Average Monday

8:30 am - Alarm breaks the silence of morning in my room , no rather in the whole neighborhood as I scramble to find it and then slink back into the quilt reasoning with myself that 15 minutes more wont cause a disaster.

9:15 am - This time I get up , draw open the curtains to let the sun or rain or whatever is coming down that day into my room. Then head slowly down to the toilet , taking care not to disturb the peace loving people around me with the creaking stairs and flapping chappals, not to mention the roaring sound of flush , announcing to the whole wide world that I just took a crap.

9:30 am- Pick up the toothbrush , wash it (though I dont need to , hardly any dust , but its a habit I picked up in hostel), put toothpaste and roll it around your dentures wondering at the same time what excuse am I going to put forward for the late arrival to the supervisor.

9:35 am- Head into the warm shower and as the good hot water hits me , I slowly forget about the time until 20 minutes later when I stop doodling around coz its 5 minutes to 10 and I am not even dressed yet. I quickly dry myself , head into the room, put on some t-shirt ,then a sweat shirt and then a jacket, because in a day in nederlands you are never really sure how many types of weather are you going to confront in a day. It can vary from hot sunny - cold sunny- pleasant windy - cold windy - cold hard rain - cold drizzle and so on.

10:05 am- For the lack of time as well as decent culinary skills , break 3 eggs put them into a glass , shake with some salt , I pretend I am James bond and its a dry martini and gulp it down. Then I wash the glass and pour some juice into it and gulp that down. Now I have effectively fooled my stomach into thinking that I just had some omelet and juice.

10:10 am - Saunter out of the house , unlock bicycle and cycle for minutes on a separate lane with car driver actually waiting for you on intersections to cross it. Really respect people on cycle here not like in India where you have to get down into the rough every time some car comes by on a narrow lane.

10:15 am - I walk into the Atlas building and avoid eye contact with your supervisor because I am now one hour late than everyone else in the building. But its coffee time so everyone is busy crowding around the machine and I join them after switching on my computer. The coffee is pretty crappy , maybe because its free or maybe the dutch like its that way, the only thing worth drinking is the hot chocolate and I usually take that. A few hellos and how r u’s later I settle in the front of my computer at about 10:30 and the first thing I open is Mozilla firefox and simultaneously open up 3 tabs , orkut , ibnlive and cricinfo. Trivial things like my project work can wait until after I have checked my scraps , devoured the news and read the latest cricket news.

10:45am - I open MATLAB and let it remain, to be switched to whenver I want to be seen as working seriously. Then I open the gtalk and check if anyone has an interesting status message and the usual suspects are Aniruddh , Deka and Bahl with Bahl mostly giving out youtube links. Usually during this time one or other of my friends ping me up to ask if I am going to paris , how much time will it take to cover Amsterdam and if there are any other places to see in nederlands. I usually give out different answers to diff. people and make up storiesas to why a particularly non descript village is absolutely a must visit. This is not to misguide, but just to make this inanely boring conversation interesting and if by chance somebody does end up there, who knows , we might laugh about it later.

11:15am - This is usually the time when my supervisor sneaks up on me unannounced and I hastily close all gtalk conversations and minimize the firefox. Then I give an innocent smile and start babbling nonstop about 2d modelling of …….. and then using the books open in front of me I pretend this work and internship is a life changing experience and my ultimate goal in life has now changed to become a hydrological researcher. Well I know all these emotions on one face sounds tough but it gets easier with practice.

11:45am - Ok enough hard work till now, time to take a coffee break again and try to see if any free event has been listed around the machine. I am in luck , there is a wine tasting event this thursday(free for students) and I make a note in my calender to remind myself.

12:00pm - Its nearing lunch time and I start thinking what am I going to buy for lunch today, considering cash is not used here, I have to buy 10euro chipnip cards to buy lunch and it gets over in 3 days flat. Soups are good but sandwiches are eatable only on certain days. Anyways as the lunch time draws nearer the frequency of chats on gtalk increases which is really frustating because that eats into my precious lunch time.

12:30pm - Its lunch time and I suggest to the other hardworking souls in the room that we should go for lunch. This is always met by “sure” and “yeah lets go” and the german girl takes about 10 minutes to pack up  her laptop and keep it under lock and key while me and the Austrian guy go to the adjacent room to invite the Italian lad. So finally at about 12:45 we descend down the building and depending on the weather go outside or eat in the canteen itself. Now the topic of discussion during lunch is usually the crappy food of the canteen, sometimes stories from our respective homelands and a few lines about the yesterdays match. The conversation is pretty easy to follow as the others are not really super fluent in English, however owing to diff nationalities its the choosen mode of communication. Infact I suspect I have a better command over it than most of them. But while others are talking or making a point I am usually thinking of a funny one liner or a clever repartee. As I am about to deliver this punchline, I am interupted by the mafioso who decides to chip in his with his 2 cents. I mutter a slew of abuses in Hindi towards him under my breath at the same time maintaining the smile. The topic changes after that. But while walking back to the workplace I manage to bring it up again and ramm in the punchline. Bingo… ‘Jhanda gaad diya’ as Sid would have said.

1:30pm - Time to pretend again. This time I open a different book and continue to scourge the net for interesting blogs, stories and anything really just to pass the time. The time after lunch I am seldom interrupted by my supervisor, however if she does arrive I always have a slew of academic nonsense ready to make it sound that the work is really complicated and it would need more of my time to get it done. The next 4 hours is a test of my time wasting tactics honed over 4 years of highschool and 3 years of IIT life and at 5:30 I pass the test with flying colors. It involves spending time refreshing your own orkut account, jumping from scrapbook to scrapbook deriving vicarious pleasure out of reading other’s talk, checking out photos of hot girls if possible(Pic lock thing - I hate that application) and trading on cric-exchange, checking out our anony IITG community for its hilarious content.

6:00 pm - The Mscs and Phds leave at this time generally exhausted with their continous struggle to churn out something useful after a day of simulations and calculations. I on the other hand put on my I-pod, clear out my desk and with a big smile on my face bid everyone good bye and skip out of the building after another funfilled day at my internship.

Reaching home the first thing I do is change my status message to New Post Up with a link to the blog to whore it around coz it hasnt got a decent following yet. I enjoy the rest of the time watching the stats go up.