How I lost faith in humanity … and my short term memory

It took me 10 months after the birth of my daughter, but I’ve finally managed to return to a weekly workout regimen, albeit to a limited extent. There’s a great gym at work, which is small but functional, and one which I try to visit twice a week during my lunch break. This gym has free weights, treadmills, machines, showers – the works. So to take advantage of this facility, and free up time in the evenings, I’ve taken to bringing gym clothes, a towel, and miscellaneous toiletries with me in the mornings. Except that I keep forgetting the gym bag that contains these items on the train into work.

Apparently there is a Lost and Found process in place to recover items left behind by passengers, but I have yet to see it work. First, you have to rely on the honesty of fellow passengers and the train conductors to not make off with whatever you’ve left behind. Second, you have to wait a day before misplaced items are collected together and sent back to downtown Chicago for storage in the Lost and Found office. Finally, you have to navigate the world’s most arcane office hours to contact someone at this office to figure out if your article has been located. Below is a picture of the hours that the Lost and Found office is actually open:

Of interest is the fact that the office is not open before 8am and after 5pm, and is not open on weekends or holidays. 90% of the passengers on the train have to be office workers, some of whom are leaving the city to get to far-flung suburbs for work (i.e., yours truly). How we are expected to make it back to the city before the office closes is beyond me, unless I have the gall to walk into my boss’s office and say I need to leave work over an hour early because I need to find a missing gym bag.

Of even greater interest is the set of random times that the office remains closed: 9am- 9:30am, 11am-11:15am, 1pm-2pm, and then 3:15-3:55pm. What the hell are these? Bathroom breaks? Union mandated smoking breaks? Why do you randomly need a 30 minute break, then a 15 minute break, then an hour break, and then, bizarrely, a 40 minute break at the end of the day? WTF?! Every time I’m between meetings at work, or have 5 minutes to myself, I’ll reach for the phone to see if I can call the Lost and Found office … until I realize that the office is not open.

The rare instances where I’ve gotten through to someone, I’ve been told that nothing matching my description has showed up. Why? Who wants my old gym clothes? This is the second time I’ve lost a gym bag – the first time I lost the shoes in which I ran the Chicago marathon. They were old, but nice. The second time I lost the second pair of shoes I bought to replace the first pair. These were not old at all, and were nice. Who looks inside a gym bag and says, “Cool – size 12 ½ Mizuno shoes for medium pronators with a large toe box. Just what I needed!” And both times the gym bag was nice – the second time it happened to be a bag I had received as part of a recognition award at IBM. Why people, why?! Why are you walking away with my stuff and not turning it in? I’d understand if I’d misplaced an iPhone. I’d know better than to expect a return of something like that. But gym bags with sweaty clothes and used shoes? Really?

I’m losing faith in my short term memory, and fast. But I’m losing faith in humanity faster. Give me back my gym clothes!

Soft hands

I suffer from a frustrating inability to get my hair cut regularly. My work hours and long commute mean that most places are closed by the time I get home on weekdays, and weekends are so busy that I just try to find the closest, cheapest hair salon to where I’m running errands. So it was a pleasant surprise to receive a coupon in the mail for Halo for Men, billed as a “hip and relaxing environment where men could comfortably enjoy salon and spa services.” The salon and spa services weren’t what I cared for - it was the fact that they had just opened a location in the very train station that I use daily, and that this location offered hours that worked for me.

The coupon itself was for a set of services called “the Man”, which included a “Signature Haircut & style, Shampoo & conditioning treatment, Scalp massage, Paraffin hand wax, Hand massage, Hot towel & facial toner, Cleanup shampoo after the man, Free touch-up within two weeks of previous appointment, and Complimentary beverage.” [the crazy capitalization is all theirs]. Although I needed only the haircut, the coupon was $25 for $45 worth of services. Nice.

However, this statement on their website troubled me – the salon was designed to be a “sophisticated yet modest environment where men could go to comfortably enjoy luxurious salon services without worrying about feeling out of place or being gawked at, like at other female-dominated salons and spas." Not sure about you men out there, but the only time I get gawked at when I go get a haircut is when I’ve gone two months without trimming things, and I look like a Chia Pet Head on steroids. And how could you be “manly” in a salon? I had trouble reconciling this – I pictured a place where macho men laughed loudly at lewd jokes and downed beverages in one gulp and watched an Ultimate Fighting Championship match on flat screen TVs, while … getting pedicures?

But I made my appointment anyway and showed up at the place last Friday. I received a friendly greeting and was ushered inside to a room with an industrial design. There was music playing over speakers – music that had a lot of guitar riffs in it, so I figured that made it manly. And there were flat screen TVs on every wall, but instead of playing Ultimate Fighting, they were playing “Goodwill Hunting.” Hmm, I thought. This isn’t too bad.

I was offered a beverage, and chose a simple bottle of water. Appropriately hydrated, I was led over to a small tub at waist level, asked to roll up my sleeves and then dip my hands in hot paraffin. “Umm, what is this for?” I asked meekly. “To moisturize and soften up your hands,” came the answer. Duh.

Gloves were quickly slipped on, and with the paraffin slowly congealing, I was led into my chair. On the TV, Matt Damon was solving crazy math equations while MIT professors looked on in awe. Suddenly, my vision was obscured – a hot towel had appeared out of nowhere and was firmly wrapped around my face. I started to resist, but lost my resolve as the warmth from the scented towel caused my facial muscles to relax. Mmm, this is good, I thought.

Gloves were taken off my hands, and the paraffin peeled away. Are my hands softer? I wondered. I had no time to answer, because a hand massage immediately ensued. Mmm. This is REALLY good. 
With the massage done, the towel off my face, and Matt Damon on screen again, the haircut finally commenced.

“How much hair would you like taken off?”

I was confused. The people at Supercuts usually just slapped a guard onto a clipper and buzzed the same amount off from all over my head.
My hairdresser sighed knowingly, and proceeded to go to work. Snips here, there, everywhere. Locks of hair fell from my head in small bunches. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon got into an argument. Then my hairdresser paused.

“Who cuts your hair?” she asked.
I had no answer. Lots of people cut my hair. A different person cut my hair each time. I believed in presenting an equal opportunity head of hair for everyone.

“They’ve got your hair at all different lengths,” she said when I didn’t respond.

Huh, I thought. Interesting.
And so it went. She would ask me a question, or make a statement, and I would have no answer for her, and she would go about fixing things. And fix she did, because by the time we were done, I looked good. That’s right, I looked Matt Damon good. And I felt bad-ass. Jason Bourne bad-ass. Because my hair looked good and my hands were soft and my facial muscles were all relaxed.

I walked out of Halo for Men thinking that I would have to find a way in my budget to make this happen again soon. The train station was crowded, it being Friday, but I walked confidently through, daring anyone to get in my way or threaten me in any way. Because with my new haircut I had gained the ability to pull Jason Bourne moves on my assailants and leave them broken on the floor.

And as they lay there defeated they would think, “Damn that guy kicked my ass. But he had the softest hands…”

Hello? God? Could you please induce Chicago?

It’s the end of April – May starts this week – and I’m still walking around with my poofy North Face jacket on. I still lean into the 30mph wind gusts and try to ignore the biting 40 degree weather, telling myself that I’ve made it through worse weather in this city. I tell myself that I only need to hang on for another few days, and surely things will warm up then. Except that I’ve been telling myself this for the last month – a month where the rest of the world long ago decided to usher in Spring. While elsewhere flowers bloom, birds sing, babies laugh, and people sing Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” to each other – in Chicago I still wipe away my tears of frustration and soldier on.

What makes things worse is Chicago’s schizophrenic insistence on sprinkling balmy warm days between the regular arctic blasts. This continues until one day it will be summer and 90 degrees out. Chicago plays sick mind games with its population, and for the longest time I struggled to find the proper analogy for what the city goes through, until it finally hit me – every year Chicago gets pregnant in September, and tries to give birth to Summer nine months later.

Think about it – the city starts out happy and giddy with possibilities in September. The first trimester is not too bad – sure there is morning sickness here and there as the mercury drops occasionally, but there’s the bigger picture to keep in mind. The second trimester the hormones go out of whack, and things get dicey. You can’t do anything to please the city, and even if you take one wrong step you get hit with freezing -20 weather, with snowstorms that make you wonder about this whole global warming nonsense. You eventually round the corner into the third trimester, which is when you begin praying for the pregnancy to conclude. This is the most frustrating part, especially the last few weeks.

Here is where the false contractions begin. One day it’ll be cold and blustery, and then suddenly it’ll be 65 and perfect. Is this it? Do you rush to pack away your winter clothes and bust out the flip-flops? Haha – no. Just kidding. False contraction – the next day it’s back to 30 degrees and depressing. Then the contractions start coming closer and closer together – two warm days here and there separated by only four or five cold ones. But your patience is being tested, because it is May now, and you really, really want to feel the sun on your face.

Now the contractions are close enough together that Chicago has to be taken to the hospital, where you as the useless significant other wait around, twiddling your thumbs, leafing through old magazines and drinking bad coffee from the cafeteria. And you wait. And wait. And then suddenly it begins. The city is ready to give birth! You rush to its side and hold its hand and ice its brow while it flings obscenities at you that make you blush. “C’mon honey, c’mon, you can do it” you gently encourage.

Suddenly Summer starts to crown, and the city tries to push, and you hold your breath in anticipation, and time slows down. And then it’s there – with a wet plop Summer arrives into the world. Temperatures immediately soar into the 90s, you are dazed and confused, but weirdly happy. You’re a new person now, with new responsibilities. You have to wear lighter clothes now, and purchase things like running shoes and bikes and roller blades. You wonder what life was like before Summer, but can’t quite remember, and anyway you don’t really care anymore. The city has blessed you with warm weather, and that’s all that matters.

Personally, I’d rather we just induce pregnancy or have a C-section every year and get Summer here on time in April – so what if Chicago thinks that’ll result in a premature baby? I don’t care. It saves me from the agonizing depression that I’m currently going through. Unfortunately I know I’m not in control. It’ll be warm when Chicago is ready to let it be warm. Until then, I’ll have to suck it up, and continue to wear my poofy North Face jacket.

Guilty pleasures

My work productivity has been creeping up during business hours. Whether this is because my nascent coffee habit is turning me into twitchy yet efficient worker bee, or whether I’ve reduced the frequency with which I browse www.cakewrecks.com, I don’t know. But I’m happy with this development, especially since it means that I have less work to do over the weekend, and can actually tackle those pesky projects that have been sitting on my to-do list, collecting the proverbial dust.

This weekend’s project entailed taking my calcifying CD collection and ripping the songs onto my computer's hard-drive so that, you know, I too could act like today’s cool youth and listen to music on something called an “i-Pod” (you should check these devices out, seriously). My ulterior motive, however, was to do away with damning evidence that I have no taste in music – it’s easier for me to secretly store my Michael Bolton collection as mp3s in a folder cryptically titled “Bichael Molton”, than to have my daughter accidentally discover the “Best Of” collection years from now, and go crying to her mother because she doesn’t understand why daddy is this way.

Along the ripping process I discovered that at one time I enjoyed listening to all things Jackson (several Michael CD’s, as well as multiple Janet compilations), that at one time I had an affinity for Celtic music (go ahead, laugh – I’m proud of being the only Pakistani who enjoys jamming to a rollicking Irish bagpipe number), and that I have a fetish for Backstreet Boys songs. There, I said it. It feels good to let that out. I can finally move on now.

And don’t you dare judge me. I know you have secret song crushes too, even though you hate to admit it. Act nonchalant if you want. Flaunt your love for indy music and that obscure band from Turkey that no one else has heard, as evidence that you’re a music cognoscenti. But at the end of the day, I *know* that when you’re cruising down the highway with no one in the car, you’ll roll up the windows and secretly blast “Quit Playing Games With My Heart”. And that you’ll sing along. Loudly. And cry, because you don’t want others to play games with your heart.

Anecdotally I know this to be true. But I obtained evidence this weekend as well. I was ripping songs from a mix collection that a special someone gave to me while I was a freshman in college [special someone shall remain unnamed but this was well before I met my wife, my true special someone (I love you honey!)], when Saeeda brought Nuha into the room and started playing with the baby. It just so happened that I was burning a Backstreet Boys song from this CD at the time, and I couldn’t mute the computer volume fast enough. I don’t know why, but I felt flustered and dirty almost, like I was browsing an adult website and was trying to Alt-Tab my way out of the screen or something. Still, a 3 second clip managed to escape before I could mute the speaker. That’s when Saeeda turned around and casually asked why I was listening to “As Long as You Love Me.” From the Backstreet Boys.

Let me repeat – she identified the song from a three second clip. I’m not the only one people …

Making It

Yesterday I had to go to one of our team members to give him a heads up on a new project that was coming down the pipe, and which would need a pretty quick turnaround on his part. This team member has been with Abbott for a lot longer than I have, and his grasp of things is impressive. So we started our conversation and he began to ask me specific questions. I started merrily answering away, until he suddenly interrupted me.

"Wait ... hold on Faisal. You ... actually ... sound like you know what you're talking about dude!"

And I paused. Not because I was offended, but because he was right. I DID know what I was talking about. Heck yeah! It only took me eight months in my current rotation to get to this point, but I had made it!

See, I prescribe to the Infinite Monkey Theorem - if you give a monkey sitting at a keyboard enough time, it will eventually type out the complete works of William Shakespeare. And I sometimes think of myself as that monkey - stringing together random jargon endlessly in the hopes that one day it will make sense to someone. And today it did.

Now, if only I can game the system so that this guy writes my performance review, I'll be set.

I'll beat you silly .. when I'm 60

Last week we concluded play in our Abbott basketball league. My team, playing in the competitive division, came in a respectable 3rd, although I feel that we did not live up to our potential. There was plenty of blame to go around, including some for yours truly - ever since the marathon last October, I've engaged in activity that can very loosely be defined as "exercise" - and even that I've only managed to do once a week. Although the almost daily cleaning out my daughter's diaper pail should count - the little thing is a champion poop generator, and carrying that pail to and from my building's trash chute would leave anyone winded.

What disappointed me most about my play, however, was my inability to keep up with the younger whippersnappers on the court. I'd be guarding someone who would blow by me with ease, and I'd be left blaming my aging knees. Or I'd go up for a jump shot only to have my shot rejected into the bleachers. My coping mechanism focused on the fact that I was more than 10 years older than some of the competition, and that I was actually pretty physically fit for my age. In fact, were I to face my opponents when they were older - say we were both in our 60s - I'd kick their @$$. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but it helped justify why I kept tripping over myself.

Still, I need to figure out an exercise routine, and fast. And cleaning out my daughter's diaper pail does not count.

Stewart vs. Cramer

I wanted to wait a few days before putting pen to paper on the recently concluded Mad Money/The Daily Show Battle Royale. There are plenty of opinions floating around, and I wanted to add mine to the mix, but only after spending a few days digesting last Thursday’s events.

Basically, I think that the Cramer interview was one of Jon Stewart's best ever. Which is funny because Stewart has had dignitaries, celebrities, and luminaries on his show before, and has handled controversial topics galore. But this time he clearly chose to dispense with the gloves, and to aggressively pursue his guest at all cost.

I don’t know why Cramer chose his approach of almost complete subservience. I was expecting to see some of the vigor he displays on Mad Money or, at the very least, the aggressive recitation of a couple of talking points CNBC had to have provided him with. But in retrospect, it was probably smart on Cramer’s part to avoid from being confrontational. How would he have been able to remain aggressive in the face of video clips of him touting hedge fund strategies that were at best shady, if not borderline illegal? How would he have been able to remain aggressive when trying to defend the idolizing of CEOs by his network?

Throughout the interview, the passion in Stewart’s voice was obvious, and his language and delivery could not have been more potent. I also can’t say enough about the research and writing teams that support Stewart’s interview prep – they have got to be one of the best in the business.

Stewart’s performance was eerily reminiscent of his takedown of bow-tie wearing Tucker Carlson on Crossfire several years ago. Given the result of that confrontation (Crossfire canceled, Tucker Carlson subsequently condemned to bouncing around), and now this Cramer interview, the powers that be can no longer afford to underestimate TDS. Jon Stewart has become the unofficial outlet of frustrated masses that have no special interest group to represent them, no talking head to spin their points, and no lobbyist to pressure Congress. Don’t get me wrong – there is an undoubted leftward lean to the politics of TDS, and there are differences that I have with Stewart. But he invariably presents a reasoned, logical, and impassioned argument of the type that you just don’t see used anymore.

So what will be the likely outcome of this episode? I don’t think CNBC can tout “In Cramer We Trust” as the show’s tagline anymore. Doing so would be crass and disingenuous. Cramer’s ratings are likely to suffer – the spat with Stewart and the subsequent outcome has been covered by multiple media outlets, and has had to have reached his viewership.

Unfortunately, unless the network loses advertisers en masse, I don’t expect to see changes to the channel itself. But I’m positive GE executives were watching to see what would happen during the TDS interview, and are now contemplating making some modifications, however superficial. Is it too much to ask that CNBC reporters actually fulfill their responsibility to the public and do hard-core investigative reporting that ensures we don’t get blindsided with a financial catastrophe next time? Probably. The existing culture is too far ingrained to change overnight. But I do believe that there are good people working at CNBC, and I hope their voices are going to be heard a little more clearly now. The tomfoolery of “Fast Money”, the coddling of CEOs and the bombast of Mad Money has got to tone itself down, if not stop altogether. Because, at the end of the day, what is happening around us, as Stewart so clearly stated, is not a f*#$&^% joke.