Chapter 1: One not so Fine Day

It was not one of those good days of downloading movies and playing games, neither it was a bad day on which I work. It was the worst; I have my time sheet completely filled the brim and spilling all over, with component development dead line, couple of must-fix bugs, and an over ambitious intern eagerly waiting (picture a vulture sitting on a tree branch and waiting for its prey to die and multiply it by a 100 times to get the effect) for me to give KTs and train him.

“Hi Manoj”

“Is the module completed?”

“Whats the Update on the Bugs” Questioned my manager in IM.

I thanked god for making him sick today, otherwise he would barge in to my cube every 30 min, asking for status.

“Everythings under control”

“We will meet deadline” I replied cursing the IM for disturbing me.

Owing to his sickness, my manager didn’t go in to details.

I am preparing myself back to action, and “Tadaa” a chat message popped up on my desktop. Its from one of my team mates, Arun and it has one single word “Lunch???”. I looked at the time shown in the bottom corner of my desktop. It is 12.31 PM. “Not again and definitely not today” I uttered in a disappointed tone.

“Why yaar! What happened?” asked Kamal without turning away his head from the screen his head is dipped into.

Out of frustration I said, “Seriously Man, I don’t know how he gets hungry always.”

Kamal added “I wanna know how this guy is keeping his stomach from complaining of overload. He had good amount of breakfast with me at 10 and …”.

“Is it??” Srinath, a newbie in team, exclaimed a little too loud, stopping us. “I thought he has n’t had his breakfast, I mean when I saw him in the breakout area at 11, having corn flakes and 2 cokes, is he always that hungry??”.

Kamal, smiled and said "You will get to know lot more things than that, buddy".

In a sarcastic tone I said, “I guess that must be just Snacks”, and mocked the quotes in the air, around the word Snacks. We laughed and suddenly became quiet watching Arun walk around the aisles to motivate the nonchalant colleagues.

“Come on Guys, Let’s go for Lunch. We better leave now, otherwise we could n’t get good place to sit, its already 12:35, Chalo Chalo”, came arun towards us. His face is a little pleading and his tone is lot more requesting.

We reluctantly left the seats, closing the laptop lid, a little too hard.

Feeling very contended for making his two renegades move their a**es, Arun went back to lead the legion, towards the cafeteria as fast as he can.