October 14, 2008 | Awake & Dreaming

I, like most guys, can become very awkward when a girl is crying in front of us and especially if the girl in question is not one we know very well. It’s one of the hardest things really. I get all confused, don’t know what to say, not sure if I am supposed to pat the girl and console her or wait for backup (of the female variety). I also start sweating profusely even if it is quite cool in an ac environment.

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The latest such incident happened to me a couple of days ago. One of the trainers who report to me, brought a trainee to me and said that the girl’s grandfather’s (who raised this girl from the age of 8 along with the girl’s grandmother) health had taken a turn for the worse and was not expected to make it past the evening. A guy who claimed to be her cousin had called up and said to return to her grandfather’s home immediately, which was 4 hours away from our office. The girl was emotionally wrecked and she asked us for leave and I said ok.

Turns out that it was a fake call. Someone was playing a nasty trick on her. What happened was that the trainer told her to just check back to the number from which she had got the call. It turned out to be a phone booth. So she dialled home and spoke to her grandmother. Yes her grandad was ill and was taken to the hospital….but he was now back home and watching a movie while having lunch! She came back and informed her that she had been tricked and she said that she was happy that he was ok but that she didn’t know who would play such a trick on her. Then the waterworks started.

Ofcourse I was immediately looking like a fool, stammering a few words and trying to console her, looking around helplessly for a lady colleague who could handle the situation better. I patted her akwardly on the hand and almost screamed help when one of my lady trainers came by. I moved the girl towards this trainer and I said “handle it, please”.

Later my team members were teasing me about the situation I was in. They can laugh; it was scary for me.

I can certainly sympathize with the crashing of hard disks. Over 5 years I had 3 crashed disks that I lost over 50 GB of data and while that normally isn’t a huge amount for lots of folks, for me it was a huge deal. Mp3s, images, photos, whole e-books, a lot of my sci-fi stuff. Plus it was data from 1997 till 2003 and you just can’t replace that. I didn’t use a computer at home from May 2003 till Sept 2006 and I was happy to have saved & stored some data across 10 cds.

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When I got my current pc, the first thing I did was copy all the data from those 10 disks onto the hard drive and then store the cds in a cupboard. Then I copies a bunch of cds with just mp3s in them that I had bought after 2003. I have a 120 GB external drive now for my mp3s and, for the time being, around 2 seasons worth of Star Trek : Voyager episodes. I have downloaded a few movies and some other tv series episodes. I have backed up all these and the mp3s which I have downloaded from Sept 2006 onto writable dvds. I have about 25 gb worth of un-backed data also on my pc which I should back up into dvds by the end of the month. It’s a tedious task.

Too bad we can’t just back up data like DATA is backed up in Star Trek : TNG!