Tongue Tied and Twisted

Posted by Jeffrey on July 25, 2007

I hate it when I have to pickup the phone in the office. Not only 99% of the time it’s not for me, but the phone is 2 desks away from mine. So when those 2 colleagues of mine aren’t at their place, I have to take off my earphone off of my ear, carry my heavy butt off the chair and walk! Yeah that’s like forced work! I’m sure it’s illegal in some parts of the world.

But before I do that, I would give it 5 rings just to make sure it is a call related to life and death and even it if is, it would be mine.

Anyway, the other day I had to answer this call. I was in the midst of extreme programming. That’s when I close all my non-work stuff like my IMs, Emails (yes non work :P) and websites. All I have in front of me are my scripts and browser to view the page.

So when I picked up the phone, my mind was deep in binaries. That would be 1 and 0 all around. If you remember the Matrix, the way Neo was seeing the world, that was exactly the way I was seeing things. Something like below.

So the caller was looking for a colleague who was not at her desk. So the usual yada-yada stuff, like “maybe she’s in the washroom, maybe you can call back later”.

Now as we were talking, my mind was already in advanced mode. My mind told me to say “you’re welcome” at the end of the of the conversation when the caller says thank you. You know, the politeness thingy.

Ok fine. Now just before the caller was about to end the conversation, the other, dumber part of my brain got another idea. Say “No problem” instead of “You’re welcome”. Don’t know why. Maybe it’s cooler. Maybe I’m schizophrenic. So there was a bit of a useless war going on inside my head.

Then the moment finally came, the caller said “okay thank you. I’ll call back later”.

And you know who won the battle from my overworked brain? Well let’s just say they agreed on a truce.

I replied the caller “Okay, YOUR PROBLEM“!

Then I hung up the phone.

My mind was like “WTF did I just say?“. Man I’m sorry for the guy. I’m sure he’s really confused why I would say that.

Posted under: Stuffs