Leslie's Laughs

  Image by upklyak on Freepik I am sure many of us are shortsighted enough to remember the good old eye-testing charts beginning with a large E and ending with an indecipherable string of letters which apparently no one but Superman can read. Well, that happens to me every morning but with a few bells and whistles thrown in. Let me explain. The Eyetest Equipment: The daily newspaper. In my case, The Telegraph. The Day: Everyday except when the powers-that-be declare a string of holidays as in the recently concluded Pujas. The Place: My favourite place is the "Library" which some people call the Necessarium or the plebs call the Bogs. For one thing, there's no fan and pages don't fly. For another, some of the news is so frightening is scares the crap out of you. The Story So, just like the eye-test, they soften you up by giving you a few large advertisements in the first four or four and a half pages.  Easy on the eye - some of the pin-up girls in jewellery are even ea...

  Image by storyset on Freepik WAGs Analysing Chat Behaviour The Types of WAGs There are various types of WAGs (WhatsApp Groups) and they attract all sorts of people. I might do another post on the types of WAGs, but for now, let's focus on the users. Some of the regular WA users are listed below, more for fun than anything else. Read and react. Do you fit the bill in any of your groups? The Winners Ravi just left the conversation after a heated exchange and the rest of us are left to continue (Who’s left?). Raging controversy on the group. Who's right? Whoever is left! This happens pretty often when there is controversy. People leave. And whoever is left feels they have “won”. Lurkers and Scanners These people rarely post.  They may read and delete or they may just not read the messages. They might have the option of “archiving” the group, so that the pings do not disturb them. Or they mute the notifications and read at leisure. Peekers and Voyeurs This bunch of people are r...

  [There are times when one is tempted to use four-letter words when faced with a problem.  So, they created this five-letter version.  Here's my take on some of the interesting things that happened along the way as I, like many others, got "hooked".  Do leave a comment and let me know how you fared.] This fascination for the five-letter word at the stroke of midnight has caught the imagination of entire generations, older ones included.  Wordle came into our lives surreptiously, insinuating itself into our consciousness without any fanfare.  Within minutes of a WhatsApp message sent innocuously by someone with his or her first winning streak, we, too, were hooked. There were a lot of nay-sayers who famously misquoted Shakespeare:  "What's in a game?", they asked as they sneakily searched for the answers themselves.  Within weeks there were user groups who discussed and argued about certain words, the most famous one being too many options with th...