Speech is silver, silence is golden

Popular saying but for a chatterbox like me, this is not even remotely applicable, though I'm sure people reading this would beg to differ.. They are probably saying "Ok.. when is she gonna shut up n let me speak????"

Ah well... today I shall not be talking about the non existant "Mute" button on me but my perennial panga with the same on electronic gadgets around me. My journey begins when I was a toddler and could just about manage to walk, with occasional stumbles. My parents had bought a lovely Sony music system and were sitting right in front of it and investigating the same. Dad fished out a cassette of ABBA (ok ok.. obviously I don't remember these tiny details hence bluffing to make this post a li'l more interesting/believable... but the cassette part is true since I've heard this story several times) and placed it into the player. Then with an expectant/excited look on their faces, Dad hit the "Play" button. But to their dismay they couldn't hear a thing. Dad and Ma exchanged worried glances and quickly discussed "Yes.. it's a new set so within warranty.. We can easily get a replacement". Dad, the engineer that he is, decided to investigate. Took his face closer to the player and checked... Yes it was indeed playing. But then why couldn't they hear anything? He was probably one step away from opening it up when they realised that the tiny "Mute" button was down. Parents were obviously zapped because they distinctly remembered NOT hitting that button. So they started looking around for a possible explanation when they happened to see me in my usual mastiful mood standing quite close by. And there I was the culprit... whose tiny hand had shot out right past them and hit the button.

Fast forward to my engineering days (coz nothing noteworthy happened in between). Sumedh, Anshula, Suvrat and Indranil had come over to my place to work on the ADTL (Application Development Tools Laboratory) project. This was sometime towards the end of Third Year as far as I can remember. Anyways, after a tiring day of designing and coding we started fooling around. Sumedh sat with dad's pipe in his mouth (empty by the way.. he just wanted the feel of it). I got my webcam out and recorded a bunch of videos of all of us goofing around. After that we played all the videos, but to our dismay they were all silent. I was zapped. I remembered using the microphone built into my monitor. But why was it not working??? After a lot of pondering I finally attributed this to the installation of Windows XP on my home PC because the last memory of the working mic was when I had the eternally crashing/hanging Windows ME on my machine. After a few months my dealer paid me a visit with a new keyboard etc (ok people this time I ain't bluffing... I actually remember) and very indignantly I told him that the microphone had stopped working and that it should be replaced. The fella gave me an incredulous stare and then opened the advanced volume panel from the little icon on the taskbar. And there it was.... the culprit. A little green tick in the tiny checkbox below the microphone symbol and next to 1 teensy weensy word "MUTE". Man did I feel stupid or what!!!

Alas, my list of dumb acts does not end here. I have a lovely headset which I use at home. It has a long wire and allows me to walk around and sometimes even lie down on my bed while I am talking to someone. OK.. strayed enough. So getting back to the point... I connected my headset to talk to a friend. The Google Talk call went through. We started off with rounds of "hello".. "Hulllllllo" "Anybody home?" "Knock knock" "can you hear me?" etc. I could distinctly hear my friend but not vice versa. Thought something was wrong with my PC. Hence rebooted my machine. But in vain. I verified the settings several times to ensure I was not repeating an old error. Even tugged and then connected the wires back. Finally I was convinced that the microphone of my beloved headset had conked off. Dejectedly I made the switch... office working headset with mic with the one I use at home. A couple of days down the line, ond fine day (honestly like any other day), I happened to be listening to music while working parallelly. I was toying with the wire when I felt the little control panel. I looked down curiously and saw a little black button on it. I brought it closer to my eyes and realised that the button was pushed to one side and next to were the 4 now familiar letters M U T E. Baaaah! Another feather to my "Dunce" cap for sure.

Well these were the most memorable(actually the only) Mute pangas that I can recall as of now... Will update you guys when I have more related stupidities to write about. So till then Sayonara and have a nice day!