Monday, May 25, 2009

A Hero's Story

Warning: All characters in the following blog are fictitious; any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental or it may be the gift of the writer to make fiction sound so true J. Wherever I have felt some comments are necessary, its written with a different format within brackets

Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away from earth was the planet OG. There lived the hero of our blog. He was a smart, intelligent, etc... And embodiment of many more adjectives that are part of Other Galaxy’s (OG) vocabulary. He got into one of the premier institutes of OG, OGIM L (Other Galaxy Institute of Management at NoLuck). After having successfully survived one year at OGIM L, he was set to the financial capital of OG, baybom to do his winter internship.

(Winter in OG was during March, April, May. Though they use different names for their months, the names have been translated for the convenience of the readers. Eg: ÑÔšÌ - this is our hero’s name, which translates close to God in English. But for simplicity, let us call him hero)

From here on, it’s the narration of our hero’s experience in his project. I have taken great efforts to translate his language, if you find any weird symbols, please ignore the language of OG and read on….

“You are going to have awesome fun, this is what my senior told me about the winter internship. To be a successful marketer you have to get your hands dirty by getting into the market, I used to wonder why on OG would anyone want to dirty their hands, when there are so many brands of hand wash available???

I don’t know if taking customer surveys is part of this getting ur hands dirty, but I assure you that you get everything dirty in the process J. By the end of taking surveys on a typical OG day (1 earth day = 1.0027 OG day, hence they don’t have any leap year confusion) you think as if you had committed a grave mistake in the previous birth and are reaping the effects of it :)

You find a lot of interesting and funny responses from people. For the past one week, I have been more or less like a tape recorder repeating the same thing over and over again in the hot sun (it’s ironical but it’s true, OG Winter = Earth Summer). This is my pickup line ;) “ Hi my name is hero, I am from OGIM L, I am doing …. and it goes for another 30 sec”.

Some people listen patiently to the pickupline and say “No”… wtf just a No, come-on I talked some 100 words without losing breadth and all you can manage is “No”???? Why can’t you give some lame excuse L

On the first few days, I was counting the number of rejections, but as the days progressed the number of rejections grew so large that, my brain started giving a stack error (just like an earth 6-digit calculator gives a value E for 7 digit calculations). I tried so many combinations of pickup line and nothing seemed to work. Sometimes when they would not even listen to what I am saying, I would shout OGIM L, few people turn back and then answer the question. Thanks to OGIM L brand name. Some are so intelligent that they give a lot of mind-blowing reasons,

“I am very busy” – Yea you can clearly see that I am interviewing people and am jobless.. So relatively you are busy than me. That is not an excuse NЮбФ (His family total damage). Most people who say that go and wait in the restaurant that is adjacent to the shop.

“I don’t really shop much” – Neither do I survey much, but am I not standing in the stupid heat and asking? I also got to know that there was a separate category of shoppers called “much shopper” and I have to go and look out for them J

“I need to go” – Did you think I am going to stay here forever, even I need to go moron. What a stupid excuse (The hero is surely in a bad mood :) )

"I've already answered a survey yesterday" - Even u ate and slept yesterday. aren't you going to do that today? I dont want to call you a stupid and insult stupids :) get lost....

“No” – Just one word, anyway you are pretty, so you are excused miss… J (Well this never changes across galaxies)

Many people ask in the middle of the survey “How long will it take? – When you have said yes for my first question, you have entered a legal contract according to the court of law of OG. Why can’t you honor this contract by spending 5 minutes? Obviously you not the Bill Door of Macrohard® who makes 50 OG$ every second

While taking exit interviews, you will have to stand outside the store. Sometimes you are amongst the company of some salesperson and get misunderstood as one among them. If your fortune is really good, then you will find yourself fighting with the beggars for customer share. But then there are some morons NÔWکژ۷ (this part had so many foul language, most of which I could not translate, I guess the foulest of foul language on planet OG) who just say “tch/Shoo” just like shooing away a dog. Wtf, how much fucking energy will be spent to say “NO”?

Also there were some NÔWکژ۷NÔW (Dude Watch ur language) who used to sit in the car and answer the questions and then toss the paper over to me. Where the hell does this arrogance come from? From this survey experience, I found a general relationship between arrogance and wealth, which is explained in the graph here (what’s with graphs and MBA’s, a stupid graph and such a big fuss for this simple graph). Well there may be outliers to this general rule, but I am not bothered about it. If you see this graph and you are wealth and you don’t give a damn shit about it, then you are at the top of this red line :P :P :P (thank god OG is different from Earth)

I have been complaining about the a** holes (I am fed up with the swears :() all along. It would give a wrong impression of OG. There were also 100 odd good souls who were patient enough to answer my survey. However inn the whole process, I got roasted in the heat, got cramps in all parts of my body standing for 7 hours a day for 5 days, got cheated by auto-rickshaws, tasted different varieties of food, and more importantly met lots and lots of people.

The whole experience helped me discover a new me. This trip has been an eye opener. Never did I realize that people can be so hostile and so friendly to strangers. I learned a very valuable lesson. If there is any help or anything required, you know who to contact. Too much senti… :) I was just joking, if at all this experience teach me anything, it did increased my cynicism on people and made my attitude worse or else why would I come up with that stupid graph. I will be waiting for my revenge, since OG is a small world, I am sure I am bound to get my revenge… (Hero is pure evil, I am thinking if I should change the name to villain)

Hope you enjoyed the experience of our hero. Comments are really appreciated and I will make sure that it reaches hero in 2 light years. Thanks for your patience. Bye until the next post… :)