I wake up. 6:00 a.m. Sweet!
I eat at the hotel buffet. I’m finding that in India, there are always people ready and eager to help with any task. So a waiter helps me put food on my plate. He serves me Idly (a white, spongy, rice-thing) and a number of other things I can’t name. I enjoy the Idly and the fried black-lentil thingy. The soup is a bit too spicy for me.
For lunch, I eat at the office. Thoughtworks provides a buffet lunch every day to all employees (and guests). I take some of everything. I enjoy all of it, although the overgrown wheat-based potato-chipy thing is a bit too salty. Half way through, I’m full. After lunch everyone goes to the kitchen to scrape their trays and give the freshly scraped tray to ladies washing dishes. I start scraping. There’s a lot to scrape. Disgusted by my poor scraping skills, one of the ladies pries the tray away from me. I vow to eat everything on the tray next time so that I can avoid future tray scraping humiliation.
The entire team meets so that I can go over with them the history of Advantage Suite at Medstat. I have an idea that I can use my web cam to record everyone saying their own names. The room is a bit too dark for the web cam. Ram offers to take videos of everyone with his digital camera.
I call in home again with the web-cam using a program called SightSpeed. Tyler discovers that he enjoys using the program’s instant messaging features. So, even though we can see and hear each other, we “talk” by typing messages to each other. The web-cam is still useful, though, because when he doesn’t know how to spell a word, he simply looks up and asks me.
I am in a meeting and I hear strange noises. It sounds like racket-ball. It is Alpesh and a few other Thoughtworkers playing Cricket... in the office.
We go on a team outing. It is difficult to get everyone out of the office -- they are determined to get their work done before leaving. We go to a really cool place called River View. It is an outdoor restaurant set in the hills beside a river that cuts through Pune. In addition to the outside seating, the restaurant has a pyramid. I don’t know why.
At dinner, I ask what it means when people bob their heads from left to right during a conversation. Shilpa says it is used when you verbally say “yes” to something, but you really mean “no”. So, if you ask someone if a project is on track and they say “yes” (head bob), you probably should be working on plan B. I have seen the head bob used that way, but also in many other ways. For example, I think it is sometimes visual punctuation. Someone says something and follows at the end with a slight head bob. It is like the period at the end of the sentence, or maybe a trailing ellipsis. Sometimes, it means something like “yes, OK, but give me a minute” as in “Are you coming to dinner?” “Yes” (head bob). Sometimes it clearly means “yes” as in “Can I trade money here?” “Yes” (head bob). Sometimes it is an acknowledgment of understanding like when you order something in a restaurant and the waiter bobs his head while writing down the order. And sometimes it is a sign that you are not understood at all.
I eat at the hotel buffet. I’m finding that in India, there are always people ready and eager to help with any task. So a waiter helps me put food on my plate. He serves me Idly (a white, spongy, rice-thing) and a number of other things I can’t name. I enjoy the Idly and the fried black-lentil thingy. The soup is a bit too spicy for me.
For lunch, I eat at the office. Thoughtworks provides a buffet lunch every day to all employees (and guests). I take some of everything. I enjoy all of it, although the overgrown wheat-based potato-chipy thing is a bit too salty. Half way through, I’m full. After lunch everyone goes to the kitchen to scrape their trays and give the freshly scraped tray to ladies washing dishes. I start scraping. There’s a lot to scrape. Disgusted by my poor scraping skills, one of the ladies pries the tray away from me. I vow to eat everything on the tray next time so that I can avoid future tray scraping humiliation.
The entire team meets so that I can go over with them the history of Advantage Suite at Medstat. I have an idea that I can use my web cam to record everyone saying their own names. The room is a bit too dark for the web cam. Ram offers to take videos of everyone with his digital camera.
I call in home again with the web-cam using a program called SightSpeed. Tyler discovers that he enjoys using the program’s instant messaging features. So, even though we can see and hear each other, we “talk” by typing messages to each other. The web-cam is still useful, though, because when he doesn’t know how to spell a word, he simply looks up and asks me.
I am in a meeting and I hear strange noises. It sounds like racket-ball. It is Alpesh and a few other Thoughtworkers playing Cricket... in the office.
We go on a team outing. It is difficult to get everyone out of the office -- they are determined to get their work done before leaving. We go to a really cool place called River View. It is an outdoor restaurant set in the hills beside a river that cuts through Pune. In addition to the outside seating, the restaurant has a pyramid. I don’t know why.
At dinner, I ask what it means when people bob their heads from left to right during a conversation. Shilpa says it is used when you verbally say “yes” to something, but you really mean “no”. So, if you ask someone if a project is on track and they say “yes” (head bob), you probably should be working on plan B. I have seen the head bob used that way, but also in many other ways. For example, I think it is sometimes visual punctuation. Someone says something and follows at the end with a slight head bob. It is like the period at the end of the sentence, or maybe a trailing ellipsis. Sometimes, it means something like “yes, OK, but give me a minute” as in “Are you coming to dinner?” “Yes” (head bob). Sometimes it clearly means “yes” as in “Can I trade money here?” “Yes” (head bob). Sometimes it is an acknowledgment of understanding like when you order something in a restaurant and the waiter bobs his head while writing down the order. And sometimes it is a sign that you are not understood at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment