Excitement of a new year

tap to edit

The Jelly Beans story

The year was 2006. I had just started on the new project (Margin Management) in Chicago and was catching up. It was our first meeting with Dan. Subodh, Emmanuel, Kavitha and I were there in the room with Dan. We had a lot of questions about the application. Dan brought in a cup full of colorful jelly beans and announced that we would get one or more jelly beans depending on how good our questions were.

As we went ahead asking questions, he went on passing some jelly beans to the person who raised the questions. As it was a client meeting, we did not eat any of the jelly beans, but then Dan interrupted and asked us to go ahead and eat some. As soon as we put them in our mouth, we realized that we did not like those and they tasted real bad. We did not want to upset Dan and tried to put on a brave face (I am sure he would have made out that we did not like them). Kavitha just kept her mouth closed and did not chew on them.

Dan asks each one of us “Did you like them”?

Emmanuel, Subodh and I say differing answers, but each one of us just try to down play it by saying they are “OK”, “not bad” or just “hmmm”.

He then looks at Kavitha and asks her the same.

Kavitha’s mouth is still closed, and with a pitiful face she shakes her head to convey “No, I did not quite like them”.

Dan says, “Spit it out if you don’t like them. Oh, by the way, that was beef flavored. There are variety of flavors in these –chicken, beef, earwax, bacon and vomit!” and gives a wry smile.

We were dumb struck, thinking which flavor we just ate. And hearing those names did not sound quite attractive. We were tempted to run to the rest room and spit out everything. But here we were, in our very first meeting with the client – one that could make or break the relationship. One that could create a negative/ positive image. So, we quietly swallowed it and cleansed our mouth afterwards. It became a hot topic for discussion for us after the meeting.

And just before we were about to leave for the day, Dan came up to us and apologized for the prank that he played on us. Little did he realize then that some of us were vegetarians and may not have taken the episode in the right spirit. He was appreciative of the fact that we were polite and did not take the joke rudely. His son had seen those jelly beans on TV and Dan bought it for him. But he too, just like us, did not like them. That was why Dan brought them to work and wanted to play a prank on someone. We were the unfortunate ones to become ‘bakras’, but looking back, it was in good jest.

He has not played a prank on us since, but that one incident gave him an idea of how polite we can be. He recently brought another cup to work to mark our 5^th anniversary, but this time the flavours were not as bad. I am attaching a picture of that. So, that my friends is the story of the Jelly Beans.