It's a Bat, Man! and other tales...

The workplace is sometimes more fun than it probably wants to be. And that is one of the reasons I am still here.

The thing is, that since I went to a girls college, the possibility of teasing friends with guys and other such juvenile fun never arose, really. And so, it was a new and altogether hilarious experience to find that workplaces can be made entertaining just by the presence of one good friend and a random collection of loser-type guys.

Now, before we get into the details, let me enlighten you about the setting of the action. Office happens to be on the top floor of an Hotel, with a nice view of Delhi. However, there is no convenient canteen type place for people to take a tea-break. But there are quite a few offices on the upper floors of the hotel and hence quite a large number of people who have nowhere to go when they want a little break. There was one little boxy room where a chai-wala made his little fortune selling chips for a rupee more than MRP and so forth, but for some reason he now is forbidden to serve any but the employees of some random office. In other words, no more merry gatherings on the fourth floor.

But it wasn't always so! Back in the days when it was the hub of all the random people of the earth, friend S and I had many entertaining conversations, many, though not all, of which involved some or the other random guy who may or may not have been eyeing either or both of us.

So if we were sitting on the stairs, and person X walked by, I would nudge her and ask "Why was that loser checking you out??" while she would raise her eyebrows meaningly and ask me in her most suggestive tone, "Poor guy, he was staring at you and you didnt even look at him... poor fellow... it's not good, A, you should not do this to people..." and so on. Person X could be a sweeper, an ageing uncle with a potbelly, a young executive type, a lawyer, or just a random entity. It didn't matter, really.

The best of the lot were probably the lawyers, who at least could be depended upon to dress decently. One in particular had the most fascinating profile. So pleased was S when I mentioned this, that she sent me to pay the chai-wala just so that I would have to walk past Mr. Side-profile and could check out whether the front view was as good. Also, she was certain that he was checking me out (as usual) and so she was doing him a big favour as well. She even messaged me when I was in Bombay to tell me that she had spotted my 'side-profile' fellow!!

I may also mention that S being a lawyer herself is convinced that all lawyers are her brothers and sisters. In other words, she put paid to all my attempts at teasing her by adopting the entire lot as long lost siblings.

Then there is Champu/Champak Charlie. Equally random, Champu works in the same office as us, and S has decided that he has a 'thing' for me. Since he is entirely weird, and we don't even know his name, we christened him Champu/ Champak, because he seems like one. Anytime he is in the section for some work, S has her 'suggestive' face on. I'm convinced he is fascinated by her, simply cause if he meets the two of us, he studiously avoids looking at her, but I'm sure he darts furtive glances her way.

The most hilarious of the lot though, is the case of the person in office who is part of the AS's staff, I think; S says he's a peon, and I suppose he must be. There comes a point where you can't be entirely sure of anything, specially when the information comes from someone who tells you (yet again) that the guy in question spends most of the day lounging around the section gazing at... who else. According to her, she has a wonderful view of the section from her desk, and since she has all the time in the world to do nothing but gaze around, she notices that this fellow is constantly staring. So she came up with this elaborate plan once, where she would message me everytime she saw him staring at me, so that I could turn and see for myself that it wasnt all in her head. Alas, all lab conditions can't be controlled, and despite a lot of (free) messages being sent my way, I never once managed to see for myself!

One strange thing about our Division, though, is that there are a lot of peons, and all of them are loud, pretty abusive, and for some strange reason, take great delight in burping horribly all the time. I suppose it's better to have loud peons with a heavy dose of haryanvi jat-ness thrown in, that to have dead bats in the air vents.

Apparently, in the days when our Ministry had newly acquired this office, they had to summon pest control a lot, cause of the various kinds of livestock that the Hotel people had bred there. Apart from the mandatory cockroaches and rats and mice, there were bats. Without too many creepy stories on that, I'll just mention that dead bats in the air vents sound even worse than live bats in the air vents. However, for some reason, I was always a little sceptical about all these tall tales as I thought they were, specially when S would point to the dark corners of the stairwell and try to convince me that she saw a bat. Until we rounded a corner one bright, sunny day, and actually saw a bat! Flying around looking confused, we thought... but right then, S came up with 'It's a bat, man!' so loudly that the poor confused bat probably got a little more confused wondring if it was indeed a superhero, recently relocated from Gotham City.

Ok, now I'm sleepy, so more tales next time.