by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/01/29 09:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/01/29/7304132.aspx
Between the time I blogged about Bangalore Sans Scooter, aka Counting backward from ten in Sanskrit and now, many of my regular readers have been concerned about the situation with me and my scooter.
I know this for a fact.
Not because I am arrogant (which I unquestionably am, it just didn't apply here).
And not because I am self centered (which I am not, though lots of people who don't know me all that well assume I am).
But because so many people have been asking me! :-)
Not everyone even knew I was here, a side effect of the last minute nature of the trip (my favorite message was the one from Cathy which I received soon after I landed and checked mail -- the title was OMG -- You're in India? and I was laughing for several minutes at the message from this friend of mine who just came back from a vacation in South Asia to find out that her friend was going on "vacation" in another part of South Asia!).
Anyway, I have been getting many messages about the scooter situation, and people have generally been either concerned or sympathetic or outraged (or some conventional and occasionally unconventional combination of these traits), so I thought I should let people know what is going on so people do not have to worry....
They were able to find a place to repair the broken parts of the scooter, and in fact I am sitting on it right now!
Just a few minutes ago I was scooting around the building -- nominally to test the scooter out but actually just greeting many people who had mainly had to come to me or who I had met at lunch and now I finally go to go talk with them, it was very nice.
I had actually met Vidya, Cathy's opposite number here (the Director of Strategy at MSRI) and we had the chance to talk about Tamil for a bit, which was fun (she is actually Bengali not Tamil but she knows about the language and many of the projects that happen related to it so it was a great little language policy conversation between two people who just find language issues interesting).
Then I had some other conversations about places to see which will help me over the next few days, more on this as it happens....
Now they never did find he basket but it looks like they will just reimburse me for that. And then everything will back to normal.
And things are close enough to normal now that I can get back to doing stuff the way I am used to doing it.
Special thanks to Joy for pushing them to do the right thing and for everyone else up and down the tree for helping to further expedite things, lending their time and effort and position and reputation.
And if course thanks to Jet Airways for doing the right thing. In my largess I will assume they would have done it without that extra help and support from people in MSRI, but just in case that help was needed I am truly thankful for it being there....
This post brought to you by ॐ (U+0950, DEVANAGARI OM)