No, The Man from Madras Musings has finally not lost his marbles, and that clarification is only in case you did not think it had already happened. Those are all abbreviations that the IT world has given us. The first is Bring Your Own Food – a scheme when subsidised canteens were wound up following one of these periodic recessions that batter the world of code frequently. The second was Bring Your Own Computer, when the licence laws for software became so confusing and upgrades so frequent that companies shifted the responsibility on to the staff. Now the latest, and this is Chennai specific, is Bring Your Own Water. There is also an offshoot of this – BYOP – Bring Your Own Plate. This is to ensure that you use YOW to wash YOP after you eat YOF and before you go back to work on YOC. There is a more extreme alternative – BYOH – Be (at) Your Own Home and work from there.
All of these have been brought about because of AWS (acute water scarcity and not Amazon Web Services) in the OMR (that you know) area. This IT Corridor has apparently been planned with no permanent arrangement for water beyond the usual WTs (Water Tankers) and when those went on strike there was chaos. Or as the IT people would have put it – a severe malfunction or glitch took place that caused an outage of the entire system. The denizens of the tech world have been left if not high, certainly dry.
MMM (oh come on, you know what this stands for) is quite amazed, as he is sure are his readers that this hi-tech corridor has such an Achilles Heel or in tech terms a bug that can paralyse everything year after year each May unless a fix is developed and a patch fixed. This can at best be implementation of RWH (see page 1 for what this is) systems so that when the rains come, there will be enough water that can percolate to collection points and be available in the dry season. In the meantime, BYOW it is.
But that is all very well as far as drinking water and washing of plates are concerned. But what of ablutions as they are euphemistically referred to in the old world of plain English? Will that necessitate a policy of BYOB and BYOM (bucket and mug respectively)? And will that mean that for those from up north it will be a case of BYOL (lota)? Or will there be a strict ruling that those who work in the IT Corridor have to avoid MYOW (Make Your Own Water)? Only the future will tell.
MYOW reminds MMM of the latest technological solutions that are available to combat the GWS (Great Water Scarcity) – there is a new product in the block that creates water out of air. Apparently it traps the moisture in the Chennai atmosphere, of which we have plenty, and makes it available for us to drink, bathe and ablute. And then there is the other solution that conserves water by not letting it pour from taps but only releasing a fine mist of droplets. That is all very well for the hands. But what if we need a bath? Imagine standing under a shower and all you get is a fine mist. As for the nether regions MMM assumes it will be a case of BYOP (paper). Desperate times have clearly resulted in desperate solutions too.
hilarious.. LOL
Final solution – GLIM – Go Live in Mars. Lets hope people will be more environment conscious, less greedy, not pretentious and without politics, politicians, bureaucrats and crony businessmen.
Some years ago I used to work in the IT function of a reputed company. That was the time when BYOD was being touted as the latest innovation in IT ( a fad of course) . The ‘D’ in the BYOD stood for ‘Device’. Our management pundits loved it — they were keeping up with the joneses. Our IT department resisted BYOD, because of the wild non-standardisation it brought with it. (in security and maintenance). We gave ‘D’ a new meaning. It was a derogatory slang word for a certain part of the anatomy. :). Our company never implemented the BYOD plan after that.
Haha