Buy one Get one free

Yesterday morning I was alone at home, reading news paper. I heard my dogs barking loudly. Somebody had approached the gate. I quickly went to see who it was. I saw glimpse of a man running away. He was wearing a pink T-shirt! I cursed my dogs, poor fellow he would have come to help me, these people didn’t have the intelligence to know it. Then I noticed a pamphlet lying on the floor next to the gate. I was not totally wrong; that man was trying to help me by dropping a Mega Sale ad happening at a Home furnishing mart in the city. It read upto 50% off on range of bed linen, shown in the ad were all pink in color. Then only I realized why he was in pink.

I just threw the pamphlet in the dustbin; there was not an inch of blank space on it which I could have used for scribbling. I had gone responding to a similar ad some time back, that time it was sale of shoes. I just entered the shop looking for those 50% off ones, found a few pairs at the front. They all looked used ones by some one! I entered deep into the shop. He had used the normal practice of pricing everything abnormally. I exited the shop in 5 minutes time without even trying anything.

We had seen those hoardings, “Buy one Get one Free” incomplete. People who had gone for it can confidently complete that slogan “Buy one Get one free Dump both at any place you see”. When we were touring Delhi, my friend bought a pair of “banians” from the foot path vendor. It was on sale for 50% off. After reaching the hotel room, he opened it to see that it was truly 50% only. Only the front portion of the banian was there. Good that he bought two; he could get them stitched somehow and try to use.

Recently I bought 5 packs of a biscuit in one go. There was one small plastic container, 50 gm capacity, was free along with each pack. I didn’t buy those because of this offer. I like those biscuits, normally I buy two of them, but this offer made me buy 5. My wife managed to open one of those “free” containers with a lot of struggle, but could not close it even after putting double the effort. So, all of them are lying in the original state, either open or closed state even now. End result was that I finished five packs of those biscuits in a week, instead of two.

One of our customers had a software project on hand which involved nascent technologies. All of us had just heard of that technology, nobody had even seen a book or manual on that – mind you, internet was not heard of that time. Our boss decided to bid for it by giving the customer a whopping 50% rate cut, to train his people on new technology making customer also bare the cost partly! Normally these customers are very smart, they do check whether people have the required capabilities to execute a project, they just don’t go by price factor alone. This customer somehow believed in us and awarded the project to us. Yes, we delivered the project, 8 months later than agreed schedule – the customer manager almost lost his job. Obviously we all became experts in that cutting edge technology by then!

There are few other things also available free, need not be on sale. Advice is one of them. Those electricity board fellows mercilessly cut down the branches of the tree in front of my house.  Electric line is just running above the tree. With full vigor it grows in one month, only to get cut in the next month by these cruel fellows. I can’t open my mouth when they do that as I will be with no power for at least for a week. The “cutting” ceremony happened last week. As usual they left the cut branches in front of my gate itself and vanished. Next day morning I was picking up those branches to dump them under a nearby transformer, that is a convenient place for all of us now to dump all unwanted things, transformer cannot object to it right? A gentle man approached me. I felt happy, somebody is going to give me a hand, and number of my trips to transformer might come down. After enquiring what all had happened, he simply advised “do not throw this away. You can convert this into nice compost to use as manure for your plants” Where is the question of having a place to make this compost in my house, I don’t have a place to keep even a few pots to grow plants. Since it was a free advice, I did not  react to him nor to his advice.

Yesterday evening I went to buy some fruits. There were fully ripe bananas and I wanted just half a kg. The vendor was trying to push me to buy the whole bunch weighing around 1.2 Kgs. He was offering a discount. I, being bitten many times not just once, politely refused that offer and limited my purchase to half a kg as per my original plan.

After eating a few of those bananas, I just went to sleep, feeling happy that I didn’t fall prey for these discount offers. There he is. “God” has come to my dream. Smiling he says “I can increase your life span by 25%”. I get scared these days when I see or hear that “%”. It is God, he does not have any reason to sell anything to me, as some people in our society try to sell ideas in the name of God for their own good. God is definitely not like them.  I am sure God wants to help me. My eyes opened wide. Then God added, “these are the conditions you have to follow though”. My eyes started the reverse journey to their original state, as the conditions came one by one:

1.       1. You need to have ambitions in life, important for you. But what is important for me is you following the “right” path to achieve your goal.  You can not deviate from the right path.

2.      2.  You need to be disciplined through out

3.       3. You need to give full commitment to whatever you do, do not worry about end result, that you leave it to me

4.       4. Do not hurt anybody in the process, you may not be nice to all at all times. But don’t hurt or insult them.

5.       5. You have to celebrate each milestone.

6.       6. You need to stop criticizing your mistakes, try to learn from them, do not repeat them.

My eyes almost closed in the dream but opened otherwise. I looked around, God had gone. I seriously thought about those conditions. The returns are very high, though the conditions are a bit tough. I felt happy as I hadn’t closed my eyes fully in the dream. God would have seen it, so he would definitely come tomorrow. I should negotiate and look for a middle path to achieve 12.5% extension at least to start with.