FYI, I am in Love ( A Short Story)

“Hello Subramani, How are you? Why are you sleeping, instead of doing the work?” squeaked the Betal hanging upside down from my monitor.

Its voice sounded like the voice of my next door neighbor (who has a cute 18 year old daughter), and I squeezed my eyes trying to make ascertain that I am not in the Dream World.

“What, what are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be hanging on the trees? More over I thought you belonged to the era of Vikramaditya. What are you doing in this 21st century?” – I sounded as excited as Danny Morrison when Max Mobile Time out comes during the IPL.

“I live in all eras and all places. I have seen the Romans slay the Gladiators and Indians slay the Lankans in the World Cup Finals” said the Betal and it added, “Now days, there are no trees for me to reside, so I have decided to live in the Computers.”

“Okay, Okay” I agreed, as I do whenever any one speaks more than three sentences continuously, because I still some times get lost in the nuances of English language, despite working in IT field for nearly three years. And also Betal was speaking with US accent which it must have picked up from some Call Center. (I am sure about it, because I don’t think even Americans would speak in such perfect slang)

“I am going to say you a story as usual. Are you ready? Or you have some thing important to do?” asked the Betal with its sheepish grin.

I looked at the wall clock, oops no, looked at the lower right corner of my monitor and the time read 10.00 PM. I should have ideally been lying on the bed and jumping from one TV Channel to other at this point of time. Instead I’m sitting here, trying to debug a code, written by a _____ _____ programmer (substitute any bad word you know instead of dash), who relishes on making simple things complex. The way this code was written is like giving a 1000 page manual on how to boil water.

So I decided, that doing any thing else would be better than analyzing this stupid code, and got ready to listen to the story of Betal, but with the only condition, that it shouldn’t say those old boring King stories to me. I wanted to listen to a modern story. Betal complied with my request, and started narrating.

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Once upon a time, there was a place called Narashima Town, in which was present a big company. There were thousands of projects being executed from that company, but we will limit our attention to the one cursed project. The project was so cursed, that there were no unmarried girls in the project.

Three very close friends namely Designsekara, Codeananda and Testakaran had been working in that project ever since it came into existence. All three of them, were so dumb, that girl friends have eluded them till date. When people from other teams, go for lunch and treats with gorgeous girls, all they could do was just watch them with envy.

They all worked hard. In fact they worked so hard, that the only reason their manager could tell for not giving them DRR1 is “There are no slots.” But they were neither worried about DRR1, nor about onsite opportunity. All that they wanted was a stunning girl in their team. They even prayed for that.

At last, their prayers were answered. A gorgeous Angel (No, that’s not her name, this name was given by our three friends) joined the team. The three friends were straight away stumped by her. She looked like the sort of girl who has never done any work in her life, and got all her work done by people exactly like our friends, who were ready to do any thing just to speak with her. Her body weight also suggested she eats less than what a 5 year old kid could consume. And less we say about her dresses, the better.

Fortunately or unfortunately, her Onsite Coordinator was a lady, and hence she was forced to do some work for the first time in her life (i.e.) if you don’t consider applying make up every half an hour as work. The work was fairly simple and she was given five long days to complete it. She wasted the first three days, thinking that she could get the work done on two days, but then she couldn’t work on the fourth day also, as she was mourning for the loss of her make up kit on that day.

She opened the requirement document on the fifth day, and it looked like some alien script to her. She started biting the company provided pen (in same way Kerala born Tamil heroines do). She was sitting there confused and saddened that she won’t be able to complete the work. It was then our Designsekara came to her rescue with a comment that she looks more beautiful, when she is sad. He started reading that requirement document, without her asking him to do it and found it so simple, that he couldn’t fathom, how it looked confusing it to her.

He however to impress her, exaggerated that it was a complex requirement document, and that he would help her design it. That exaggeration was like, telling a college Kid, that solving (a + b) the whole square would get him a Nobel Prize. Well not exactly, but that comes closer.

Designsekara, then sat beside her (without bothering about jealous looks of the other two guys, that was hotter than Chennai May month Sun), and gave her a simple design on how to code the program. He explained the concepts in such simple terms, that a LKG Kid could have understood, but even then she couldn’t. However after he repeated the concepts four times, she at last understood the design and thanked him by holding his hand. Our Designsekara thereby entered the dream world and left the place to continue his duet in Australia.

The design that looked so straightforward when Designsekara was there, once again looked like some complex code language for our Angel, once he left. She continued nibbling at the pen, but started to code some thing based on her limited understanding. She coded complex things like, initializing the variables etc, but even got stuck about in that.

It was then our second friend, Codeananda entered the scene. He saw the worried face of Angel and the half baked code. If any one else had coded it, he would have laughed at their face. But he said to Angel, that it was an amazing effort, and almost everything was correct, except for few small mistakes. The few small mistakes unfortunately occurred in 99.99% of the code.

He almost rewrote the code, making the logic further simple, giving comments where ever necessary (the comments were so good, that even our Angel could understand it), and also optimized the code. Our Angel was so happy that she patted on his shoulder and thanked him. Codeananda decided to go to Swiss for his duet.

Angel now started testing the program, and some unfathomable error came up on the screen. She stared at the screen trying to understand what the error says, but as usual she couldn’t understand any thing. As expected, came there running was our next friend Testakaran. He saw the error “Object not found in Test Environment” and explained to the Angel that unfathomable error - how one should move the object to test environment before trying to test it there, or the stupid system will give stupid errors like this. He also added that even Managers make this mistake, and it was nothing to be ashamed of, to console her.

Then he moved the object to test environment, did the data setup, and tested all possible scenarios and completed the work for the Angel. Angel was so impressed by his dedicated work (he even didn’t look at her while doing the testing), that she gave a pat on his face as a reward. Testakaran chose Mauritius for duet.

The work was so good, that she even got an appreciation mail the next day. It was not the only mail that she got though, as she had also got mails from three Friends separately proposing to her.

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“Now as usual I am going to ask you a question” said the Betal.

“What, questions? I hate questions” I screamed.

“Nope, I have to ask, if you don’t answer the question correctly ……..”

“What will my Head break into thousand pieces” – I interrupted the Betal.

“Nope, you will get DRR4” concluded the Betal.

Now I was relaxed, since any ways I will get DRR4 only, so asked Betal to go ahead with the question.

“All those three guys have helped the Angel so much. So whose proposal would the Angel accept? What will she reply to each one of them?”

Very easy question. She would mail them saying “FYI , I am in Love already. Please find attached my Boy Friend Photo. :)”

“Right answer, but how did u know”, asked the Betal.

“Four years experience mate. Which beautiful girl comes from college without already having a boy friend? Only in dreams mate. “Now go back and come up with much tougher questions”, saying this I continued to debug my code in a half sleepy state.