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The Making of a Dumb Datum

Imagine 10,000 years in the future. Two archaeologists are digging a site, and they find the remains of human bones. They take those remains to the lab, perform tests on them, and try to reconstruct the habits and lifestyle of that human. Say those bones belong to me. They are trying to find out my story, how I lived, what I ate, where I traveled, etc. Once they find all the info they need, they toss it into a museum where they store all other such ancient human remains they find. I was essentially one data point to them in trying to understand how humanity evolved over time. Or I can also call myself a “datum”, the singular form of data, literally one piece of information to solve a bigger puzzle. Honestly, I don’t need 10,000 years to become a datum. I am already a part of several datasets people use these days to study many things. So for that objective learner, I am already a datum. Now let me get to how I got the dumb part of it. I have had an interesting and eventful life so far...
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A Man from Guatemala

I was feeling slightly worse today, and as if to add to it, the air conditioning in my apartment stopped working. I was internally like “great, one more worry for me to handle now.” I put up a maintenance request with my apartment management – “AC stopped working, it’s getting hot in here, por favor SEND HELP!”, and they sent help.

A short man with a weary face but an innocent child-like smile knocked on my front door. In broken English, he communicated that he was there to install a temporary window AC for tonight. I was like “alright, come on in.” He installed it, and while leaving, he stopped in my living room and glanced at something. To be honest, my living room is full of clutter lately, with books and sticky notes spread everywhere. I was curious to see if he’d react, and then he reacted, but his reaction was unexpected - he asked me where I was from. I replied “I am from India, what about you?”, and he said something that I couldn’t quite understand. Took me 3-4 repetitions from him to figure out that he is saying “Guatemala.”

I will be honest, I am very ignorant of Guatemala and I can’t quite point out where it lies on a map. But in cases like this, I have this trait of making an overly positive guess, so I replied to him “oh wow, it must be a beautiful country.” He didn’t react to that. To be honest, if his accent felt Greek to me, my accent probably felt Italian to him. We are two brown skinned people with our unique English accents, so I guess we weren't that different after all.

He made a plane gesture with his hand and said “November” multiple times, so I figured that he is trying to tell me that he is flying to Guatemala in November. He asked me a question that I initially had trouble understanding, but its essence was something like “I spent 700 USD for this flight, is 700 USD a lot of money?” I said “yeah, it is an expensive flight.” He then told me that his father passed away recently and he is going to visit his mother, and then he made the plane gestures again with a whoosh sound coming out of his mouth, as if to tell me that he is happy to go home.

We later exchanged pleasantries and he left. I locked the door and stood in the same spot in my living room where he stood while we were talking, and then it hit me – he noticed the picture of my parents on my desk and that made him start that conversation with me. It made me tear up  

 

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