Monday blues . .

Two years since beginning my "working life", I am beginning to feel the monday morning blues.
If ever there was a day I had to drag myself off to work against all my wishes, it was today;
One week on-site in Mumbai.
Two days pilgrimage to my favourite temples.
One week laid up in bed with a fever that refuses to go away.
. . . The monday after all this is really a drag.
But one one reason made me travel all the 26 kms from home to office. It was to check my mail and find some good news about a much anticipated travel. But darn!! The mail completely turned my day ulta pulta. From there on, my enthu for the day's work slid even more. . . .
I somehow managed to escape at normal office closing time without having to do the usual last minute fire fighting work that crops up on most days. . . but that raised a few eyebrows though.

Surprising how, if one makes it a habit to stay longer than mandatory minimum, the superiors in the office give you "that" look on the rare days that you leave along with all the other guys out there who have a life outside office.

Weird

The hostel where I am staying since the past 18 months seems to have rather weird people in charge.
A couple of situations I encounter quite often makes me sure of this.
7 AM:
I wake up bleary eyed..early in the morning .......find my way to the bathroom complex hoping to grab a quick shower before dashing off to class/office....and yes, my stay in the shower is very brief...reason: The water is biting cold.

This is nothing new.. repeated requests to the concerned authorities to fix up the water heating system..has not at all helped. Infact it looks like they are pissed off with the innumerable complaints they receive regarding this matter and have decided to take revenge.
Why do I feel this? . . . .
7 PM:
Location: The loo.
The taps are running with steaming hot water........ ouch!!


The hostel authorities seem to be saying: Shower in cold water[even in the middle of winter] and wash your ass in hot water.

I asked for hot water, and got it......it is only about 12 hours late that's all. . . .I have heard of Indian Stretchable Time.....but this is too much!

Mediocrity!!

It was supposed to be a day spent in relief,after completing the end term exams with only one project demonstration remaining.I hardly slept the previous night despite being sleep deprived for over a week.By around 5 in the morning, I had managed to complete the remaining work in my project and went to bed, with the intention of speaking to my prof later in the morning to get some feedback about the work.A careless mistake while demonstrating resulted in unexpectedly bad result from my program. So the prof decided to take a look at the code to identify the cause of the anomaly. Having taken one look at it, came a most surprising comment," There is no good in just getting a code from somewhere, you gotta understand how it works atleast, before demonstrating it."

This comment shocked me !!Being a mediocre programmer, i usually start my coding work, from a template and build on it, seldom starting any programming from scratch.However, this was one occasion where i wrote every line of code, with meticulous commenting and following almost every trivial Software Engineering ritual, maintaining the date of creation of code, date of modification, versioning scheme, a few lines of introductory comments about how to run the code, etc.[This was something that this very prof espoused in class saying,"maintaining good documentation is very important, even if your code is not working, these rituals must be followed-will help in debugging and maintaining the code later on!"]
This sort of organised method of working is probably best confined to speeches and not practice and was probably not expected of us..
If any work which is done with diligence can be met with such reproach, no wonder we are content to do amateurish work and be satisfied with it, coz that is what is expected of us. Going the extra mile to do things in an organised manner only lands us into trouble, resuting in comments from well meaning peers," Why did you need to do it that well, they will obviously suspect that you flicked it from somewhere".
I guess, there is some truth in these comments afterall.
My first time doing a decent programming job and i get this!!I can only say "Idu yentha lokavayyah" where mediocrity is the norm and hardwork and effort count for nothing and leads to suspicion.

Lesson from this incident: NEVER FOLLOW SE practices. If you do, then you will land in trouble. I always knew that the profs were only Bull Shitting us in the weekly 4 hours of SE lectures every week .But now, speaking from experience, i can be certain!!