the shOemon chronicles

A very WET first day ; Corporate diaries #1

~ This post is dedicated to all the new and refreshing friends I have made in the past 2 weeks.  ~

”     It was a very wet first day.    ”

That’s what I’m telling all the nice people who asked me how my day of working was.
Its interesting you know, sometimes in life you make friends, and then you also make friends who really care about how you are doing, and most often we don’t realize the difference between the both.
Anyway, so I reached my reporting place by 10:28am. The rain was continuous but not awry yet. Soon I met another person from my college who was selected for this, that made the count 2/119 HCL recruits. Waiting at the lounge-y reception, I heard two people walk by with laptops in there hand and talking about conversion of IPv4 to IPv6. A little tech-nerd inside me stared at them with twinkly eyes. Soon the HR person seated us in the conference room, and in the successive 2 hours we signed around 35 times and acquired a Platinum privilege account at ICICI. The “platinum” and “privilege” lover inside me sat-up a little more proudly. A part of me juggled between thoughts off long lost childhood, and another was trying to absorb-in the reality of growing up and starting the first job. Can you feel out of place and totally right at the same time? Yep.

Around lunch break, we got done with all the formalities for HCL. We then proceeded to our client Nomura’s office in Powai (where we’ll be working for real) to submit some documents and prospectively explore the office and transportation facilities. Ok, Andheri in general…sucks. But when it is pouring down Elephant-pee-gallons-per-minute rain, it literally is a Venice-themed hell.
After receiving mud bath from passing by cars, we took a bus to powai.
By 3pm we were done with all work and our dear awesome bosses gave the day off (Yipeee!(thats obviously the child part)) . 
Usually in a foreign city you would just wanna go home after this, sip coffee and relax, and escape the rain.
BUT, I own-this-moda-fuka-City (Forgive me, I have been wanting to go all hip-hop for sometime). No really, I know this city and love the adventures. So I rolled up me-sleeves and called up my buddies and we decided to go down to SoBo for cell phone shopping. 
We entered heera panna at around 4, amidst rain-but-no-flood. We exited at 5:30 to what looked like busses and cars oops-ed into a river, and a muddy one at that.
The girls decided to leave for home and I went to my dude friend’s home nearby.

(Why do we always leave for home in middle of a effing havoc? Its like…. “ooooo, its FLOODING…lets leave the comfort of wherever we are safe, and rush home through the extremely crowded and dangerous water logging…doesn’t matter if we have to walk or swim or die…LET’s GO HOME!!!….”….
 ahem…Right.)

Ok honestly, you sort of forget the rain when you are on 10th floor of a sea facing flat near Malabar Hills, but the non-operational Tata Sky only means that the rain is bad. My friends that had left for home did reach home, but not her own. :P
At around 9:30, the rain stopped to a drizzling level and I set out for home.
The bus took 20 minutes only to reach Dadar but then…a funny scene awaited me.
The busses and cabs around Plaza theatre had completely been parked. Like, no headlights, or humans walking. It was a scene from Zombie-Transportation movie, and after being highly amused, I walked across the bridge. There were people watching movies on their tablets, some sleeping and some just staring at me. (creepy alert).
I walked to TT and got a direct bus home. (Yipee). But in the next half hour, the bus moved probably 7 inches, and so I got pulled into the Zombie-lala-land. I happily saw half more hour of Madagascar on my neighbour’s iPad.
(This is such a 3rd-world-flood problem. Bloody, there’s no transport to reach home, but we have awesome phones and tabs to kill time. )
After a while I couldn’t take it anymore and walked to Matunga station, through an intense dead-dark lane and helped a few old ladies go into a scary deserted platform. 
Did I mention my shoe leather by now was as moist as it was when it adorned a fat and healthy cow, and also, its not very pleasant walking in water filled leather shoe. Not, AT,ALL!

I reached home safe and in one piece at midnight. And thus end my first day of work. Ok, seriously, I can’t even have a NORMAL first day of work. WHAT-THE-HELL is wrong with my life? (But I’m not complaining. I love the non-predictable adventure lifestyle I have)

So today is day 2, and I am at home. Why? Because my company needs to first accept me, then transfer me to Bombay, then transfer me to the client side and other million Technicalities. And while they do THAT, I get to sip on corn-maggi soup I just made. Yum!)

Anyway, KeepON reading with ShoemON .(Im trying to come up with a catchphrase for the blog. Suggestions will be lovely.)

Cheers-