Good Morning, India!

7:00 a.m. on Tuesday mornings is a very special time. 7:00 a.m. Eastern (U.S.) time, during Daylight Savings, maps out to 4:30 p.m. in India, which means that a meeting that starts there at that time will not prevent people from going home around 5:00 p.m., provided that nobody talks too much in the meeting. Tuesdays are special because that's the day that I actually meet, via Skype, from home, with the Indian software engineers from my company who work in my area. And 7:00 is extra special because, generally, nobody gets up in our house until around 8:00 a.m. I get up, set the garbage at the end of the driveway (Tuesday is Garbage Day in our neighborhood), dispatch the dogs to the Great Outdoors for at least a half hour to follow, and then log into Skype and meet with the "off-shore" group. (Here, "off-shore" means way off-shore; we're not talking about Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket...) And then, after a half-hour meeting (or less), I finish getting ready for work, Ian and Amy get up, Daniel might get up, coffee percolates, some breakfast might happen... And generally, the whole setup works very well.

However, about two weeks ago, events deviated from The Program. The Indian engineers and I had much to discuss, in painfully detailed terms, because several technical problems had come up in the course of their work. So rather than ending around 7:30, the meeting ended shortly after 8:00. Suddenly, during my Skype meeting (which, of course, is "video-enabled"), Daniel materialized in the family room, where I normally log into the meeting. The family room is farther from the staircase than most other rooms downstairs, which means that I have less chance of waking people up as I try to speak loudly and clearly to the other side of the globe. But it's also the room with the CD-player, so Daniel pranced in, in his pajamas, and proceeded to play a story-telling CD as if I weren't there. I got him to put the project on hold, but not without a visit...

Daniel was curious about the fact that I was sitting on the floor talking to my laptop, so he came over and peeked into my screen. By that point, the issues had dwindled down to two small ones affecting only a couple of engineers, so the crowd on the other side of the Himalayas had dwindled down to two people, and I introduced him to Rajesh and Hemchandra, who were quite amused by the new arrival. He waved in his happy-go-lucky five-year-old way, but of course, that was not enough. Within a few seconds, he was climbing onto my shoulders (since I was sitting on the floor), and sat on my shoulders for the remainder of our discussion of some software timeout issue. Luckily, the final issue was tentatively resolved within a few minutes of Daniel's climb. Rajesh, Hemchandra and I all said goobye; and Daniel said goobye, in his own way. Already perched triumphantly astride my shoulders, smiling into the web camera, he started waving dramatically, gracefully flapping his arms like the lady in the circus who rides the elephant. The subcontinental engineers were not expecting this, and neither was I. Even though our weekly meetings are usually rather collegial and cordial, this one ended with a bit more mirth than usual.

Of course, 6:00 is starting to look pretty good... otherwise known as 3:30 p.m. in Maharashtra...

(March 29, 2011)