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11:27 AM
Bikram Vohra
JournalismPakistan.com
July 18, 2013
One of the nicest things to be is a Consultant. Great fun. You don’t need to do anything but consult which means tell other people how to do the job you won’t do. Well, better get off this track before someone wises up and tells you about this consultancy (same fella) I got with a newspaper in Goa, by far the most advanced publication from that truly blessed place.
Talk about advance. Day One they tell me they have prepared a dropbox for me and we will only communicate through it. Since I have no idea what that is and it can’t be a bench in a park where we exchange secrets hidden in a newspaper I thank them very much and wait for its delivery, like it was a goodie bag or a sort of joining gift. Then they send me a cryptic line: http://mbox.thegoan.net/index.php?domain=thegoan.net.
I am told to take this line and go to the drop box and put it in and after much travail and voyages of discovery I manage to do this and up pops a demand for a password. So I call them back and tell them I need a password and they send me one. It is 4YLo65Vc.
What? Is this a trigonometry examination or an email? Anyway, being the sort who never says die I try all combinations, is that a zero or an O like el, em, en, O and that red message comes up telling me I am messing it up. And then I copy the article and then eureka, I copy the password so I lose the copy of the article and only that one line appears so I try to relocate the article but I did not save the changes and all that work is somewhere in the ether (who says matter is indestructible???) and I have to do it all over again.
Why can’t they send a password like ‘cheers’ or ‘yoohoo’ for untrained slobs like us, just look at it, you’d think it was a cryptogram from a Dan Brown novel leading to Tutakhamen’s treasure.
Oh yes, in case you are concerned, I know what a dropbox is, I just am not sure how to get there and these machines are getting so complicated that whenever some nerd tells me it is easy I want to hit him. I have this Ipad which you are supposed to caress with your fingers and the pages flip and things happen. With mine, I keep pushing it and then the same page sort of goes off and comes back and…oh, but that is another story.
(The writer is a Senior Editorial Advisor of Khaleej Times and the paper’s former Editor. He has also been the Editor of Gulf News, Gulf Today, Emirates Today and Bahrain Tribune)
If my call is so important to them, why don’t they answer it for 22 minutes?
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