YeT AnOtHeR MiShAP !!! Yeah That's ME ;-)

So, friends here again.. I, the favorite BAKRA of God was made a target of an unusual, unbelievable, unexpected and unfortunate (may be) event of my life. But, the best part is (or I should say the worst part is) that this time I was not alone ;-). This time I was luckily not the only Bakra but there were 6 other people along with me :-). So, lets start with the narration :-P

This all started around 3 months back ;-). We wer about 14 people who were supposed to appear for a Certification exam called "CSM Certification" - a term applicable mainly to Amdocs. CSM- Customer Service Management and is one of the major application of Amdocs with which I have been associated for the past 2 years :-). Prior to our batch there have been two more batches who have appeared for this exam and unfortunately the pass rate happens to be not so good :-(. actually the passing percentage required to clear this exam is 80%. [Ab jaha engineering ke exam mein 35% bhi pahad ki chadhai jitna mushkil lagta tha us he kisam k logon k samne agar ap 80% ka target rakh do to 50% moral down to waise he ho jata hai ;-)] Not that complicating as it sounds :-P.
Well, now the next batch was decided and the preparations were about to start :-). We were supposed to start with our so called training sessions on various topics from August '08 for about a period of 1 and half month. So the training schedule was planned and implemented. The final exam date was chosen to be 22 september '08.

Actually its not a big deal to pass or flunk in this exam, but its just that it is set as one of the goals for this financial year for me and now or later eventually it is necessary for each one to appear and get certified ;-). So, i thought why not this time :-).. Hey, the thought was innocent enough its just that i forgot ki.. mere sath kabhi kuch ek baar mein theek nahi hota... Ooops dont get any ideas yaaro.. abhi tak to exam date tak he pahuchi hoon result ko to abhi time hai :-)..

So, on 17 September 08 out training co-ordinator asked us if we were all comfortable with the exam date of 22 september.. :). Yes!!! I told nothing is right with me in first shot.. so within a day or two we were told that the exam is postpponed indefinitely. :-( bu hu hu hu.. Well, I am not sad because I had studied a lot and I was very prepared this time and again I will have to reprepare etc... its just that I was mentally prepared to give exam this time and since the date was changed I will again have to mentally prepare myself for the same ;-).

Finally the date was decided to be 16 October '08 and I actually ahd to work very hard to mentally prepare myself ;) by giving 4 mock exams prior to the final one and barely managing to pass few of them and the remaining.... [ mmm aaaaa...mmmm... understood na :-( ]. Newaz, then the day came finally and we had our lunch. Since the timings for exam were from 1:30 PM to 5:30 PM. So 11 of us who acctully registered themselves for exam appeared at the examination room. The instructore gave us the instructions and we logged in to the exam...

Hmm.. so now the clock ticked by and so did the time and we were looking and answering the questions with appropriate answers :-). Then checked and rechecked and rechecked and so on.. Meanwhile, we did not submit our session just navigated to different pages of questions. Ap soch rahe hoge ki ab tak kuch trajedy to hui he nahi.. this blog does not justify the title "MiSHaP" right?? Dont worry. I will tell you now. In this exam we were given a set of documents to refer to for finding correct exam. During the process of searching i came accross an XMl file and I opened it to find my answer. But... you know what.. inorder to open that XML file using internet explorer that examination session of mine was halted and this XML file got opened in same internet explorer :-(. I called upon the invigilator to look into it and hlep me. She was also shocked at such a weird situation and tried to call someone for technical help. :-P Meanwhile I tried to restore the session by choosing BACK option and hence I was successful and was able to restore the exam session. Trust me I was able to breath only after my session was restored :-). Newaz, by this time 2 hours had gone and 4 people had already left the room after finishing their exam and 7 of us had remained behind :-).

We were killing another 2 hours as none of us was interested to go back to our desk and continue with the work ;-). But then.. the actual tragedy happened. Suddenly one of us complained that she got an error message saying :"Session Expired". Later each one of us got same error as we tried to move between different pages. Now the invigilator was really tensed she asked us we had submitted our answers. But then none of us had done that as we thought that submit is to be done finally when we are done with answering. There were some calls to the technicians and it was decided that the technicians would try to retrieve answers from our session via backend and if it would be successful then we will be evaluated and results will be shown else... tha sad part is we will have to reappear for the exam :-(.

Trust me initially we didnot submit our answers just to make sure that we are scoring atleast 80%. But now we all prayed and wished that we should not have waited so long and clicked that submit button then even we would have made it on time and got the results :-). But wo kehte hai na "Ab pachtaye hot kya jab chidiya chug gayi khet..."

But one thing that the supervisor confirmed was that this particualr scenario had never occured before. This was the most weirdest exxam she had monitored :-P. Ha Ha ha.. She did not know me much and that I was appearing for the exam else she would have expected the most weirdest and unbelievable things to have happened :-). Well among the 7 unfortunate examinees was my room-mate Abhil;asha who said...ki "Neha tumhare sath hum bhi is kaand mein fas gaye... Tumhara to koi kaam ek baar mein theek hota nahi.. and tumhare chakkar mein hum sab bhi fas gaye.. [I should say latak gaye ;-)].

Well there were people waiting for us to hear out our results but when I told them about this MiSHaP they weren't very much surprised as they know when Neha is around there has to be something abnormal and unnatural ;-)!!! Surely not much surprising to my blog readers as well ;-) Ha Ha Ha :-D

Ohh Ccc Dis !!! Has It Ever Happened To You???

Hey, its not Ohh Ccc Dis.. its called OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder :-)!!!

This time I am not here to tell a story.. Infact these are all incidents based on facts :).

Incident 1:

Ishita is an 8 year old girl, who constantly performs low in her tests and flunks them. The reason here is not that she isn't smart at studies or has low IQ or is less intelligent, the actual reason is that she is overcautious while writing in exams. She writes, rubs and rewrites an alphabet or a word untill she feels that it is rightly written. (Mind you here, not CORRECTLY WRITTEN but RIGHTLY WRITTEN). She is definitely aware of all the correct answer but she doesnot proceed to answer next question untill she feels she has rightly written the current one. If you look at her answer sheet, you will notice that all her a's, b's and c's are exactly is same pattern as if printed there.. and why not she takes all the world's time to make them so and hence ends up without completing all the answers.

Incident 2:

Varun was 3 years old when his parents noticed that their son has a weird habit. He never steps on joining lines of different tiles on the floor of any room. He purposefully jumps over any crooked line that comes in his way while walking. He also showed his irritation if he had to step on any crooked line or joining lines of tiles while he took a walk. At a garden Varun selected a particular leaf lying in a park and used to walk on it only. He used to walk in the direction whereever he found that leaf. No matter how long he had to stretch himself to reach that leaf, in this process he ended up hurting himself even but still he did not change his habit. He also used to count his steps to any place he went. And this is not just it, he made sure that the number of steps he takes is an Even number. He simply hated Odd :). In case the number of Steps turned out to be Odd then he would take an extra long or an extra short step to make it Even number. This habit of his made him appear weird, but he couldnot help it and neither could his parents treat him inspite of various attempts from their side.

Incident 3:

Shubhra is now 24 years old. She has a habit of locking the door thrice each time she unlocked it. This made her feel safe. Though it may sound strange to you, but its true. If she unlocked the door and then locked it once she dint feel safe or did not believe that it was locked. So, she used to unlock it, lock it and do this thrice before she felt safe that the door is now locked properly. She also had a compulsive habit of washing every utensil she used. Washing every bucket every time she used it. She also used to wash every tap after washing her hands and before closing the tap. She said she did not feel her hands were clean if she washed hands and closed the tap with her hands without washing the tap before turning it off.

Incident 4:

Ramya was an intelligent girl. But she was a little superstitious :). How??? Well, she used to relate her happiness with Numbers... and not just any number. EVEN NUMBERS ;).. Yes again, early morning when she used to get up, she made sure she keeps both her feet down at the same time (2 feet, even number). While brushing she used to make sure she brushes her teeth even number of times in each direction. While combing there should be even number of brushing in each partition of head. If she heard someone sneeze, she used to wait for him/her to sneeze again. Why so? well she believed that Odd - Evil and Even - Go[o]d. There is BALANCE in each and everything and only Even stands for balance whereas Odd disbalances :). Weird isn't it?

QUESTION:

While reading these incidents, could you relate yourself to any single thing? Or something equally weird has ever happened to you? This weird thing might not exactly mean the mentioned things it can be anything as weird as "Always using same pen/pencil box for an exam because it is lucky for you". "Wearing same shirt or same color for any important occasion/meeting or interview".

ANSWER:

In case your answer to above question is "YES" or you could pen down any single such weird habit or so called superstition then I would say it is very Normal. Yes, studies have revealed that every average human being goes through a phase like this. BUT, surely for the above mentioned cases, the severity of these incidents/habits and weird behaviour is BEYOND LIMIT. As long as you can control these habits (Weird habits) and they are not harmful to you or any one else, its acceptable. In case its not controllable and is BEYOND LIMIT, then it means that you are suffering from OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Its not that scary as it sounds. But then there are cases where this is actually treated and medications are given to the patients.

Well, now you must be wondering why the hell in this whole wide world this girl decided to leave her masala stories n scripts and diverted her attention to such a topic :-P. Now, here the reason is that I just watched "As Good As It Gets" - Where Jack Nicholson is suffering from OCD and is a bigoted romantic novelist. After watching the movie I did some google serach on OCD because I could find out many weird bevioral patterns in myself. Then I also took a test on OCD - to determine if I am actually a patient or not :-D. To my relief I scored 10/15 which suggests that I am quite capable of becoming one :-).

If you wish to you can take test at: http://psychcentral.com/ocdquiz.htm

Newaz, I would love to hear from you in case you also turn out to be suffering from OCD like me (HE HE HE :-D) or even worse, you are a psycho like me to take this test just for FUN :-).

Hey, let me know your score :-P...