It was yet another wait at the subregistrar’s office to get an official property related document. Universal Teacher: Experience, had taught me to equip myself with a book and adequate water supply on such visits to make the wait less painful. It was one of those less blessed offices which comprised merely of a single large room with half a dozen tables and chairs distributed unevenly. A few chairs, ‘waiting chairs’ as I call them were lined at one end of the room as a courteous gesture from the government for frequent visitors like me. I was asked by the clerk to wait as usual and I perched on one of the waiting chairs. As I opened a P.G.Wodehouse , I happened to notice a lady clerk at one of the tables . Something about the lady struck very odd to me. She was very visibly jobless and kept staring at empty space with a perpetual lazy smile on her face. The stare with the lazy smile continued for a very long time .I wondered if it was her joblessness that struck me unusual. A very frank mental dialogue told me that I have been equally jobless on many days in my own office. It then suddenly flashed: Unlike me, the lady was extremely frank about her joblessness. The poor lady did not have internet. Worse, she did not even have a computer!
These computers might have given us dry eyes, crick in the neck and a dozen other ergonomics related problems but we ought to acknowledge its long service in helping the ‘corporates’ appear extremely busy in their pretentious cubicles. The complicated looking excel sheets which act as an excellent background against minimized online newspaper windows. Office intranet messenger with a ready source of vital information about the company and its employees (read gossip).The office mail which makes you look important even when you are actually reading the stale joke forwards. And the ever helpful Desktop cluttered with a zillion files which gives you an air of importance when you stare fixedly at it scratching your chin.
I decided to acknowledge the service of my desktop through this blog and as I was concluding it ,a colleague from the next cubicle pinged on office messenger ,“ Busy Bee .Aaj kal bahuth kaam karti hain. Which Project?”.
