aim to get a website high on rankings is a tough and time consuming job, it requires a lot of content, back links, a proper content placement strategy and constant observation or even spying on the competitors. Sadly our SEO gurus are too busy deceiving innocent young people and hence do not have the time to actually demonstrate all these elements through incorporating them into the curriculum that they offer to teach to the willing and sometimes plain old dumb students.I know it sounds harsh but the students are dumb since they do not bother to research and happily pay for something which they can easily learn right from the comfort of their own home, without paying anyone for anything.

But that does not mean everything in the SEO industry in Pakistan is bad, but because of these SEO jerks the competent SEO professionals have forced themselves to go into hiding since they do not want to be in the same spotlight with the self proclaimed champions, leaders and trendsetters of the SEO industry in Pakistan. So my advice for the SEO hopefuls would be to perform a complete research and background check first on the SEO principles and then on the SEO guru whom they wish to pay for nothing.

Apples are HARAAM (Forbidden), indeed

This true story was told to be by a friend of mine. It contains lessons of intelligence and logic, which are two very rare commodities in our world. It was told to me in Urdu and I am posting it in English, for the readers of my blog. So without further ado, let us get to the story:

One day a man (Tariq) was praying in a mosque when all of a sudden a strong stench of burning tobacco hit his smelling sensors. He turned around a saw a man of 40 something, getting ready to pray. Since there were only a few people at that time in the mosque, Tariq was certain that the centre of this nasty odor was this 40 something guy. Since Tariq could do nothing about it he went back to praying and concentrating on what’s more important, bowing down to the Almighty.

Soon after he heard a voice coming from the back row and turned to see that a young guy, in his mid twenty’s was greeting the smoker with the traditional Islamic greeting of Assalaam-o-Alaikum. The smoker replied and the young guy straight away in a blunt tone asked him, Sir, don’t you know that you are not allowed to offer prayers after doing something which is deemed Haraam in Islam? The smoker was a bit shocked and taken aback by this show of complete disrespect. The smoker surprisingly says, boy, watch your tongue, I did not do anything Haraam, to which the guy replies, sir, I don’t think you know but smoking is deemed Haraam in Islam. 

The smoker after hearing this from the guy gets infuriated and the arguments starts heating up. The smoker is visibly angry at the guy and says; show me one verse in the Quran which explicitly says that Smoking is Haraam and I swear I will quit this habit forever and for good. Just then the Muezzin announces the call to pray and the argument stops for a few minutes.

After the prayers were offered the guy turns to the smoker and says, sir ‘Smoking is as Haraam in Islam as eating Apples’. Now this blows the lid off the smoker and he raises his voice and says, boy who died and made you in charge of giving nonsense and Un-Islamic Fatwas. Who gave you the authority of declaring things Haraam, which were deemed Halal by Allah? It is because of people like you that Islam is suffering all over the world. I doubt that you are even a Muslim seeing that you think Apples are forbidden. The smoker was previously feeling a bit embarrassed because of all the unwanted attention but now was very happy thinking that he has cornered the guy and now this guy will get off his back for good.

The guy calmly lets the smoker speak, and then says, show me a verse in the Quran which explicitly deems Apples to be Halal and allows Muslims to eat it.

The smoker gets what the guy is getting at and smiles and says, well done boy, I promise I will try to quit this bad habit and also to avoid further embarrassment and the hands of a youth, from now onwards, I will avoid smoking before entering a mosque.