I entered the office in the morning to find an alarm going full tilt.
Everyone else was working so I thought it was just one of those times when your ears go all naughty and act up (I’m an old soul, forgive me. I’m supposedly in my early twenties but sometimes, I reckon The Power Above sent me down with some recycled inside parts, especially my ears and eyes… and oh, I think my knees are rather second hand-ish too).
I hunched down and waited for 5 minutes while more people entered the place, went to their desks and fired up their computers… er, do you fire up a computer? Or a furnace? Oh whatever. Since no one reacted to the noise, I concluded my ears were whistling again and my parents would probably blame it on sleeping late (yes, sleeping late is the cause of all evils; from disobedient children to whistling ears to food that got burnt. The key to destroying the world-as-we-know-it is sleeping late)
After 15 minutes, I kid you not, FIFTEEN minutes; I went to the programmer who has the cubicle next to mine.
‘What’s that noise?’ (Better to play it safe… no reference to any alarm)
Without taking his eyes off his computer, he takes another bite of his twinkie type cake-in-a-packet and says ‘alarm.’
‘Alarm!?!’ I try to inject suitable alarm into my voice to remind him it’s an alarm. ‘Isn’t that supposed to be… alarming?’ (Pun intended)
‘Yes’, he says and carries on typing weird things.
‘So, can’t you turn it off,’ I hint at some action being needed in this regard.
‘I can but then it’d just start again.’
‘Ohh, okay,’ I say and pretend it makes sense.
The system administrator comes in and says, ‘Oh where’s that noise coming from? Server room? Oh no, it’s the alarm again’ and he goes and flips the switch.
If I was lost in the world of IT before, it even worse now: I can’t understand anything. I don’t even know for sure if he was a system administrator because I don’t know the difference between System Administrator, Network Administrator, Database Administrator, then the Manager Networks/ Systems (WTH is that?!)
Alarms aren’t alarming, no one cares if they eat and spill crumbs all over their keyboard and people wear hiking boots and jeans to office.
And that last one, in some ways, is the worst of all.
‘I would love to visit. As you know, I had Pakistani roommates in college who were very close friends of mine. I went to visit them when I was still in college; was in Karachi and went to Hyderabad. Their mothers taught me to cook.’
‘What can you cook?’
‘Oh, keema … daal … You name it, I can cook it. And so I have a great affinity for Pakistani culture and the great Urdu poets.’
‘You read Urdu poetry?’
‘Absolutely. So my hope is that I’m going to have an opportunity at some point to visit Pakistan.’
You might want to try and guess who said it…
Or you can just find the answer here!!
Living Room.
Specs is watching TV while S is reading a magazine and A’s putting on her nail polish.
(overheard)
*mumble* *mumble* *mumble*
They suddenly start arguing tuning me in on their conversation
A: Oh EXCUSE ME. I’d like to ask you to take his name with a little bit of respect.
S: Whatever.
A: No, I’m serious. He might turn out to be your future Brother-In-Law.
Specs (thinking its another proposal they’re discussing) *all interested* Who are we talking about?
S to A : He is horrible and you know it.
A: Shut up. JUST SHUT UP.
Specs: Who are you two talking about?
S and A keep bickering, ignoring Specs.
A makes an exit in tears
Specs: Woooo. P-M-S.
S: Ahh, nooo… I was just dissing Edward Ferrars.
Specs: Er, who?
I am SO glad I was a normal boring aunty-ish teenager.
They are humid homosapiens with full sized aortic pumps.. I mean they are warm people with big hearts
As you know I’m interning these days (I jokingly refer to it as work… okay maybe not jokingly, sarcastically, if you will)
We’ve been assigned the exciting, fun filled, cerebrally challenging task of… slitting open envelopes. Er, yay. That’s why I always tell doctors they have it better at their house jobs; at least they get to cut people open! At this end, one day we’re THE EXPERTS the computer people come to with finance questions; the next day, we’re sorting mail.
Let me not be the ungrateful child. In truth, sorting mail does have its… charms.The interns look upon it as the ultimate intern bonding time and they’re determined to cram as many jokes into that time frame as they can to take the edge off the letter opening.
Plus, you come across some real gems… like the cover letter I’ve copied word for word for your pleasure (say thank you; I could get fired for this)
Dear Sir,
I feel great revence to request you to be so decent as to appoint me the ****** ****** to work under your gracious administration and compassionate command.
My resume is the soft light on my qualifications and capabilities it would comfortably enable you to take lively and expeditious decision which would surely be in my favor.
On my selection I would spare no pains for the complacency of my superiors with conscientious word and accomplishment of arduous drudgery assigned to me.
Yours Obediently XXXXX
Have you said Thank You yet? I told you, say thank you!
Did I tell you lot you’re wonderfully diverse? One only has to look at the questions to know. Here’s a very virtual totally halal hug for you:
*hug*
I had no idea I’d put this post up. It was on automatic publish; when I opened my in-box to see ‘new comment on ‘Whassup?’ I went all bonkers within full sight of Foot Starer thinking someone had hacked my blog.
Its totally your fault now that he thinks I got excited because he was looking at me.
Just one word, though. If you like me and think I’m funny and intelligent, please stop reading, go directly to the comments section and leave me a nice comment putting that into words. If not, oh well, you asked for it (asked? Get the pun? Oh sorry, its just that the Sunday’s gone to my head)
Here goes:
*drum roll*
When Nabokov says “ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the mis-informed, simple, noble winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns”, what is he getting at?
Yes.
Should I go for York or City?
York is always better than city. It can be used before a word and after… like NewYork and Yorkshire. Consider the manuveraility of the word. York.
Anyways Boba Iqbal-York sounds WAY better than Boba Iqbal-City. Someone might think you were married to a housing scheme.
I would like to know what to do when i get bored.
You can start reading my archives.
Oh wait, you wanted to know what to do when you get bored… you can read e-books, listen to music, make a new curtain rod using bamboos. Oh scrap that last one. You live in Norway. Well, you can always volunteer some where. Or update your blog more!!
Could keeping a blog haunt me when I have children and they discover the world of internet?
To me, that question is the same as asking whether our parents keeping their personal diary in a library haunt them. The internet is HUGE so its unlikely they’ll come across your blog. Maybe they won’t even have the internet anymore because ‘if you search Google on Google, you can break the internet’ (name the program!)
Just make sure you destroy your hardrive after you’re done with blogging forever. Don’t throw it in the river ala Michael Scofield; take it to the laundromat and put it in the dryer.
What do you get if you cross a bear with a moose?
Boose (b
z)
do you think i’ll pass all of them??
If you drive fast enough, you pass all of them fairly quickly, yes.
We are talking about roads signs, aren’t we?
How come I only drop my mobley phone when standing on the pavement/tarmac/any other hard and abrasive surface and not on carpet or grass??
Did I never teach you anything! Its because of Murphy’s Law! Next you’ll be asking me why a toast falls butter side down. Seriously, Smee.
What do you think it means if you dream it’s the end of the world?
It means that you’re trying to fit the buzzing of the alarm clock into a context that will let you sleep longer. Open your eyes and haul yourself out of bed.
Have you ever been impressed with a person’s character/looks so much, that you wished you could be that person?
Truthfully, who hasn’t? But then you try and adopt their good qualities while keeping all of yours and there you are, a better person than you were before… and a better person than them. Life is all about adapting and changing for the better. Though envy isn’t the way to go about it.
When Nabokov says “ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the mis-informed, simple, noble winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns”, what is he getting at?
Uh, now that’s proly more like a riddle…
You’re such a Linux user, aren’t you? *frowns* I asked for a question, not en entry test! This blog is rated category C halal so I wouldn’t want to quote Lolita on it. *tauba astaghfar*
Seeing as the Seraphs are Angels in the Bible and in Jewish lore, I’d think it was Love…
Even if it wasn’t, now it is because I said so.
I have one question for you people now: why did no one ask me what the cartoon had to do with the post?
Someone sent me an e-mail asking me what’s happening at the office these days.
If you noticed my lax use of the term ‘office’ I’ll have to ask you to play along.
Or else.
Well, then.
Anyone else has a random question?
Leave it in the comments and I’ll put up a post on Sunday with answers to the first ten.
I was on vacation in the boonies last year, when the filling from my root canal popped out.
There was nothing to do but wait till we got back to civilization (in the relative sense of the word) I was looking out over a pretty valley when… I bit into one of my mom’s culinary misadventures and lost the tooth. I first thought it was a rogue bone filling my mouth. Not that I have rogue bones but I thought it came from the food. It wasn’t until I made it to the bathroom that I realized… AHH! Where’s my tooth!!!
The visible part of it had collapsed leaving a root that had to be extracted. As you can guess that meant rather a long procedure, I delayed and delayed; dentists are not my most favorite people after the botched root canal.
I changed dentists and they gave me a nice plan and a hefty discount for the amount of work I’m getting done. They almost presented me with a plaque for most dental work (get it? plaque? Hahaha…er…Oh er, well). However, the dentists told me I required a root canal on another tooth which was hurting me bad and a crown on it, plus a bridge for the top-broken one they’re going to extract.
My father has taken to labeling this my graduation present since he never did get around to giving me one. Well, at least it’s a thing of lasting value. What more can a girl want in a present; this one is going to outlive me. When people in 2200 find my skeleton, they’ll probably conclude I was a part owner of a dental council and had free work done.
The root canal was uneventful, but the tooth extraction required minor chair side surgery. Since there was no surface to hold on to, they made an incision and then pulled the root out.
I was given a pretty big dose of local anesthesia and was a little woozy from staring into the light when I suddenly realized: I hadn’t noticed till then: the dental surgeon was H-O-T. Well, it’s entirely his fault really for asking me to look at him (what’s it with the dentist asking you to look at them or their assistant? Don’t they realize its fitnah? Oh but what a fitnah it was 
)
It wasn’t until they were stitching me up that I opened my eyes feeling very Grey’s Anatomy’d with all these hot dentists (surgeon + regular dentist + assistant who’s doing his house job) that I realized I was giving them random smiles. I figure they put it down to the anesthesia. But I couldn’t stop thinking how like a movie it was with all these really good looking people hovering over me.
The dentist then gave me a long list of post op instructions. For that piece of hotness, I think I can take two more stitches any time.
All along the way back, I was thinking how terribly awesome all three of them were *silly grin*
It wasn’t until I got home that I realized: one of my hot dentists was a woman.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It was the anesthesia I tell you.
I mean, I think.
Just trying out the post-by-email function. So, In effect, this is my very first mass e-mail. (A mass e-mail that doesn’t ask for money? How many of those do you see? Eh?)
P.S. Where are my regular commentators? I thought it was supposed to be summer holidays.
Wait, that’s only for schools.
Oh, never mind.
I don’t dare complain because my mother keeps on warning me of the dangers of ‘men’ in the work place and if she gets a whiff of this, I’ve got an internship no more. So, I don’t even dare make fun of this at home (because every situation no matter how serious gives me a good laugh; I’m weird that way)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
During training last week, I looked up to find a guy staring at my feet.
First I assumed he was just lost in thought and had chosen a random point in space to concentrate on. Like I find myself staring at people who think they are God’s gift to women and come to to the smirk on their faces where as I was thinking about what to wear tomorrow. Trying to get in a more comfortable position, I shifted my crossed legs from a right slant to a left slant. And his pupils followed.
Oh.
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The next day I wore closed shoes but he still stared. This time, after an hour, he gave up on the feet and stared at my forehead. He was staring with such concentration that I thought he might come over any moment with his pencil and start playing ‘connect the dots’ with my very pink and obvious there-was-a-pimple-here marks.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The next day, whenever I looked up, he was staring. In class. During breaks. In the middle of a conversation. Staring. With all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
I tried to hunker down in my chair and disappear.
The three guys from my university took offense to this and in breaks, one of them always ended up sitting next to me talking about random things. Really random things.
And then, Foot Starer started getting aggressive.
Whenever any of those guys made a mistake, he made a point of letting out hyena like guffaws. At this point, the class promptly split into two groups because guys, it turns out, are not afraid of declaring allegiances and inviting conflict (Lesson # 1 learnt and noted for future reference)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The next day, everyone from the insulted group were sitting right behind me in the auditorium where we had to give a five minute presentation. As we discovered that day, Mr Foot Starer could dish it out but he couldn’t take it (don’t you just love those ‘acts-macho-but-is-as-bullet-proof-as-a-sponge-cake’ types?) His five minute presentation lasted a full 30 minutes where he got more and more nervous to the point where he started shouting that ‘a group’ was destroying his concentration. I wonder what category of concentration breakers does he slate ’staring nonstop’ in.
That last day, someone handed the transfer letter to our trainer and since everyone kept on asking again and again who they were to report to, the Trainer kindly photocopied a notification meant for him only and gave a copy to everyone… with everyone’s address and phone number on it.
As a further favor upon me by Fate, Foot Starer and two other guys were assigned to IT along with yours truly.
Then, a break. Turned out Foot Starer was transferred to his hometown branch in Rawalpindi (which is a neighboring city)! Hurray! He fought tooth and nail to stay here saying its the largest office (its headquarters) and he would like to stay here, but him trying to bulldoze his way didn’t sit too well with the Incharge who made sure Foot Starer was assigned to Rawalpindi.
The Twist in the Tale Epilogue:
I got up from my cubicle today when I was suddenly face-to-face with (oh don’t tell me you guessed already! What clever readers) Foot Starer himself (do I write a capital H to allude to his sense of self-worth?)
He said Hi. I said Hi. I excused myself since I was blessedly carrying some files and faked being in a hurry. Later, I overheard him talking to the Head of Operations saying he’s not learning anything in that small place (Pindi’s small?!) and he would prefer HeadQuarters. My heart was in my throat and my stomach near my ankles somewhere. I truly did not want this crap in the workplace.
The Head, bless him, told FS that when he first came to that place, he came as an Assistant System Analyst but no one would let him touch a computer. “It takes time to learn and they’re not going to let you do everything the first day; and remember, you’re an intern. I don’t mean it in a bad sense but if you ruin anything, your Incharge would have to bear the consequences. We have enough interns at Head Quarters as it is; we’re hardly finding work to keep them occupied.”
Oh bless you, Mr Head of Operations. If you didn’t have as much cuddle factor as a cactus, I think I would’ve almost hugged you.
