One day in life....

7 AM: Trrrrrring. Actually...beep beep beep (era of cellphones, no more clock alarms). Alarm goes off..I wake up eyes half open ,and in a reflex action ( hand must be doing it automatically now i guess) shut the alarm and goto sleep (It's still 7 AM...thats too early..)

8 AM: The sun's bright rays are on my face directly. They seem to be saying "Who do you think you are fighting against eh?". Finally, the brightness is unbearable,I open my eyes, fully for the first time in the morning and look at the time "oh...its 8...damn..why the hell do I have to get up"

8:30 AM: I force myself out of bed into the shower. Get hurridedly dressed, grab some crumbs of bread and leave. Gotta get to work by 9 :30. Along the way, glare (abuse them in the mind..silence is golden you see) at a few errant passers-by, as if they were responsible for me getting late.

9:35 AM: Approximately 10 traffic jams, 5 near-accidents , and an almost uncountable number of times of honking, I saunter into office, wondering what the day would be like.

9:45 AM: Check mail (official). We usually get spam mail in our official mail ids. If they arent spam, then they are usually some ridiculously boring ,recycled since the 1990s forwards (some people are in a time warp ). After reading the last of those forwards... it feels like I am done with all the official mail.

10:30 AM: Yawn...I feel so sleepy. There are a certain category of spam mails, that we have to reply to and they are from our bosses. 90% of the time, they are only information for you to learn from. A few times,however entails us to use our 'brains' and reply. This is part of the excellent 'interactive atmosphere between supervisors and other employees".

10:32 AM: Look for some pretty women to talk to on the official online chat messenger. Simultaneously, check personal mail. Now personal mail is again a list of forwards from some other time challenged people, and this time it is on your e-group. Number of e-groups you are a member of is directly proportional to the number of degrees you have. Now for some numbers

10: Number of forwards you recieve in a day(The number could increase if the total number of people who passed out with you in all your colleges subscribe to the egroup)

0: Number of mails you want to recieve from someone so badly, but you havent received.

5: The number of times I take 'official' coffee breaks.

15: No of chat windows open between morning and noon

13: No of people who havent bothered to reply to me.

1: Some guy I chat with everyday..about office jazz. Only he has bothered to reply.

Now back to the timeline for the day.

1 :00: The best part of the day, where we have lunch. Feast on everybody's lunch and at the end I begin to wonder if my stomach is really a bottomless pit?

1:30: Lunch festivities end..beginning of the apocalyptic afternoon siesta. ZZZZZZZZZZZ!!

2:30 Time for a coffee break. Been working to hard..so the weariness is showing. A coffee break would seem like a godsend at this time. Talk to a few team mates over coffee about how sucky things are...every one i meet is somehow frustrated with everything, but they end up working a lot. During this time, my boss also comes up and gets an 'update' of things. This update is just a way of him feeling sure that i am definitely gonna screw up. Hes just sorting out how many people will actually screw up, which will eventually screw him.

5:00 After pretending to do some work for the last two hours, waiting for the clock to strike five so that I can take my tie off. Its like a ritual, happens everyday.. same time ...not necessarily the same place..sometimes in the loo as well.

6:00 Remove all pretensions of work from my head, and now multiple chat windows are open and this time on other 'banned' chat messengers. Gotta catch up with friends from other places you see, its very important.

7:00 Think it's time to leave...after a gruelling day's work!! (DAMN..why the hell are we so loaded with work). One friend says Pub..the other says Coffee pub..while the two argue, I watch...and finally the 'hanging' out plan is cancelled either due to inclement weather or people just not feeling upto it. Huge relief, since no money spent...running short of money as well.

8:00 Saunter home...take off clothes and pick up the TV remote. I watch the same mundane channels...like news..music etc etc and complain about how monotonous life is. Some of the news channels are entertaining coz they show the funny side of George W Bush Jr...which is when he is himself..and that is all the time.

11:00 A hearty dinner..and a few smses and calls later....i crash...into a world of my own...wondering what the day like will be tomorrow?

Are bosses really that DUMB

Cliched and probably exaggerated office conversation

A (any bored employee in a reasonably good company) : Hey...how are you?

B( An equally bored employee but double more hassled than A...Looks like hes been asked to work on a presentation that could easily be the biggest fraud perpetuated on the intelligence of the human mind...eyes groggy...hair unkempt...just about to drop dead...Looking up): Who me?? Er....What day is it today?

A: Oh man...look at you..you look like you just got out of your bed.

B (Looking curious): I havent really gotten out...I wish there was something in this world where they'd pay you to sleep all day long.

A (Asks the proverbial question he should have asked long back): What happened?

B (Thinking to himself...cant people understand the DAMN system here): Working on a presentation that has all kinds of fancy charts and figures, that basically shows nothing but the revenues our team made...

A: Hmm...looks like crap eh?

B: Well, we made $10 million last quarter, and now this has been represented in 10 different ways, using 40 different color combinations , in a power point presentation.

A: Huh?

B: Thats not all...C (B's manager) didnt like a couple of colors on the charts, so he said the charts were wrong!!. I redid the colors, and he said "Oh yeah, thats allright, but are you sure the board members will be allright with the jazzy slide layout". I had used the same slide layout for all the slides, so I changed them to something less 'jazzy'. By the time all other 'nuances' could be taken care of I was almost half dead. The next thing I know is I wanted to bomb Microsoft and speicifically Gates for introducing Power Point. I cant believe these board members actually make us waste so much time on a presentation that could be done as class assignment for a seventh grade student and still manage to find stuff not upto the mark? These meetings are anyway a good way of wasting company time doing something that can be obtained with a phone call or an e-mail. I actually spent 4 full days and 5 hours trying to show that last quarter we made 8 million, this quarter we made 10 million, so thats two million more. WHOA...!!God hail NEWTON..!!!.. We need to goto the amazon for a party with the anacondas!!!

This makes me wonder whether the Dilbert comic is a real life tale of a deprived boss. I mean deprived of the top floor.

My boss, all day long does what he is really good at-- Nothing !!. So when he is bored of doing 'nothing' , which means his brains have lost the last few cells, that were active, he sets out to get an update around the 'progress' the team has made. Actually the team could do without these 'updates'. Lesser hassles for both of us. He walks upto one of the new team members, shows up right behind his chair and says "Whats up?". The poor kid not knowing where the voice came from, desperate to impress the boss, freezes in his seat and begins to nervously rattle off a list of things thats been done. Boss couldnt seem to care less for the kid's enthusiasm. A totally disinterested look with a wry smile on his I'm-the boss-here kinda face and suddenly interrupts the kid and says "When you get your contacts do you use this particular tool". Kid's already shedding loads, its not yet showing on the ground, but one more statement we might have to call the Janitor. Kid, with a genuinely clueless expression says "Er...I am sorry...whats that?". Boss's face suddenly turns from a wry smile to a kid-you-better-learn-fast kinda look. He shoots off his unwanted mouth explaining to the kid to use a computer tool (lesser said abt this particular tool the better.) and how it is so useful and all that jazz. Poor kid's listening with enthusiasm. I happen to sit next to the kid, and even though I didnt want to be a part of this conversation I had to pretend as if boss had just dropped down from his heavenly abode to guide us lesser mortals , and listen to this mumbo-jumbo ( the apocalyptic afternoon siesta is much better). Of course, at the same time boss was looking at me and implying "#$%&*...you sit next to him and you havent taught him yet." The lesser said about this man the better. Whatever happened to common sense?. Kid meanwhile is all gung-ho about the new tool he didnt know existed and is all set to work on it turns to me and says "So is this really that good". I was like "Look dude, i dont wanna spoil your image of him, the last time sense poured out of his mouth was probably when Halley's comet last came. The best thing would be to treat this as a good break and try to move on and get back to working the way you were, coz if you ever followed what he had said (which of course he conveniently never followed) then you would definitely turn violent and psychotic. I think you are a wise man and you would chose the best. Decide". Boss bitching anyone?