Life is Rocking

Didn’t the story of the eternal optimist (see my previous post) rekindle your spirit and open your heart and eye? It sure did mine. I was just thinking about this kid for a long time and his statement was slowly piercing my heart and made me think of things in a different way. I am living all by myself with no friends at work or home or anywhere. Previously I used to get very depressed at this thought. But now I think, “So what! I am all by myself and how independent I am. There is no one to disturb me or command me of how I should live my life. I can live as I like and I can do things as I wish. I have complete privacy and I am going to make utmost use of it, for this won’t last long”. I am amazed at how a small story has changed my perspective! Thanks to “Chicken soup for the soul”

1.Banana – This is the best especially when you know that you are too busy to take a break for the next 2 hours. In my experience, a banana holds the hunger for at least 2 hours and its also fully packed with nutrients that simply makes it a wonder fruit. It also takes only 5 minutes of your time.
2.Orange: I never knew orange would fill a stomach until I tried one on a late afternoon. It instantly filled up my stomach and what not, with its packed immune boosters, it will make sure that no annoying bugs enter your body’s territories. Its the best fruit to munch if you are watching your calorie intake. A banana or an apple might be a bit fattening but you won’t have that concern with an orange
3.Yogurt: With its probiotics (good bacteria), its very good for digestive health. This is also a good stomach filler.
4.Soy milk: Its probably a good idea to stock some soy milk cartons in your office fridge. Its a healthier alternative to the traditional cow’s milk and its tasty too. I particularly like the chocolate soy milk. Its just yummy!

Are you a full time employee working 40 packed hours a week and feel hungry very often? If yes, this might be for you. I work from 8.30 to 6 with a 30-45 minute lunch break in between. Mine is mostly physical lab job and so I tend to get hungry very often. They have coffee, tea, pop, hot chocolate at office but these are not healthy. I was drinking pop and tea during the first month of my job and I had to quit it when I noticed my cheeks getting chubbier. I asked several people, including doctors and came up with some good things to stuff up between meals which not only fill your stomach but are also healthy in the long run. The list follows in the next post.

I cut my hair last week – I cut about 10 inches of hair. I am proud to say that I donated it. Don’t think I am an altruistic person or the like. I wanted to cut my annoying long hair and I also wanted to put some use to it. This is when I learned about locks of love, a non-profit organization that donates hair to children with alopecia areata, who have lost their hair to medical treatment. As many of you might have already known, the minimum length of hair you can donate is 10 inches. So I waited about 2 months till my hair reached the required length and finally got rid of it last week. My new hairstyle is also pretty good – it received some rave reviews from my friends and colleagues at work. I also feel much lighter on my head! Short hair rocks!

The projects that I could think of which are not suitable for getting implemented by virtual teams are construction projects and fieldwork projects. These kind of projects which require some action in the open and whose results are a tangible product like an artifact can be carried out only in collocated team environments. For example, lets say the city of Corvallis decides to build a huge recreational park near the university. For such a project, a team of construction engineers, design engineers and city management officers typically collocate within a team and work closely with each other to first plan our a design and construction chart, get approval from the higher authority officers and implement the design with construction workers. So for such projects, virtual teams are inappropriate.

1.Interrelationships develop more quickly
2.Team members effectively communicate with one another
3.There is a greater opportunity for feedback and discussions of the project requirements and implementation
4.Collocation facilitates better coordination and results
5.It allows more rapid response to issues and enables processes and tasks to be streamlined.
6.It provides for a more rapid performance of development activities or tasks that cross functional department boundaries
7.The task requirement can be addressed on the spot among the team members responsible.
8.In a radically collocated team, people can more easily and quickly be found
9.An openness with information and of ideas is fostered.

There are lot of bugs around, especially ants. My dad today was telling me how he get rid of all the ants in our Chennai house. We used to suck up all the ants in our vacuum cleaner previously. But somehow the ants find their way to kitchen again. So he had this idea. He took some borax (he is a chemistry professor so he has access to all the chemicals) mixed it with sugar and sprinkled some in the ants’ path. He kept doing this and within a few days, he completely got rid of the ants. The secret is these worker ants (the ants which hunt for food) toil all day, collect some food in order to feed the queen ant, which does nothing but just sits at its home for food to be brought. The queen ant deserves this special treatment because it is the only one to reproduce (similar to the queen bee). When the queen ant is served this food (sugar that also contains borax), borax which is an insecticide takes care of killing the queen ant and thereby abolishing the entire ant community. This is not new because this the idea behind all the ant-killers but somehow the ants have become resistant to these traditional ant killers. So this idea might work at least till the ants become resistant to this new compound.

Collocation is the grouping of elements in a team in a specific order that would typically enhance the effectiveness of the team. When a team is formed, it is important to collocate the team members and promote the team into a project area. The closeness and the physical proximity of the employees would provide a number of advantages but there are also some disadvantages for people who prefer privacy like me. For example, I prefer to work in isolation. If there are people around me, I tend to get uncomfortable. So as far as possible I tend to stay away from people. But for those people who are not like me, collocation provides a lot of advantages which follows in the next post.

My opinion is that radical collocation has diminished in companies and businesses over the years and virtual collocation has taken its place. Through the years, science has unraveled many things thus leading to huge technological innovations enabling different fields to come together to create a product. Many of today’s companies have a variety of departments working in conjunction with each other and its not possible to radically collocate all the departments in a single working place. This is where virtual collocation comes into play. A virtual team is a group of individuals who work across time, space and organizational boundaries with links strengthened by webs of communication technology. Nowadays, almost any project could be virtually collocated. Many of my undergraduate research professors virtually collaborate with overseas researcher on a specific project of shared interest.

The story that I was talking about that changed a hard core pessimist like me to think optimistic goes like this. So there is this very optimistic 6 year old kid (an optimist by birth) who is famous for his great optimistic remarks. Each morning 5 am, he crawls into his parents bed and mumble to them that its going to be a beautiful morning. When they ask him to stop talking, he would say, “I not talking to you; I talking to me!”. His ultimate optimistic statement was after the funeral of his 2 year old baby brother Tanner, who died of hemolytic uremic syndrome. When his mother was consoling him after everyone left, he said “I feel more sorry for all those other people who never knew Tanner. Weren’t we lucky to have had Tanner with us for 20 months. Just think, there are lots of people who were never lucky enough to know him at all. We are really lucky people”. The eternal optimist!