Tuesday, July 01, 2008

the real world

My horoscope of the year was - "your expenditure will exceed your income"
And that was the first thought that crossed my mind when it struck me that I had lost my wallet for good.
"How would you go back to your hotel?" - the security lady of china town asked me. Good question I thought.
"Everybody should lose his/her wallet atleast once in their life" - was the third thing that I heard from Saurabh when I came back to hotel.
The fourth thing that I heard from my brother when I called him to help me cancel all my US credit cards was - "Don't worry you would have lost all that anyways".

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Well as a software engineer I have lived most of my life (at least last few years) in the web world. I have expressed a lot on chats, blogs, breathed in facebook and orkut and ofcourse college world and seattle-microsoft world is utopia in some sense where everyone is good and honest. Everything is safe. You let down your guards and then one day you realize that there are people who would want to steal. And then you wonder, how much money would tempt you to steal from someone? How would you enjoy it if you know it is is not your money? What will not let you enjoy more? The risk of being caught or the guilt of taking something away from someone? Or can you understand the person who is needy enough to not care about all these questions when he is stealing?
So a Google employee opened a coffee shop called TerraByte near kirkland (Seattle) and the business model was that you need not pay for the coffee - if you feel like you can tip but the person serving coffee will not look at the tip you are giving and it is in a box in the corner of the coffee shop so there is no way for her/him to come back and check and remember for future. I and Dami had gone to check it out and a year later it was still operational. It is heard that pple didnt feel good about drinking coffee for free and sometimes ended up paying more money out of that guilt. May be he should try opening a similar shop in ChinaTown too and compare the stats.

1 comment:

Alistair D'souza said...

if you open such a shop in india your expenditure will definitely exceed your income :-)

but yeah the real world is a nice and exciting place to live in ... oh la la :-)