The Awkward Date

(Combinatorial merge of two true stories)

The two friends were smoking and drinking at a bar. One drank out of happiness whilst the other drank to drown in his sorrow!

“It is horrible! I do not know why I am such a failure!” Ramon, brooded. “Let me drink to my fill, and I can forget my pain.”

“Life has been horrible to you my friend. I hope you don’t seek failure through your actions.” His friend Shawn replied.

“I don’t know what wrong I did. People tell me to ask questions and when I do, I wonder what happens to them.”

Ramon had gone to see a beautiful girl that his parents had come across through an online portal match. The match-maker were damn serious that the couple were made from heaven for each other. And at the end of the day, after everything had been discussed both from the girl’s wonderful nature to the boy’s enormous salary package, they concluded the relationship to be a good-trade. The girl would not do any household-work for which they would pay a dowry.

The boy had been asked to see the girl alone. Alone was a mysterious word for him. He wondered, how could he be alone when the girl was with him, and everyone knew about that? And when he was alone with the girl, his mind went blank. He didn’t know the scheme or mechanism to woo a girl. All he could remember was what he had been trained for. Computers, data, programming, machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc. And what came out of his mouth, when they were left alone was –

 “What is data mining?”

The girl was shocked for a moment. She wondered what to say, as if she had lost her sense. Finally she found her voice and said-

“Data mining is the process of discovering patterns in large data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and data base systems.”

The boy’s ego wasn’t satisfied. She had given an answer- okay, but he wanted to make sure she knew her subject well. So he asked again,

 “What is Inheritance?”

The girl looked at him with a curious look. Maybe he was mentally abnormal who would torture her with his knowledge all her life. So she smiled at him and said –

 “when you declare a class, that is not allowed to get accessed, but by inheritance, you can make another class having its properties…

I think our parents are waiting.”

The boy hurriedly agreed to go and that was all they talked.

Decision- The girl rejected the boy.

“Did I do anything wrong?” Ramon asked.

“I don’t think so; my plight was almost similar,” Shawn said.

Shawn went to meet the girl of his life in a restaurant. It was just a normal restaurant where people go to eat their breakfast. Nothing unusual, and surely not meant for a couple. Shawn was nervous, and he had to keep his mind alert to know what he was saying. The good thing was they were the only people in the restaurant. It was a hot day, and the restaurant boy played some stupid loud songs that neither wanted to hear. The girl asked Shawn if he liked the music. He replied in negative. The girl went up to the guy playing the music and told him to stop it.

 Now our friend, Shawn wondered what to speak. He was as dumb as Ramon with girls, and without a conversation he would get nowhere. The girl said she was studying physics.

 So, Shawn gave her a problem to solve.

Suppose, a person travels from city A to city B, at the speed of 60 km/r and returns from city B to city A at the speed of 40 km/hr. Calculate the average speed?

She looked at the problem he had written on a page. She said, “Ha, it is easy. The answer is fif-”

He looked into her eyes. “The answer is not 50 km/hr. Now solve it.”

She took the pen and paper, and started solving it. He realised she was finding it difficult to solve the problem. He helped her. The answer was 48 km/hr.

After that he gave her another problem in physics.

A boy on a roof top throws a ball up at the speed of 20 m/s. The ground is 20 m below. What is the speed of the ball when it crosses the boy?

Well it was a conceptual question. The magnitude of initial velocity is same as the magnitude of the velocity of the ball as it crosses the boy. The height above the ground had nothing to do with the problem.

The girl found difficulty in solving the problem. She chewed the cap of her pen and Shawn had to help her again to solve the problem.

 “That was the last question I asked her on physics.”

“So, you too got rejected?” Ramon asked eagerly.

“No,” said Shawn. “On the contrary, she was the one who proposed me!”

“How on earth is it possible? We were in similar shoes, and yet I was rejected. Life is so unfair!”

“No, my friend! In between, I told her she looked beautiful solving the problems!”