Humour

Chaibo takes to blogging

T A Balasubramanian on the plans to utilise chai-serving robot Chaibo, for blogging corporate meetings.

Another meeting is in progress at Baffle Corporation. “These minutes are tending to become an epic story. Soon, we might have to record them on CDs and play them back at home to catch up,” says Brando Bhatt, Marketing Head of Baffle, wearily putting down another bunch of papers with assorted minutes from earlier meetings at Baffle’s battlefield and tea-guzzling zone, the conference room.

“Yes, Brando, I agree,” says Gulabi Manpowa, Head of HR. “We can’t have so much on our backlog every time. All we do is sit here and read through the proceedings of previous meetings. And have Chaibo here serving us with endless cups of tea. Not that I mind Chaibo’s service,” she hastens to add.

The last thing that you, Papyrus Bytewala, CIO, want in your hands, as the person responsible for information management at Baffle, are uncontrolled and ever-expanding records of meetings being compiled and distributed on CDs. Even if they are considered as Holy Writ by your CFO, Fin Fina, and the assorted mafia to whom your services are offered.

So here they are, stalwarts all, debating the matter gravely. Also present is Brooke Bond, your versatile systems officer. And finally, there is Chaibo, now a permanent fixture in all Baffle meetings, rolling in with the tea service and pitching in with corporate patter. Bond, of course, has been working on Chaibo’s program ever since the robot has been inducted into Baffle’s confusing matrix of people. He is the designated owner of Chaibo, whose personality has been designed to adapt to one such owner, at least when it’s on the initial learning curve.

Of course, IT and the endless management challenges that it keeps generating, are wonderful domains to work in. Whenever you get depressed about budget cuts, your potential for continued employment, or the sorry state of your income tax eating away huge chunks of your salary, you can always look to TINGA (the inexplicable next great arrival) for providing you with a valuable escape route from immediate calamities. This TINGA has always worked for the hassled CIO across many decades of computer evolution. In the past, it has been LAN, or client-server or Web-centric architecture or any number of other such inexplicable arrivals that have swept across the IT landscape, often creating irrational exuberance.

If everything works out, TINGA will revive your spirits dramatically, or at least brighten your prospects of dealing with Fin Fina and his insistence on getting return on investment even if it means having to making everyone squeeze blood out of inanimate matter. The current hot TINGA, according to leading-edge articles, are Weblogs, or blogs for short. If you look at the alarming explosion of numbers that these blogs are generating, they seem to be the wave of the future for enhancing the dissemination of company knowledge and fulfilling the potential of the Internet and a dozen other things you could never have imagined this time last year. Sort of like what e-business, ERP, portals, and dotcoms were going to be before they got distracted along the way.

So you get the brightest idea of the month and say, “Why don’t we program Chaibo to blog our meetings?”

Bond, sitting next to you, almost chokes on his tea.

“Blog our meetings, chief?” says Bond. “What for?”

“So that we can all be free to focus on important issues during the meeting. We have a robot capable of learning and all we get him to do is serve tea, which is a gross underutilisation of IT resources,” you declare, shooting a glance at Fin Fina. “What if Chaibo can be trained to blog fresh ideas at these meetings as we talk, put them into personal memos, and post it to each of our desks? And then we extend the blog to have other people at Baffle comment on what Chaibo comes up with.”

“That’s a good idea, Papyrus,” says Fin Fina, approvingly. Your little talk of underutilised IT resources has perked him up, which, of course, has been your intention. He has obviously made some rapid financial computations and discovered that Chaibo might, after all, be worth the price we paid to Baff-Tech, which ran into a mind-boggling figure last month.

“If we could all simply sit around and babble at these meetings, and Chaibo could make sense of all of that and do the minutes, save it and distribute it, we’re probably going to get much more done than ever before in the history of—what did you call it, Bond?—ah, I have it here in my minutes—enterprise physical agglomeration,” says Fin Fina, proudly.

“Hello?” says Gulabi rolling her eyes. “Can you tell us what that means, Bond? I don’t seem to recollect it.”

“Of course,” says Bond, who never misses the opportunity to run through his Jungle Book of Jargon and practice his public speaking skills. “Enterprise physical agglomeration, or EPA, engages physical entities, like you and me, using a recognised old paradigm that combines voice and physical interaction with information sharing to baffle business communication by obfuscating …”

“Oh, please, Bond,” you cut him short, “It’s a fancy word for an office meeting, Gulabi,” you say. “If Chaibo can blog, we can have a new level of efficiency in enterprise agglomera … I mean, meetings.”

“You’re beginning to understand RoI, Papyrus,” says Fin Fina. “Let’s get this project under way quickly, shall we? When do we see some results?”

“Hold on,” says Bond, who has now seen which way this is going. It would mean several months of work ahead running endless programs with enormous databases and intensive testing and debugging. “I’ll have to go back to Ironica Robotica and see what modifications need to be done. I’m not even sure Chaibo has been designed to blog.”

“So find out, Bond,” says Gulabi, smiling at him. “We have made Chaibo a much more civilised staff member now, haven’t we, Chaibo?” she continues, turning to pat the squat dome-headed machine that sits blinking next to her. The robot makes a purring sound and offers Gulabi a cookie.

You shudder as you recall the debugging sessions that came up because of Chaibo’s early gaffe involving the use of colourful language with Gulabi. Now, of course, Chaibo has been given a reprieve, and seems to have taken to politeness and politically correct language that even you could be proud of having fostered in the corporate echelon.