25 November 2025

FedEx – false precision

It is a bit ironic that FedEx goes to the level of precision to say the delivery window starts at 10 minutes past 9 (not your standard 9 o’clock) and then admits it will be somewhere within a wide range of 4 hours.

Interestingly, if they had said somewhere between 9 and 1 and it had shown up at 1:05, I would not have minded at all. Now that it has set my mind to 9:10-1:10, if it shows up at 1:15, I am going to have a vague feeling that they let me down!

I was reading this somewhere else about how numbers have odd precision interpretation. “It will take me 4 minutes” or “It will take me 6 minutes” conveys a far higher precision than “It will take me 5 minutes”!!

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15 November 2025

“How many birthday calls do you make?”

Once in a while, I face that question, and I usually respond with “I probably average about 9-10 calls a day.”

This morning, curiosity got the better of me, and I sat down to try to figure that out. Additionally, to identify any interesting patterns in the distribution of calls.

Extracting information from macOS Contacts proved to be more challenging than I anticipated. I had to use Google Contacts, Text files, Numbers, and finally Excel to get to it.

Turns out I have 3,235 birthdays in my calendar. However, 58 of them are no more. So, I make 3,177 wishes every year, averaging just under 9 a day.

Some interesting statistics…

(*) There is no day that I do not have a birthday wish to make. The least is 2 (on Mar 23).

(*) The highest is 19 on three different dates: Jan 22, Sep 9, and Nov 14 (which was yesterday).

(*) Aug and Sep are the months with the highest number of birthdays (over 300 each).

I feel I am well prepared to answer the question next time 🙂

20 September 2025

One of these days, I am going to get into real trouble with her

Woke up sharp at 5 am, blithe as a lark and went about my early morning routine. Vitals measured and noted down, classical music put on in my study, logged previous day’s 64 point updates, wrote in my journal, made my first cappuccino and settled down in my chair. Suddenly, I heard Sharmila screaming from our bedroom upstairs:

“Rajib, are you around?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I think the dishwasher is beeping. Need to call the mechanic. Can you switch it off?”.
“Okay”.

Hmmm…. now what do I do? I started wondering. You see, that high pitched beeping noises were not coming from the dishwasher. (admittedly, I was impressed with her confidence without doing any debugging).

It was actually me, on my new learning spree. So, about a month back, I took it upon myself to learn Morse code! I know, I know, in these days of GenAI, I could not have picked up anything more anachronistic. After a month of learning my dots and dashes, I got myself a Morse code machine. And that is where I was trying to spell out different words. Not sure what is so dishwasher-y about it.

Anyways, I went back to practicing after connecting the audio output to my headphones.

Eventually, her coffee was ready and she came down. I was hoping she would have forgotten the incident.

“What happened to the dishwasher?”

My burgeoning hopes were summarily … err… “dash”ed!!

I took her to my study and showed her my Morse code machine.

Have you ever noticed how people driven to exasperation involuntarily put their arms on their hips with their palm folded around the wrists? A visage like that was the last recollection I have before I heard her say “You are a quirky man”.

Helplessly, I sat there grinning to myself with no re-Morse whatsoever! I am going to keep learning this…

So there.

Ha! (that would be dot-dot-dot-dot dot-dash to you)

12 September 2025

Pardon my French!

I was talking to this executive the other day who I had just met for the first time. In an animated moment while expounding his background, he said “Pardon my French” and then proceeded to utter some English invectives. I think he proceeded to ramble on further to justify his position… but my mind had drifted away somewhere else..

My mind endeavored in exploring questions of far reaching import. For example…

Why do we say “Pardon my French” and immediately follow through with words that are clearly English?

In fact, I reckoned as I was packing up my thoughts to come back to the present moment, if you ever said “Pardon my French” and actually used French words after that, given my French, I would have absolutely no idea whether to extend you that sought after pardon at all!!

10 March 2025

I am blinded by my eyes wide open

I had opened the garage door and was immediately greeted by brisk rains falling outside. My first reaction was that of an adult: “Messy weather”, I muttered to myself. The immediate next one was that of a child: “Rains!”, I cried out in joy.

During our childhood days, rains were something we would look forward to. Of course, it was not cold like this in India. So, playing soccer in the rains, making paper boats and letting them float down in small rivulets post rainfall and then of course getting berated by parents for staying out in the rain “Thanda legey jaabey” – were all integral part of growing up.

Today, I took a few minutes to stand inside the garage and take in the rains. In those mindful moments, something interesting outside my neighbor’s house caught my attention. It has been there all these years. I just did not have the eyes to see it. Heida, our neighbor, is a world traveller and collects all sorts of stuff from all over the world – especially Asia.

I bet she got this from Asia somewhere too. Note how beautifully the rain water from the roof is jumping from one bowl to the next almost making it look like a long cascade!

Small moments of beauty… only if I cried to stop and open my eyes.

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19 January 2025

I think I have met my kryptonite

Remember how I always talk about me trying to stay honest with minimalism and decluttering? Of course, everything is on a relative scale. Recently, I have noticed a bit of hypocrisy in that espousal that I do.

I am taking out fountain pens from this discussion since I do not collect them with an excuse to use them. I collect them so that I can collect them. But other such things like running shoes matching with colored running shirts and all that – I have been able to bring them down dramatically. In fact, when it comes to clothes, I take my minimalism bit a little too over the edge, perhaps.

Except that when it comes to island shirts made of cotton, I absolutely turn into an epitome of hypocrisy. I cannot pass up on any design and I cannot pass up on any color. Remember last year when I was in Guatemala how I took a car from Antigua to Lake Atitlan and then took a boat to one of the seven villages where they make cotton shirts? Once I liked a design, I bought seven of them! My only constraining factor was that they did not have more than seven colors! The next bigger constraining factor was getting XL size (cotton shrink and I like loose fit; Guatemalan structures are short and stout relatively). It did not help that they asked for only about $15 per shirt (that too before applying volume discount!)

Or in Valladolid in Mexico – where we drove 200kms from Cancun to find the black and white cotton shorts? I think it was $20 there.

Well, In Fiji and Samoa, I fell for the same thing. In the Caribbean islands, they do not make much cotton shirts. But in the Polynesian islands, they do. Sharmila was patient enough to let me visit the cotton shirt shops every single day of our trip! If I had a chance, I would have picked about a dozen in-your-face bright colored “Bula” shirts from Fiji.

After 7 days, I finally settled for reasonably muted designs. But could not resist picking half a dozen of them. There the problem was that they had way too many designs I loved but not many in XL sizes. The Samoan and Fijian physical structures meant I could get even 5XL easily. But for a particular XL shirt, I had to wait for them to get it delivered from another part of the country! Good news is that the country can be traversed in about three hours by car.

Taking them out of the suitcase in Atlanta, I realize this is total madness.

I have met my kryptonite.

(P.S. I did give up 6 existing shirts to charity to make space for this. Now I might have to wait for summer to go to office 🙂 )