Artificial ignorance

I was at a friend’s son’s birthday party last weekend. We were all huddled around the parents, and the kid, with the cake and everything. No one seemed to be taking the initiative to start singing happy birthday. The parents didn’t wanna do it. So I screamed out "1, 2, 3, happy birthday …" and everyone magically followed suit. I felt really good about that. All those years of idolizing Papa Smurf and watching him be this unsung paternal hero who leads others with his profound words seemed to have paid off.

After everyone had done singing, and while everyone was applauding, I screamed "speech, speech". I thought it’d be funny given that the kid had just turned 1. But my funniness got muffled in the applause and no one heard what I said. Except for this prick guy who was standing right next to me. Just as the applause ends, he yelps "speech, speech, speech, speech, speech" like a baby howler monkey and everyone just erupts into laughter. I looked at him as if to say what the hell, but he was avoiding eye contact. The guy had clearly stolen my joke. I wanted to confront him after, but didn’t think it’d be appropriate with all the kids around. So I rolled my elmo-napkin in to a ball and threw it at him (from behind) later.

Everyone thinks he is a funny guy now, and that I’m someone who just loves to sing (happy birthday). So unfair. Continue reading

Sure a lot of my blog posts are self-righteous, self-involved, non-humble posts. This one’s not very different.

But I felt like I need to air this one out, because it felt good, just thinking about what I’d heard. A friend told me the other day that she likes hanging around me because I make her want to be a better person. How awesome a compliment is that? I make someone want to be a better person. It makes me feel so amazingly useful in the universe to make someone else feel good. Or just that I’m good enough to make other people (granted one person) want to be around me. My favorite compliment up to that point had been this survey comment I’d gotten after an event I’d done : "ANAND DOESN’T SUCK AS MUCH AS HE USED TO."

What was your best compliment? Continue reading

A few years ago, I’d made a new year’s resolution – the resolution was to not make any more resolutions. This year, I had to break my pact. I made some resolutions.

I’m tired of being a victim of circumstance. Oh, the market’s slumping, oh, the economy is not booming as much as it should, oh, I have vasovagal syncope (I really did). What I’ve realized is that its one thing to feel down because you are a victim of something you have no control over, its commending to take charge and make change because you are down.

In 2001, I started at Cisco Systems as a Software Developer. I’d joined Cisco two months after it had announced massive layoffs. There were major re-organizations, but the conditions forced us to focus on what was important. I ended up being a part of a key project that was vital to the business and Cisco’s customers. It was meant to be. I think everyone followed suit (Cisco was a NASDAQ bellwether/sweetheart). Everyone refocussed and reprioritized. The pendulum started to swing.

Maybe I’m feeling so positive because thanks to Shaherose of Women 2.0, I got to attend the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner at Google last night. I got to hear from the likes of Irene Au (who I think is one of the most humble and modest executives I’ve ever heard) speak talk about their experiences. The panel comprised of several women luminaries who’ve set out to make a mark for themselves and the communities they serve. Some of them were accidental entrepreneurs. Some of them really demanded to be co-founders and retrofitted that need into a project, but either way, their presence on that panel was because of their accomplishments, which in turn came about because they were trying to solve some problem. Continue reading

So, whats in a name, you say? Well, a lot… I respectfully disagree this notion about the fact that a name doesn’t really stand for anything or that, a name’s just a name, and all the other cliches that people with bad names have come up with.

For the first time today, I got both my first and my last names, completely butchered. We had our monthly team call today, and a moderator was responsible in introducing us when we dialed in to the meeting. She read my name out as "Amanda Iyer". I laughed it off. I’m sure every guy on the team suddenly started paying attention because he probably thought a woman had been added to the team *grin* (well, atleast I sure woke up, because I wasn’t sure who Amanda was, and then I thought to myself, "huh, a woman with the same last name as mine" just signed in)

If that wasn’t bad enough, a little while later, I called up Amazon to check on this order I’d placed 2 weeks ago. This customer service rep (@ Amazon), for some reason thought that proper nouns do not begin with capital letters. And so, he ended up calling me "Anand Lyer" – he confused the capital ‘I’ in my last name, to be a small ‘L’ (an ‘l’ i.e.). *sigh* Continue reading