Sick (on) Saturday

I know I hailed "casual Saturdays" as a day to... well, wear jeans. But I'm against the practice now. I strongly believe that the only acceptable garment for Saturdays is pyjamas and the only valid reason for asking you to turn up at work on a Saturday is if your firm is showing cartoons on a giant screen and offering you a non-stop supply of milk and cookies all day. 

I don't really believe in doing anything that may seem useful on Saturdays. I never bothered showing up in school or college on Saturdays if I was required to. I would hate to betray my own belief system, and so I'm trying to model the likelihood of falling sick each month so that I can use the rest of the sick leaves on Saturdays. On the non-academic side, I will probably need to learn to exercise some restraint to hide my boundless joy and triumph on Friday evenings right before I "fall sick." 

Last Saturday had the office looking more uniform than they do when they are conforming to some dress code. Almost everyone wore black T-shirts with blue jeans. One guy even wore the same T-shirt as I did in a slightly different colour, thereby making the gender divide meaningless too. The inference from all this is that there's really no need for standardisation. We all follow self-imposed dress codes and uniformity is assured by the retailers. Or perhaps my firm's HR department is exceedingly good at assessing the compatibility of new recruits - we even have the same taste in clothes. 

Little Joys

I wrote earlier about wanting to simulate exams so that I could enjoy doing nothing. I think the argument also applies to work. I don't see the point of reading comics when I have nothing else to do. I need some work so that I can feel happy about not doing it. It's a fairly simple concept but people seem to misunderstand. The interns offered to send me their college assignments. Others counselled me and told me to enjoy my breaks because they wouldn’t last long. Standard office talk.

Not having work when you're at work is oxymoronic. You can’t go home so you're basically forced to sit at your desk and do nothing all day. It's like summer vacations with a nightmarish babysitter. But I had my first truly busy week and I must say it was more interesting than the less busy ones so far. I got a real kick out of discreetly reading rubbish online. Getting a job means transitioning from a 24 hour feeling of guilt for not studying to 9 hours of feeling like you’re doing the world such a favour just by existing.

On average, most of the people in positions of authority lie on a downward sloping curve on the busyness-coolness plane; where busyness refers to the number of times one is called away from one’s desk and coolness is the general lack of interest in what you’re doing. The good news is that any boss who doesn’t understand your quest to accumulate completely useless information won’t be around all the time, and the ones who are around a lot will be somewhat sympathetic. This model doesn’t, however, preclude the possibility of anomalies.

I’ve found yet another unexpected payoff to being a girl. Last week, I stood holding a door open for a colleague insisting that he should go first and he did the same. My gender identity allowed me to end this comical, socially mandated exchange of courtesy. Imagine how long I would have been stuck there otherwise.