On my first day at EF, I was taken to a rather small room, extremely untidy with empty packets of flaming hot chips lying around, an old pair of shoes and assorted computer hardware etc lying around.
I was rather chuffed that I had an office, but it turned out I was sharing it with a guy called Vikram, who I had met a few times at Stanford and who I know talked very fast and with very high bandwidth.
It turned out sharing an office with Vikram was the best place a new EF engineer could be placed, given he knew everything and you felt you could ask the stupid questions you may hesitate to ask Dr K or Anand.
Vikram worked a lot, and he worked a lot on the move. Have laptop and a internet connection, will code was his philosophy. From Stanford, from various airports on his way to the east coast, from office. I sometimes called Vikram 'Mr Wolf' (he solved problems).
Vikram was also a big proponent of Web 0.1. He is to date the only person I know who actually really used lynx (a text based browser) rather than a browser that showed pictures and stuff. Indeed, the ACM was built and debugged using lynx until the sad day when an unsuspecting piece of Web 1.0 crept in in the form of Javascript to login (!!) and lynx had to be dropped (although not without some searching through sourceforge i feel). And the ACM did look good on lynx.
Vikram did not watch baseball or football or reruns of ESPN news; he watched CSPAN. Between him and Anand (and the occasional contribution from dg), I was educated on the finer points of the US political landscape.
We all thought marriage would change Vikrams work hours, but even though he's in Chennai I am often chatting to him at 2pm PST, and he's often at some airport when he calls in to the weekly Infrastructure meeting. So, reassuringly, nothing has changed.
