Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

I got a call today from a guy claiming to be calling on behalf of Airtel, telling me that the payment for my Cellphone was due and that I needed to make the payment ASAP. So I told him that I would make the payment online later in the day once I got back to my desk (I was at work). Then this guy tells me that “that would take up to 2 days to process” (??) and that I needed to make the payment immediately so he would come over/send someone over to pick up a cash payment for the amount due.

My immediate reaction was “Are you serious???” Do you really think I would hand over cash to someone who just claims to be from Airtel instead of using the online payment which is faster, more convenient, trackable etc? Even if it takes up to 2 days for the payment to process (which is nonsense, as I have seen the amount reflected in my account in a few hours at the most) I would still make the payment online, or at a proper Airtel outlet.

When I talked to some co-workers about this, one of the counter-arguments I heard was that “they will be carrying a Airtel ID”. Yes, they will be carrying an ID. How do you know it’s a valid Airtel ID? It will take someone who knows what they are doing a couple of hours at most to create an ID that looks reasonably official and valid. How many times have you looked at someone’s ID really carefully?

Anyways, I told him to go away and that I would make the payment online. I wonder if other people have been receiving similar phone calls.

Well this is all for now. Will write more later.

– Suramya

Yahoo sent shock waves through the IT sector when they banned working from home. Following the by now infamous memo many articles/blog posts have been written. Initially I wasn’t planning on posting anything about it, however recently a friend asked me for my thoughts on this as I have worked from home quite often in the past in various roles. So here are some of my thoughts on the subject. Keep in mind that all this are my thoughts and not of any of my employers (past or present).

Working from home has its plus points and negative points so there is no easy answer to this question. In my personal experience I am a lot more productive when working from home if I need to focus on something and don’t want interruptions (e.g. if I need to code something). At work its easy for the person sitting next to you ask a question, or someone to walk up and interrupt you. When working from home this is not there and overall I think I get a lot more work done.

However there is a flip side, when at home you can’t participate in the on the spot spur of the moment conversations that might help you solve a particularly hard problem. Which is the point that Yahoo is making and the reason they banned working from home. A lot of times really amazing idea’s come out of water cooler talk and just overhearing the conversation next to you can point you in the right direction. The best way to innovate and come up with good idea’s is to discuss with people who can then build on top of your idea or point out issues that you might not have seen. (Which is why brainstorming is so important when you start solving a problem).

BTW, all this talk assumes that people working from home are actually working. A lot of the times a person will send out a WFH (Work From Home), send some emails in the morning; then disappear for a few hours and then come back and send a few more mails to appear like they have been working all day. These are the folks that give people who work from home a bad name. For the purpose of this post, I am excluding them from the discussion.

An advantage of working from home is that you can still work if you are unable to make it to work for some reason (could be sickness, need to stay for a delivery, to take care of a sick family member or whatever). Instead of taking a day off the person would still be productive and help you move towards your target. Plus if you need to work odd hours, working from home makes it more bearable. Basically if I have to work at 2 in the morning I would rather do it in my pajamas with music blaring than from the office where putting your feet up on the desk is frowned upon 😉

Overall I think that WFH is a great idea but should be used in moderation. Work from the office when you need to innovate and work from home if you need to focus on something without external distractions.

I am sure some (or maybe most) of you have thoughts on this so please feel free to discuss in the comments.

– Suramya

PS: I intentionally didn’t talk about the advantages of WFH for mom’s/elderly etc because enough people have posted about those aspects at other sites.

Since my last post was about reading SMS messages while half asleep, I had to post about this article claiming sleep texting was on a rise (HuffingtonPost, CNet). Basically, teens are responding to Texts while half asleep and then not remembering doing this the next morning and this is apparently a crisis. I don’t agree that it is a crisis. It is the same thing as people picking up phone calls when half asleep and then not remembering it the next day (I used to be notorious for this in College). Or talking to someone in the room half asleep and not remembering it.

Earlier this week, a CBS affiliate in Philadelphia spoke with Dr. Elizabeth Dowdell, a professor of nursing at Villanova University, who believes that more and more teens may be texting in their sleep

“It’s something new. We’re just starting to get a handle on it,” Dowdell told The Huffington Post. “I think that we will start to see more of this as cell phones become much more accessible at all ages.”

With sleep texting, the beep of a cell phone lightly awakens a person, so he or she will reach over and respond to a message (sometimes with jibberish). However, the person has no memory of having done so in the morning.

The best part is that the Doctor who started all this drama (Dowdell) hasn’t even conducted proper research on this, it’s based on anecdotal evidence that is blown out of proportion by the media who wanted a headline and what better one than protecting the kids from themselves! Just because texting is a technology that mostly kids use and adults don’t like, doesn’t make this a crisis and to use it as an excuse to shove more pills down the poor kids throats is not right.

Well this is all for now. Will write more later (maybe in my sleep).

– Suramya

So I learned an important lesson today: it’s a bad idea to read an incoming SMS
when I’m half asleep. I don’t remember reading the SMS or what it says and it’s marked as read so when I wake up I still don’t read it.

Ah well… Things you learn…

– Suramya

For the longest time I thought Twitter was useless and had pretty much decided never to use it, but then I used it recently when my Airtel account was giving issues to reach out to their head office and had a good response. At that time I seriously considered starting to post stuff on Twitter but then changed my mind about it. By now you must be wondering (if you actually read the post till here) why am I talking about Twitter like its a new technology, its not. It was just something I was thinking about so decided to write it (plus I was getting tired of lying in bed sick). Basically I realized that if I started posting on Twitter then a lot of the stuff I write about can be taken in the wrong context and potentially get me in trouble.

When you are posting a blog posting or an article, it’s well over 255 characters long and it takes you time and effort to type it out, think through the point you are making etc (for example I will probably re-write this post a couple of times before I click publish). Twitter is meant to be quick, a note to self or random thought that you share with the world. This is both the beauty and danger of Twitter, it makes it so easy to post something in the spur of the moment that you might regret later when you think about it. A sarcastic comment in a three para blog post has a lot of context around it and is hard to misquote, but on twitter that’s all you see and since there is no context it can be taken any way and given whatever context people want.

For example, if I have a bad day in the train and post a blog post about it and then as part of the post/explanation say something about blowing it up to make something better then people wouldn’t have an issue. However if I made a post on Twitter saying something like “Train Commutes suck, all trains should be blown up to make room for something better” then it sends a completely different message and can potentially get folks arrested. In past comments made on Twitter have gotten people deported, arrested etc. Plus with my sense of humor, I need as much room as possible to explain the context without getting into trouble.

We this is all for now. Will post more later. (and yes hopefully the updates will be more frequent)

– Suramya