A really long week. Have not felt this drained on a Friday morning in some time. Now on a coast to coast flight back…

Of course, this week’s travels had its own upsides… Meeting old friends that I had not seen in a long time as well as making new ones. And finding weird and funny road signs, restroom doors and so on 🙂

Speaking of new friends, one of the best places to make friends is at the hotel bar. But most of the time, instead of making friends with people in the bar, I somehow make friends with the bartender. It almost always starts by exchanging notes on interesting cocktails. And I always pick up a few more new recipes every time…

This week, I learnt a few from Joel Yacoby. He was at the Den in Portland. It was absolutely delightful spending time with this hard working young gentleman.

Learnt a very interesting drink from him – what he calls “Fiery Balls”!! And in the discussion of the “weirdest vodkas we have ever seen”, my bottle of Sriracha vodka (yes, there is a thing) won 🙂

Usually, it is I who remember people and then search the whole world for them, arrange for a meeting, get somebody to take a picture and then memorialize it in my blog with the backstory. Yesterday was a role reversal.
I was out with a friend at a bar and he had invited another friend of his who was visiting Atlanta to the bar. I am not going to bore you with all the details but some parts of the conversations were memorable. As I got introduced to Russell (that being his name), he surprised me by saying, “I know you. I have seen you before. Where have I seen you before?”.
I had not the faintest clue. But certainly not one to give up on a chance to extract some laughter, I asked him “Do you watch a lot of adult movies?”
15 seconds of pindrop silence.
Followed by three minutes of non-stop laughter 🙂
“Were you in Equifax”?
“Yes”
“Were you in i2 before that?”
“Yeah. How do you know that?”.
To cut it short, it became apparent that we had met before!!! And he used to be in Dallas area. (He is still in Texas). We frequented the same bars, restaurants and Starbucks often!!! One by one, we found out we had way too many common connections from the past. It was like we knew everything about the other person!! We were almost high fiving each other everytime we found one more connection – much to the disbelief of our common friend.
Russell pulled one back on me as I got ready to leave – “Say Hi to Mom”, he said.
I frowned for a bit. Then laughed all the way to car thinking about his reference to “Brother from Another Mother” 🙂

The original “3R”s. -Raj, Reddy and Roy
Getting together this evening after many many moons. But just the same amount of mutual jabs, quick wit humor and arguments like those hypergrowth days in i2 where the three of us used to chalk out our product development plans over a game of “cutthroat”!!!