I have a colleague who works at our Bangalore office and she is kind of our customer. Kind of because we provide the platforms and they use it to provide our common customers the IPs and tests.
You may have noticed the colleague is a female. As she is quite new to the company, she joined around 8 months back and probably the first company she joined after completing her Masters, she had a lot of doubts and usually needs a lot of help to get things done.
Since I was the contact point for their team, we talk a lot on communicator and on phone.
One pecular thing about her is that she calls everyone by their surname (those who know my surname can laugh a little :)).
Initially I thought she does that innocently as my surname is a common first name down south and she might have mistaken me for some south indian. But when I found her calling other too by their surname, I found it quite amusing. Although I have communicated with lot of South Indians and never found anyone calling others by their surname but still I thought may be its her culture.
She has quite a mature voice and the way she talks it sounds as if you are talking to someone quite settled and quite, who is pretty experienced in life. So as we do with most of things I prejudiced her image in my mind as that of a saree clad South Indian lady. And the fact that she had a Masters degree cemented my believe. In my country most of people who opt for engineering, do masters in engineering only when they have spend some fruitless time after graduation on some uninterested job or in search of it, otherwise they jump to job after graduation itself.
So everytime I used to talk to her on phone I used to be more polite and respectful even though at times she used to ask quite trivial questions.
Couple of weeks back I had to travel to our Bangalore office to conduct a training for couple of days and as her team was working with us I informed them too and was looking forward to meeting them all.
So the day I reached the office , I was sitting at reception with my colleague who too was travelling with me. At that moment a young South Indian girl wearing western outfit came to the lobby with another person. She was babbling a lot and after talking a while to her friend she blurted out my name saying I am going to come there for the training. Then she turned towards me and may be she realised it was me or not and went to the cafetaria with her friend. Me and my fellow colleague were bemused to hear my name and since we couldn't recall any other female who was supposed to attend our training we thought it must be her, but somehow I still believed in my prejudice.
But later in the second half she came to the training room and we exchanged a smile without talking but somehow we both figured it out. So later in the evening she came to the room with a cake as it was her birthday and introduced herself.
Back at the hotel room I couldn't stop laughing thinking how mis leading her voice and my prejudice is. She is totally opposite of what I thought. She is quite lively, talkative and mostly innocently confused.
I was there one more day but we din't get the time to interact.Later when I came back to my city, I told her that because of how she sounded on phone I always thought of her as a mature saree clad lady. We both laughed out loud and she told that she get that a lot.
Its quite funny to know now that she is quite a child and now talking to her is more polite and guiding than predominantly respectful.
