Saturday, September 26, 2009

Thursday, September 17, 2009

The Geek Factor

Well, I actually did an Ms. with some emphasis to research. So, most folks think that I am a geek. My cousin recently asked if I plan on doing a PhD. and I said "yes,hopefully'. Then he says "oh, so when you get married, you and your wife would be seated in adjacent rooms and studying!". That would give some idea what my family perceives about me. Honestly, none of this is true and I am just being stereotyped here :-)

Anyway, this "others proclaimed geek" (me) decided to go for a movie (Transformers 2) with other friends from my department at University. They are all either Ms. or PhD students (read geeks). I booked 15 movie tickets online and we left for the theater in two separate vehicles since we wouldn't fit into one. We arrived a few minutes late at the theater and I distributed the tickets (basically two printouts, one for 8 tickets in one row and the other for 7 tickets in another row). Since we were late, we rushed into the movie hall and started searching for seats. Someone else was seated on the chair corresponding to my seat number, whom I gladly evicted. All looked fine and I was trying to figure out the part of the movie I missed. Then after a few minutes one of my friend came up and complained that all the seats were occupied and he couldn't find a place to sit. I told him that someone might be occupying one of our seats and to get this sorted 4 of us got up and went to the door man with our printouts. The doorman went into the hall and came out after 5 minutes saying that he couldn't sort it out. He looked rather confused. My friend was rather annoyed by this and asked for the Hall supervisor. Another two minutes, the Hall supervisor appears and my friend starts scolding him for the delay and confusion. He didn't yell but has a nice way of getting things across and was pretty good at it. My friend told the supervisor that someone else was occupying our seat and asked him to sort it out.
The supervisor said fine, one of you come along with me, I will point my torch at the person corresponding to each seat number on your tickets and you identify if the person is yours or not. Started with the 1st seat number-yes he is ours, says my friend, so is the 2nd, 3rd..., all the way upto the 14 th and 15 th!
The supervisor comes out and tells us, see I have accounted for each person to the seat number on your tickets, what is the problem? That's when I realized there were 16 of us and not 15 as we presumed. I whispered to my friend (that had scolded the supervisor) that there were 16 of us! He was mum and he wouldn't say another word. Finally, I told the supervisor "We have a problem. We have an extra person"!. He wasn't surprised, he seemed to know. Eventually, one of us who had already watched the movie previously left the hall and visited the mall nearby.
I narrated this to my mom who couldn't stop laughing and she said "all these researchers together couldn't even count right!". Didn't I tell you I was no geek :-)