Communiqué Glitch!

This happened in one of the chat sessions with my friend who was on-site for a project. My friend knew Hindi and English and I knew Tamil and English. So at any point our common language can be only English! Well, she was trying to configure Oracle and Cognos (reporting tool). Guess she wanted to get the implementation to an absolute catastrophe - and asked me for help! So, in the course of our conversation - I was trying to give her instructions to run a couple of scripts, check a couple of parameters, re-boot (our usual trouble shooting step) and suddenly she wrote back saying "MATLAB" Initially I ignored it, but being me - that word was running at the back of my head.

After a couple of minutes - there it was yet again - "MATLAB!" Now I was curious as to what this Matlab is all about and did a google. To my astonishment there was a statistical tool called Matlab. I thought to myself - as it is we are having trouble configuring Oracle and Cognos and where did this new tool come into picture. I asked her "What the hell are you doing with this Matlab?" For which there was no response. I was furious and got really inquisitive to know more about that. As it was getting late she had to close the chat and said will continue later. I was still thinking about where Matlab came into picture and checked with my project manager and was informed it was not in the scope of the project. I made up my mind to confront with my friend and ask her not to waste another single minute in configuring Matlab - get the other stuff working first.

The chat session continued the next day and before I could tell her anything - there it was - "MATLAB!" This time, I almost lost my temper and told her this is so confusing. I adviced to stick on to the scope of the project. She had to call me to understand my concern. As soon as she called, I enquired about the statistical tool and to my rage she burst into a laughter and said Matlab is a Hindi word which meant "What does it mean? or meaning" Gosh...I knew not knowing Hindi was a problem - but seldom did I think that I will relate that to a tool and confuse myself to such an extend!!!