[EVIL TWIN] did youtube do this to you ever ?

from the desk of evil twin ...

You are sitting in your office cubicle engrossed in work busy typing away something that would eventually increase someone’s carbon foot-print as a result. Suddenly, the person in the next cubicle starts laughing all of a sudden in a loud, uncontrollable, characteristic duck-like quack. It turns out that he was watching some funny video on youtube and refused to instinctively remember his spatial (“place”) and temporal (“time”) context, that’s all - no emergency. And you just sit there - feeling a little weird having been conspicuously left out of the experience. Did youtube do this to you?

Similar incidents have been reported of all-of-a-sudden swearing, unprovoked slamming on the desk, uninvited aggression on office supplies and very often,  non-grammy award winning singing performances (seriously? you thought you could pull off “When the Levee Breaks” like Robert Plant while wearing a formal shirt ?) … all out of the blue and out to challenge the silent boredom of an office teamwork environment.

More evil-twin material at flawsophy's evil twin page.

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Are you a video junkie ?

I was at the airport terminal the other day. The flight passengers are slowly emerging one-by-one soon after the immigration and customs desk. I am just waiting right outside the door in the lobby. There was another desi couple waiting as well. Soon a desi family - a lady, her husband and a small kid emerge as the automatic door opens and this waiting lady rushes to hug and greet them. She is all smiles and happy to see her visitors from home. Now, the guy (of the waiting couple) seems to share none of that kind of excitement but instead decides at the moment to be an unofficial Alfred Hitchcock of the family. So, he is standing way behind, trying to record the whole thing using his iPhone.  To get a better view, he moved so far that he and I, at one point of time, are actually equidistant from the just landed family's luggage trolley. And he is recording the whole spectacle while his wife is prancing with euphoria. And now, he is irritably asking his wife to settle down because she is moving way too fast for the frame rate of a standard iPhone camera. Now, he is directing her to come closer, turn towards him and pose, you know, all that kind of stuff.

And I am just sitting there with my mouth wide open, trying to comprehend what is happening: Here's actually a guy who instead of participating in the pleasant ritual of cordially welcoming your guest is impulsively trying to record the reactions on the faces of his wife and his just landed guests after a 28-hr flight.

Question: What is one obvious thing you can say about the guests? 

Answer: They are not his relatives. They are his wife's relatives.

Moving on … Seriously, what can one possibly do with a video like that ? I wonder how many times this video is going to be played. Who is going to watch a video of your relatives coming through a rectangular hole in the wall - not a space shuttle door, just a normal automatic door in an airport lobby. What information could this video hold even 10 minutes later? Yet, it is saved in the memory disk of that man's phone for eternity. You know, if the whole humanity is wiped out because of an alien attack and somehow, his iPhone is the only phone that survives and aliens catch hold of it. And then, they see this video. And, if my intuition can be trusted, his phone is going to be full of videos like that. What are those magnificent aliens, those inter-galactic super-organisms going to think? They would think mankind considered walking through a door an achievement. And, as the readers of this blog very well know, walking is certainly not an achievement.

Day by day, people are eking through life irresponsibly, not worrying about the legacy they are going to leave behind.  You see, this kind of thought bothers me on days when it's too cloudy.

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