90/10 in Everyday Life

Stephen R. Covey and the 90-10 Principle are now well known though not as much understood or rather practiced. How we react indeed makes all that difference and it is never more obvious than when you are driving during rush hours. Once I had an experience when the other driver confessed that he was an idiot and asked me what was I?  

http://sumandebray.blogspot.com/2011/01/never-fight-with-idiot.html

That was an eye opener that one has to refresh that 90-10 principle from time to time and that is the exact intent of this post.

One day a taxi was driving in the right lane when suddenly another car reversed out of a parking space right in front of it. The taxi driver slammed on his brakes, skidded, and somehow managed to avoid the crash by just inches! The driver of the other car honked and yelled at the taxi. My taxi driver was very friendly and just smiled and waved at the guy. 

How could he just do that when this guy almost ruined the taxi car and sent him to the hospital? This is where the 'The Law of the Garbage Truck' comes to play.

Many people are like garbage trucks and they run around full of garbage which are extreme frustration, anger and disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it and anyone could be a victim. 

 We need not get impacted by that but Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Else we end up carrying their garbage and spread it to other people at work, at home, or on the streets.

Life is ten percent what you don’t control and ninety percent how you take it!

Life and Death in this world

Life, death and life after death has always been the turf of philosophers, thinkers and the religious gurus. They have always thought and put forward their theories of beginning of life in this planet. The scientist on the other hand has been been snooping into the outer space and digging out fossils to find some clues about the advent of life in our earth. Life and death are part of every day occurrences in our  life and therefore, we the lesser mortals, have not been totally immune from developing our own theories and ever ready to discuss with anyone who is willing lend their ears. The debate shall continue to rage if there was a creator for all the earthly life forms as per the watchmaker analogy or we developed ourselves as per Charles Darwin's theory.

But once in a while we come to know about some incidents that unsettles all our logical ideas. There are two news of accidental deaths that caught my attention and would like to share.
Are these purely coincidences, occurred just by chance or there is a conductor who is orchestrating everything that goes on in this world. This leaves a question in our mind and no practical way to search for an answer.....

Zooming In Disorder

One day, a few years back  I had an strange urge to pinch on a photograph  on a construction magazine while reading an article. I wanted to expand a picture to find out more about a detail and almost did it. It would have been perfectly normal if I was reading the same article in the iPad, but unfortunately it a conventional paper version of the weekly magazine.

Yesterday we wanted to read the details of an address written in in very small fonts on a bottle wrapper and this time we wished we could pinch to clarity.

Pinch here describes a gesture used with two fingers used on a touch screen interface to zoom in and out. We pinch inwards to zoom in on a picture and outwards to zoom out of a picture or object.

As the line between our digital and non-digital life gets blurred, can this be then considered to be a "zooming in" disorder! I am quite confident that with the dominance of touch screen steadily increasing in our lives, others are suffering from this disorder too.

This post from 2014 has been edited and re-posted as it relevance has increased exponentially. 

Its True

I was prepared for a call at two in the morning. This was to let me know that they have landed in the Doha airport. I had planned it well and slept early. I would have little time to sleep after picking them up in the middle of the night. But my wife woke me up at 11:30 with a call from an unknown number. This was to let me know that she had lost her phone at the Dubai airport and I was not to expect any call when the plane landed in Doha. My immediate grief was that I will no longer have the luxury of sleeping till they landed, but have to go early and wait in the arrival lounge. 

The loss of the Samsung galaxy made us sad. The realization of losing those pictures of our last vacation made us sadder.  Early in the morning I went to Vodafone store and blocked the number temporarily, stopping any misuse of the phone number. We had heard and read a lot of stories of people getting back stuff from various parts of Dubai during our stay there. These were firsthand accounts that were published in the local newspaper by the grateful souls conveying their gratitude after getting back their belongings. We were hopeful that we will get the phone back by some miracle.

The other thing she had to do was to change passwords of various websites and accounts like FB, emails etc. 

So I had to get into action right in the morning. First decision was not to lose hope. So I went and blocked the SIM card without taking the option of a duplicate SIM card of the same number and the balance transferred. 

Next step was to log into Dubai airport lost and found department and make an online application. I called the airport too but got directed to various other agencies including Dubai police airport division.

We were reflecting on statements like “why this happens with us" and "why it does not happen with us" and “How I could not check this”etc.  It was like the pain of a child losing his favourite toys than anything else. All of a sudden there was this one phone short in the house.

But all this while they have kept me engaged. I have been asked to provide details of the item lost and followed by the model of the phone, colour of the phone, the colour of the cover, so on and so forth. After three days I received the following email: 

“Good day,

After checking of our system records, we are glad to inform you that this item is with the custody of the Emirates Lost and Found Department under reference number 8795 (Date of received 27Aug) Please advise where to forward it so we can prepare documents and advise flight details.

For further assistance or clarifications, please do not hesitate to contact Emirates Lost and Found at +97145057538

Note: we are keeping the found items only for thirty days from the date of received.

Thanks and Regard,

*****                        

EMIRATES LOST AND FOUND

Emirates Airlines - Dubai International Airport Terminal 3

Tel: 00971 4 5057538         

Fax: 00971 4 2200104 "

That was one of the happiest emails that my inbox have ever received. However this wasn't the end of it. We were then requested to furnish detail and specific information related to the phone. For example we were asked provide at least five names and numbers from the phone’s contact list, records of last few calls made and received if we could, etc. 

Finally the phone arrived at the emirate airlines office at the Doha airport on an evening flight. We went there without wasting any time and collected the phone by filling up a form. Before handing over the packet the officer asked my wife ...........“Did you expect to get it back?"

"No! Just hoped", I replied. 

After a month our neighbour lost her iphone in her school bus but never for it back. The moral of the story is not to lose your phone and if you happen to lose it at the Dubai airport, do not lose hope. The people at the Emirates are too good.

This post is to express our thank Emirates Airlines and all people at the Dubai International Airport.

By Chance in The Incredible India

We visited Ranthambhore National Park on our trip to Jaipur during the Winter of 2011. We were lucky then to meet a tiger in the wild.

http://sumandebray.blogspot.com/2010/12/save-tiger.html

In the Summer of 2012 we went to Goa. On our way from the Airport to the city we stopped our car curious to find out why a crowd has gathered. What we discovered is by far a once in a life time experience. A snake have dropped down from the tree losing its balance after it started to swallow a full grown monkey. Some villagers gathered around it trying to tame it with a rope and stick, while the snake is busy gobbling up the remaining legs and tail of the monkey.

I wonder what lies ahead for our next visit to another city ........ we look forward to that in anticipation!

Your fitness is costing us dearly

The 2022 FIFA fever is heating up in Qatar. More and more new and shiny cars are hitting the roads each day. I see hundreds of those around me while driving up to work but there are only a few that have more than one passenger inside. The streets are not being able to cope up with the influx. But streets are not the only impacted, so is the housing sector. You find an apartment to rent in the morning, it is almost certain that it will not be available if you comeback for it in the afternoon.  People who lived in Dubai in the first decade of this century may term this as the “Dubai Syndrome”.

I take the cornice street to go to work every morning except Saturdays. It’s not because there are less traffic on that street, but because all the intersections along this road are manned by traffic cops. It’s got a very a scenic view too as it has got some of the greatest skyscrapers on one side and Gulf sea with paved cornice on the other busy with morning joggers.

The road also have three “Pelican Crossing”, which we wish nobody would use. This is a type of crossing with a pair of standard traffic lights facing the oncoming traffic on both directions and can be controlled by push buttons on either side of the road. The pedestrian can push the buttons to stop the traffic. When there is one such light on a 2 X 3 lanes street the traffic has to stop long enough to allow a pedestrian cross 6 lanes and a divider.

Most of the days we drive uninterrupted but once in a while we are paused by the ones eager to keep themselves fit. The traffic builds up quite fast while the drivers inside has only one though in their mind .....”Dear, your fitness is costing us dearly”.

RIP - All those Dead Plastics

Being a collector of stamps, calling cards and phone cards et al, I ended up collecting to a lot of plastics over the past years.The ones in the picture above have lived their natural life and are now sitting idle waiting for a new lease of life. But the question is What do I do with all these dead plastics?