Where is the Love?

After months of silence, blog readers may be wondering what happened to the author and her love for turning random everyday encounters into silly little blog posts.

Life, it turns out, is what happened. Demanding work and training schedules; uncooperative landlords and call centre agents; pedantic bank tellers and tax-eish-on authorities; incompetent mechanics and insurance representatives... in short, work and admin killed inspiration, passion and love for writing.

But as if things weren’t bad enough, February happens to be the self-declared month of love and it is unacceptable not to feel it... Fortunately Yahoo came to the “rescue” of people like me, who were too busy running around to feel inspiration and love:

“Valentine’s Day is coming and if you want to add an extra layer of sugar coated love, then you can send your beloved ones an email message telling them about how much you care about them. Unfortunately, not everyone is cut out to be a poet. If you do not want to send them a message composed of cliché lines, then you can use the auto-compose feature of Yahoo! Mail to compose a Valentine email message for your sweetheart.”

The over-worked person may have been happy ecstatic that the burden of expressing true feelings was automated by the click of a button. But sadly the auto-composed messages in all three categories – Crazy in Love, Friendly in Love, All outta Love – were hardly poetry and more a bad joke:

But if you think that a supposedly loving and caring message could hardly be worse, you are mistaken. A few years ago Simon hired a Personal Assistant in India to take care of his administrative tasks. One day, one of them turned out to be “send a few uplifting lines to my sick girlfriend”. The outcome left me speechless, utterly confused and potentially feeling worse (admittedly, Simon shared these feelings...):

Johanna,
My name is Meet Shah, and I am an assistant to Simon Cresswell. This email is to convey a special message to you by him.
As you are not well right now, no one else can understand how I am feeling in your absence, I just want you to be fine as soon as possible, so I can re-live all the lovely moments which I had with you and wish to make some new loveable and romantic memories with you.
It doesn't matter that I am at work; the only thing which keeps going on my mind is that "When my Love will be with me and when will she get well?”
All I want to say to you as I am not with you right now "I had sent my cares to the wind, and ask the wind to pass them to you, and when you feel the wind blowing towards your lovely face that's me saying take care my love, I miss you so much”.
I pray to God that you get well soon, my Love.
Yours Lovingly, Simon

From these two encounters, I learnt an important lesson: if you don’t feel inspired, don’t write - no matter what the day or occasion. Chances are silence is better than automated or outsourced words.

Fortunately, as my project is coming to an end, my new flat contract is signed, credit card application forms submitted and flights confirmed, life can slowly go back to normal and love come back to this blog.