Lunch Meetings

Food is one of the basic needs for survival and an animal instinct is to hunt for it. Mankind is no different. We easily get attracted to food and anything that entices you towards it.

My company is pretty proficient at work-life balance. People enjoy their work (or so they portray) but are very possessive about their lunch time. That is the hour of the day when my colleagues want to relax, forget about work and have a good time. Most people don’t want to sit in their cubes and stare at their computer during this time. Meanwhile, someone somewhere in the company is conspiring to steal that hour of personal time from his fellow workers. He wants to set up a meeting during the lunch time.

A response for such meetings is pretty lame unless the meeting provides free lunch. I have seen it work almost every time. Meetings with lunch provided are far more effective than brown bag lunch meetings. It’s a recipe that will never go wrong and get the right audience to attend the meeting. People WILL flock in for your meetings. They will be fine huddling into a small room and working the way the organizer wants them to. People get hypnotized and drop their weapons.

The organizer knows the skill to capture the attention of his request. He reads, understands, analyze his audience to understand their likes and dislikes. The meeting organizers have gone that extra mile to catch the pulse or stomach need of the attendees. They will provide the best food from the most popular restaurants. This ensures that conflicts do not reduce the attendance. By any means, he wants the invitees to get attracted towards his meeting. People will enter the dungeon (small meeting room) and ignore the warning signal in their head that is crying loudly “A FREE LUNCH IS ONLY FOUND IN MOUSETRAPS.” Alas, they will enter and they will find themselves caught while nibbling through the fresh sandwich or delicious pizza.

But what can you say? It is mans’ nature to follow his instincts and I am no different. I sign off as I see a tail wagging from my rear and my teeth protruding. Its time I turn into a mouse as I go for my lunch meeting.

So long!!

I feel LEFT out!!

I am left handed. And so are about 15% of people in the world. Its good to be different than the mass. However, being different comes at a cost.

It all began when I couldn’t even speak properly. My mom tells me stories about my grandmom who wanted to force me to become right handed. Eating with your left hand was just not acceptable for my aaji (Grandmom in Marathi). Actually, I can eat comfortably with either hands (I can eat with my legs if required… its all about food!!!). But that’s not what I want to talk about. Actually, I want to talk about the things that are so biased in this right hand dominated world. There are several instances that I can talk where being left handed was not only painful but also dangerous.

Teachers did not explicitly teach me writing. It is tough being left handed as most letters are being written differently. The letters are biased to right handed people; most if not all letters are more convenient for them than for me. I never understand why most letters face to their right and not left e.g. “b,c,e,f,h,k,p,r,s,t,u”. The ones that can be called left facing are “a,d,g,j,q,z”. My grip is funny (say a lot of people) and I attribute it to the way my writing style is developed. I tilt the paper in North East direction so that my wrist doesn’t hurt. I and all left handed people complain about the direction of script. As a left handed person, I always covered the words that I just wrote as my hand moved from left side of the line to right. I couldn’t see what I had written and sometimes saw that my sentence is either tilted up and down. The severity of the problem increased as I moved to higher grade and had to use an ink pen. Now my hands were smeared in ink and my paper was all blue. If seeing what you have written was tough, then ensuring that you don’t smug the writing was tougher. It took a great deal of practice for me to get used to it.

Chairs with desk on right hand always puzzled me. During my Engg. Days, I had a hard time finding a left handed seat. Most of the times, I had to join 2 right handed chairs and use the desk of the left chair for writing. Another problem during graduate days was the drafter used for Engg. Drawing. The drafters are made for right handed person. A lot of times, I hid the scale while drafting. This consumed a hell lot of time.

I can go on with my school day experiences and trouble due to being a left handed person. The experiences were miserable. However, there were times when I felt that it was dangerous being left handed. For example, the hack saw always hurt and sometimes didn’t cut the way it was supposed to. Similarly, any scissors were a pain in my hand. The ram or milling machine was a nightmare. The holding table was on the right hand. Hence, I had to work through to ensure that the wood was cut in a straight line while making sure that my left hand doesn’t get caught in the blade.

I never found left handed hockey sticks. It was a challenge teaching myself working with a right handed stick. Similarly, I bat right handed in cricket. I cannot arm wrestle since either me or the other person is not able to use the stronger arm. But I have no complains as I was never good at it.

As I mentioned earlier, my grandmom wanted me to eat with my right hand. I can do a good job eating by my right hand. However, it’s a challenge for me to use spoon or fork with my right hand. Hence, whenever I go to a restaurant I have to ensure that I sit leftmost at the table. My guitar had to be restrung for me. I know that we get left handed guitars. However, the easiest and quickest was always right handed. Any pen or pencil will have writing that will be upright if you hold it in your right hand while upside down if you hold it in your left hand. Similarly, a lot of mugs will have picture which you can see only if you hold in your right hand. We talk about ergonomics of a system but have failed in several e.g. most camcorders need to be held in your right hand only, most cameras have click buttons on the right hand side. Simlarly, blackberries have wheel on their right side. This restricts it usage with right hand only. The weirdest is the wrist watch. Almost all watches have screws on the right side. Wearing watch on your left hand is trouble for us as it gets caught if we are writing. Meanwhile, if we wear it on our right hand, then we cannot use the adjusting screw without removing the watch from our hand (try it yourself). We even call it ‘right hand’ or ‘correct hand’ while the other hand is called ‘left hand’ or ‘remaining hand’.

So all I have left to say to all the right people is that “Lefties have Rights too!!!”