Sunday, December 7, 2008

04 (a). How The Buds Started 'Hmmm'ing – Bud 1


Do you like stories? I, like hell, do. Be it fairy tales, or Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings, or Percy Jackson, or Anne Frank, or Ayn Rand, or The Kite Runner, or, well you get the idea (I hope!). Anyway, this is the story of the buds.






How the buds started ‘hmmm’ing




Once upon a time in July 2007, there was a girl who, besides other things, liked to work. And this work sometimes required her to get in touch with professionals, to well, write about their profession for a certain magazine. For that particular issue, a particular profession was chosen.


So, there was a deadline looming large, as always, and contacts were needed. The girl’s boss got her a contact and one of the girl’s college mates messaged her the numbers of two more.


Of the three contacts, only one would talk (no pun intended here). So what this girl did was, she called her best friend who knew someone through Orkut, who might be able to get some contacts.



(Yes, it was a long drawn, agonising, process).



SB (the girl’s best friend) scrapped the guy she knew, and that fellow told SB that the girl could get in touch with him directly. So the girl did just that.


Now this guy mailed the girl email IDs of two contacts almost immediately. And because of the aforementioned deadline, the girl too mailed these two people almost immediately.


Unfortunately, one of the mails bounced back. The girl mailed the guy back and asked if it was possible to get another email ID. This time too, the guy replied back almost immediately.



(You may wonder why all they did was exchange mails, and not other work. Well, you may go on wondering, it’s your wonderment after all…)



Now to the girl’s amazement, she got a reply from the alternate email ID, yes, you guessed right, almost immediately. The other person, whose mail hadn’t bounced back, didn’t reply at all (Grrr).


After some more mails were exchanged, in one of which a number to call on was asked for and the request declined, the girl sent forward a list of questions, which by no means could be called small, and the reply came in, nope you are wrong, this time it wasn’t almost immediately, but wasn’t after a long gap of time either.


Now, equipped with these answers and the replies the girl had already got from the contact who had talked, and of course after thanking them both, she set forth to write the article. After a considerable amount of time (not almost immediately), she opened the mail again and Voila! she read a line she had missed before (maybe she was in a hurry to write the article, maybe she didn’t scroll down before, we’ll never know).



And the line she had missed was, “Just bumped into your profile on orkut. Nice!” Now of course, the girl knew it hadn’t been “just a bump” so, she decided to “just bump” into this person’s Orkut profile as well.



(I could end this story right now and say, “The rest as they say is history”, but the fact of the matter is that it isn’t!)



A scrap was left, a reply came, yes this time it was almost immediately! Another scrap was sent and so on, and so forth. Until Orkut decided that it didn’t want them to continue scrapping without having to wait for some eight minutes or something between scraps.



(You could say that that was the turning point, or you could say that later. I’ll leave that choice to you…)



Now this girl, being the impatient kind, decided that no one was going to ask her to wait, especially NOT Orkut. So off she went and added the person to her friend’s list. Not surprisingly, the person accepted the request, almost immediately.


What followed was another volley of scraps, without the eight-minute interruption.



(You may again wonder why all they did was exchange scraps, and not other work. Well, you may…)



(Without boring you further about how the Internet was otherwise instrumental in the beginning of the ‘hmmm’ing of the buds, I shall jump a little further in time.)



Several days (okay maybe it was just a day :-P), chats, and Orkut scraps later, the girl decided to ask this person a question. This is how the chat went:





Girl: alrite here goes
coffee sometime?










Person: hmmm






And the rest, dear reader, as they say, is history.




(IN CASE you haven’t figured out yourself, girl is me, person is bud. Always good to make things clear, you know, some people, like the ones mentioned in the post below, need things to be absolutely clear for them to understand what it is. Capiche?)


© The Humming Buds Dec 2008

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