A Geekish Love Story!

            "Reality continues to ruin my life !” – Calvin & Hobbes! 

In a time when the expectations about my life partner were even bigger than the biggest floating point number my computer could crunch, did I come upon this event. I had very strict requirements about my life partner, some of which went like this: She must never be the sqrt(-1), must never divide by zero, must have a determinant equal to zero and must also be x years old in x squared. Above all these, she must first decode these requirements to pass the screening! Well, for those poor souls who are wondering, what is all this mess about? let me clarify. The requirements say that she must be simple; must be very intelligent, must have singular qualities and must have the same age as mine! No wonder, girls run away from the very sight of me :) . Relishing on this “freedom”, I came upon this event!

It was an April 1st. I was hardly awake, when I got a call from her. This girl, lets declare her by the constant Gee, used to work with me a year ago. Candid to say, I used to like her, but never got to solve in real time the nonlinear optimization problem happening inside me, due to my above said constraints. Thus I moved on and took up a good professional opportunity in this new city. Ever since then, this is the first time I was hearing from her.

Probably due to the cached thoughts of her, I could readily identify her voice from the very first “hello” I heard over the phone. She had just landed in the city two days back, was put up in a hotel and was hunting for an accommodation. We decided to meet up on the weekend and I promised her to catalogue all the brokers I have met since my Big bang in this new city. It was interesting to watch at myself, how the optimization problem slowly started to relax some of its very “concrete” constraints and began an iterative descent towards an optimum.

We met at a spot as had planned, collated all the broker acquaintances and started the hunt. The search was tiresome, since Gee wanted a perfect house! I had no clue of why she was so adamant on where the pooja room should be or how many bedrooms should be there or whether the kitchen was spacious enough! We looked at houses from 1BHK to nBHK (no bedrooms), from 2D searches to 3D searches (in multistoried dwellings) and finally “fortunately” found one. The day was tiresome, as if I had been put on finding the best ‘kernel’ to host a learning problem. But I was happy that I could spend a lot of time with her.

Probably, girls have this interesting behavior of filling up their abodes with items that are more than necessary. The week after the first meeting, I took Gee for shopping. I was curious, why she should care so much about the number of vessels she wanted to buy or how much capacity rice cooker she needed. I never asked why, since I could just figure that out myself rather than throwing away another cliché, about her optimism for more roommates. I hate platitudes. Gee seemed far more complicated than I thought, but I was kind of ready to sacrifice my first constraint for her.

After setting up the house, I called her for a treat, and we had a great dinner at one of the most expensive restaurants. After dinner, I dropped her at her new house, came back to my apartment, and had just started brooding over my new algorithm, when I got a call from an unknown number. It was Gee again, but she was calling from a telephone booth, in the middle of the night. How stupid! She was worried and was panting and crying in between. She had forgotten her mobile at the restaurant. She had all her contact numbers in that and was expecting an important call that night. She was pleading to get back to the hotel and get the phone as early as possible. I had no options, but to turn my computer to hibernate! The hotel was about to close, but I managed to get to the waiter and fortunately get back the phone. I was kind of pissed off with the lack of responsibility from Gee. But she was crying like a sweet little kid and I guess I had started loving her. That night I had a conversation with myself on whether I should tell her about my feelings for her. Ooh my constraints, they were coming my way and I decided to postpone the talk.

Things went like this and that for a while. But I never made up my mind in this 6 months time to say my heart. I felt ashamed of myself, when I could not open my mouth and looked helplessly on my algorithm relishing over misclassifying the test data. And then came her birthday. I didn’t know what exactly would be the ideal gift for Gee. I consulted a lot of my friends, did some good research on the net and came upon… nothing ! Finally, I decided to do it the geekish way. I created a very romantic message of exactly fifty words, created twenty five gmail logins with each login having sender name as two words each from the fifty. Then I started sending the mails one after the other in the reverse order, with each mail having an attachment of a beautiful photo of her signed by me. The whole idea just took seven hours to implement after a trial of some ten times to my own login. The messages once received looked like love everywhere, in the sender’s field, in the subject line, inside the text body, over the attachment! Wow! Finally, satisfied with the trial runs, I clicked the twenty five mails away at exactly 12 midnight!

The next morning, I woke up a bit late, made a call to her and wished her “Happy birthday”. She responded with a flirty anger, complaining why I didn’t call her earlier. My next question was on whether she was happy with my innovation. She responded back asking what the innovation was!! Oops! Probably she had not checked her email yet. I waited on the phone to hear the dramatic applause she might probably make at my new way of wishing, but alas nothing came over to my side. Seemed Shannon’s sampling was not enough to transmit heart beats! I waited… finally she came back on phone asking what was the great idea! Oops! Did I do a mistake? I felt my heart had stopped for a while due to the extra power consumed by my brain cells in simulating all possible paths for failure! Oh yes, the spam filter. I asked her to check the spam bin, which she checked to revert back saying it was all some garbage mails intermingled! I just said with a broken heart “Forget it”!

Though I was sad that I could not get her to my feelings for her, I decided to take a second chance. I planned for a birthday treat for her the next day- a candle light one! She said she was very busy for the dinner that day, but after a lot of pleading from my side, Gee agreed. Finally, “tomorrow” was the day and I was very happy.

That night I was sitting on my computer working on my new algorithm, but was actually thinking of her and how I should tell her of my love. Though Gee did not conform to any of my requirements about marriage, seemed love was above all that! I was not able to sleep that night, and decided to do some timepass on orkut. Accidently I fell upon Gee’s scraps and… was taken aback at the foremost scrap!!!

It was a message from her friend Fee, and the message read “How is he”? Oops “he”? Again, I missed a heart beat due to the simulation overload from my brain! Oh, she already told her friends about me? Or is it like she had a boy friend? I was restless. It was some 2 in the morning and I needed to find this out! I went to Fee’s scrap book to find if Gee had re-scrapped. Nope, she hadn’t. I started looking at each scrap of Gee. Girls are very lazy at deleting scraps and this turned out to be very “fortunate” for me. Conversely, there were some two thousand scraps in her scrap book and going through each one of them was kind of painful especially at 3 in the morning. I decided to write a script to automate this and finally got all her scraps into a text file. It was 5 in the morning and I forgot that I needed to sleep. Who will sleep in such an hour of contingency! After perusing each and every scrap, I found a message from Mee, another friend of her with the following message: “So are you married?” I jumped straight into Mee’s profile, searched out the corresponding message from Gee, and it just read “Yes”!

At times, you just stand there looking at nothing, when everything else start revolving around you and you ask yourself “why me”?

Thanks for reading! Believe it or not, but that was pure fiction, some thoughts I cooked up to kill a time of intense boredom :)