A Day in The Office

Before i proceed to assault your senses with a lengthy discourse on one of my days in office, I will take this oppurtunity to pen a few words about the irrepressible personality, who happens to be the prime moving force behind this initiative, and the fourth member of this unlikely quartet.....

Singhal to me is defined by his booming voice, its something nobody can miss. Its almost as if he has an inbuilt Bass equalizer with the knob turned to maximum. The guy's a freak, a likeable one though, i mean sample his hobbies, and this is just a sample----hanging out in crowded buses, exploring the seedy bylanes near malleshpalya, having two packets of milk for dinner just for kicks, teaching kids at an NGO(saturday mornings 8'0 clock, I know he's a little crazy), having conversations with random people at Landmark(which he says he never initiates, though I am skeptical about that), and the list goes on.......

As you can make out our man is a many splendoured personality, full of life, thats his chief characteristic.....Among the four of us, he's probably had the most workload, but I have rarely seen him crib about it whereas in stark contrast I keep complaining all the time, and the others at regular intervals.....To go with this he is a terrific raconteur, one of the best I have met, incidents and anecdotes take on a whole new dimension when he's narrating them.....

Ok I can go on and on, but i must cut short this eulogy in order to tell you about.........

Tough day in the office yesterday. It began quite normally, i had to study some project documents and attend two meetings to discuss them. Though I was more or less a silent spectator, I mean half the time I had no clue what some of them were talking about, the other half I spent realizing that my interpretation had been completely off-course, its like I was aiming for the moon and landed on Pluto, the poor ex-planet.

The second meeting was memorable in the sense that my team-mates got the first taste of my unique and remarkable ability to do stupid things. My new team consists of 14 members, which is huge, generally teams comprise of 7 members at the max. The fall-out is that we have to really squeeze and scrunch in the meeting rooms, picture the general compartment of a train. Anyway, we had a meeting room which was smaller than most. As usual I was among the last people to enter. I saw there was a crisis situation, and I love crisis situations, gives me ample scope for messing things up, if there is anything resembling a crisis I cannot be far behind to further entangle things and whip up an exotic cocktail of confusion that leaves everyone dazed. It seemed there were not enough chairs and space for everyone to be seated, I decided to take command, first I brought two chairs from the pantry and just so that nobody was left out I asked Pee-Pee ( yeah, the same PP from the Coorg trip, older readers will recognize him) to get two more. I then began to arrange the chairs asking a couple of people to position themselves flat against the wall while I went about putting the chairs in place. Having done that I suddenly realized something The problem was if you put in all the chairs the door would not open, and if you did not put in the chairs the door would open but 4-5 people would be left standing. In trying to eliminate the first problem I had given no consideration to the second one and now it stared me in the face, it was a throwback to my childhood days when I discovered mum had found out the glass of milk I had left behind the safe. Tricky problem eh!!!! I could see everyone was baffled, the two guys sticking to the wall were getting a little impatient and the three guys standing outside seemed to be staring at me with undisguised hostility. Pee-Pee was the only one without any visible concern, but then he is used to my methods, elementary as they are, he is the Watson to my Sherlock.

It was that kind of a situation, something had to give. My alert mind open to the possibility of further mayhem immediately provided me with a text-book disaster solution. I picked up one of the chairs and began to hand it over to one of the guys sitting at the other side of the table. That guy was taken aback to say the least, his eyes seemed to be barking---" What the fuck do you think you are doing?". I was in no mood to be intimitidated by barking eyes and scowling faces, I had half a mind to tell him—" Come on dude, do it for the team put the chair in your lap, and one guy can sit there", I mean he was acting as if I had told him precisely that, when all I was asking him to do was to hold the chair for a little while so that everybody could come in. No sense of co-operation, and they talk about being a team player. The strategy was to make people sitting on the other end of the table to hold the chairs and then usher in everybody standing outside and then arrange the chairs and finally sit down and start the meeting. It was based on sound logic and bound to succeed. Fast-forward five minutes, everybody was in the room, four people were holding chairs at one end and a minor army was clinging to the walls. People passing by and happening to glance inside made little effort to conceal their amusement. I get really pissed off by this kind of behaviour, I mean these guys on the outside, they don't know anything and based on superficial knowledge they are prone to come to the wrong conclusions in no time, bloody idiots. I am telling you, it's so damned discouraging.

I am made of sterner stuff though, I am used to it, geniuses are never recognized in their lifetimes, and so I paid no attention to the smirks of these wise guys.

In the meanwhile another problem had cropped up. Now that everybody was inside, I suddenly had another realization. Frankly, I don't know what the deal is with realizations, I mean they almost never come at the same time, to me they don't, they wait and take their own time in arriving at my doorstep at irregular intervals. It's jarring to say the least, and puts paid to the best laid plans. The realization this time round was that there was no way all the chairs could be placed in the room with everybody inside. Why was god doing this to me? I was at my tether's end. My normally fertile brain was running out of ideas. However I had one last ace up my sleeve.

I told pee-pee and another fresher to move out, then positioned two chairs in the space they had vacated, asked two of the guys standing to sit down there. I then put one of the chairs in front of the door, half-opened it and asked one of the guys standing outside to come in. He was in the process of somehow trying to squeeze himself inside, making faces and all, contorting his body, who told you to eat so much…………… And then………

Another team-mate arrived, bloody late-comer acting smart, asked the contortion artist to step aside and then calmly swung the door outwards, just like that, it was like Blane doing one of his tricks …There was a collective sharp intake of breath, I mean actually there was not, it was an un-taken intake, more effective, hangs longer in the air and sort of chills the atmosphere. To make my victory complete the guy even made a perfect wise-crack---"There's always an easy way to do things"…. Yeah, right. How was I supposed to know the door was BI, what are the doors coming to these days, you simply cannot distinguish the straight one's from the you know. It ruddy swung both ways, no Fucking morals.

The meeting finally commenced around 30 minutes late. The team lead said that since a lot of time had been wasted today, we would just have a brief introduction and have the major discussions the next day. I don't know why, but the whole time he kept staring pointedly at me.

Once we were outside and out of the ear-shot of the other members, PP burst out into a prolonged fit of laughter, so much for sympathy. I dunno what Shakespeare meant when he said something about a good deed shining like a candle in the night in a naughty world or something to that effect, must have had too much to drink, it does not work that way………