Am too exhausted, have been commuting to workplace daily for the past fortnight. Have to catch the morning bus to office as early as 7:20am. Let me quickly look at my calendar for tomorrow. well, it appears cleaner than ever! No meetings scheduled for tomorrow. Sounds good! Why don't I plan to work from home tomorrow? The thoughts creep into my mind this evening.And finally I decided that I'll be working from home tomorrow.A sense of relief! Will restore my energy tomorrow, at least will save commuting in traffic for an hour and a half one way.Indeed, will be able to work better from home. All the positive thoughts settling in my mind tonight. Will surely have a sound sleep.
Comes tomorrow morning, oopse the alarm rings right as the clock strikes 5 in the morning. Ghosh! why didn't I reset the alarm last night. Thank GOD! snooze is a resort! Ding Dong! Oopse I wake up from my snooze again. This time its the door bell, I grab my cell phone to have a glance at the time. Its just 6:00am. Time for the house maid. Why didn't I inform her last evening to come late today, cursing myself I get out of the bed. The door bell rings again. Why can't this maid give me a moment? This time I curse the maid and hurriedly bash myself against the door. Finally, the day has commenced. Its not yet 7:00am but since I'm already up and moving I plan to log in to the office port. Sipping a cup of hot tea, I start checking my mails while I'm also logging on to the company's internet chat id. No sooner have I logged on than I receive a ping! This is one of the Japanese folks. Perhaps, he's the one who has raised the problem report I was working on till late last evening. Has he set up an alarm to alert him as soon as I get available on the chat server? Indeed! Japan is around 3.5 hours ahead of IST. My clock shows past 7am. Oh! these assiduous Japanese customers! Hours pass by before I end up the discussion with the Japanese customer.
The clock strikes 10am. I've already started feeling hungry. Time to have some breakfast. As I peep into the kitchen to decide what to have this morning, BEEP! and a ping from the office. People have now started the working day and have some queries for me. Whilst I utilize my typing skills to quickly reply to the queries, I smell something's burning! These are the toasts I was merrily preparing for breakfast! Off, I rush to the kitchen and sigh on seeing my breakfast plate! Quickly I gulp in the milk of glass and get back to my work desk. My work queue enlists a heavy inflow of work items today. All need to be closed by the end of the day. I sit down to prioritize my work items. Ping pong keeps happening as different colleagues have various discussion lists.
A continuous cry from outside distracts my attention. Looking out of the balcony, I view the green grocer vociferously listing the vegetables he has displayed in his cart today. I remember no vegetables in the refrigerator. Not much time to think, I grab my wallet and run downstairs to buy some fresh vegetables for the week. It'll save me time from going to the market. I buy almost all the varieties the grocer had. Ranging from tomatoes to bitter gourd, I also buy the coriander leaves, colocasia, brinjals, ladyfinger and bottle gourd. Handing over the money to the grocer, I rush back to the stairs and there rolls down the tomatoes from the torn polybag. Irritatedly, I keep the rest of the bags inside the house and climb down the stairs collecting the fallen, uncrushed tomatoes.
Grabbing some breath I climb up the stairs and get back to my desk. Alas! another unscheduled call invite. I certainly can't decline this one. Have another 15 minutes to get into this call, so I hurriedly try to close the less time consuming tasks. Am almost on the verge of analyzing the logs, when the meeting commences. I dial into the meeting, and this one continues for more than an hour. Winding it up, I get back to my work and keep ticking one item at a time as I complete the day's "To Do List".
Suddenly, I feel quite exhausted. There's pain in my cervical region. I move my head and check the time on the wall clock. Its 5:00pm. Least did I realize I did not get up to have my lunch. Definitely a time for me to take a tea break. Off, I goto the kitchen and prepare some tea for myself. I take some cookies with tea and curb my hunger. I relook at the list of work items and see 2 lesser priority tasks which I can work on tomorrow. But, somehow I just feel like having a look at the logs. I pull down one of them and start my analysis. This continued for over an hour and 'ding dong' rang the door bell. Its 7:30pm and the maid has come to cook the dinner. I aim to wind up my work soon and logoff for the day. Finally, I shut down the system and am too exhausted by the end of the day.
Its now that I fetch some time to read the days' newspaper. Post dinner, I get into my bed wondering whether it was really that less stressful to work form home!
