Office Capers: Colleagues can be human too

After a week of staying with colleagues, I now know that the people I work with:

• Look like hell first thing in the morning
• Do not know how to set an alarm, then set it wrong
• Are willing to do without toothpaste because they forgot to pack it and refuse to buy it
• Have not heard of voicemail and are unaware of how to check messages (I didn’t either)
• Read the pre-class work over breakfast
• Copy each other’s notes
• Flick pens, pencils, mints from other desks and forget their own in the restaurant
• Will drink vile-tasting brown liquid from any cup lying on the table so long as it smells of coffee
• Sit on/ step on other people’s spectacles
• Leave their spectacles in the restaurant aisle, the table outside their room, the seat next to theirs
• Eat noodles, pancakes, fried rice, sushi, dal makhani and fresh fruit all in the same meal (breakfast!!!!) and with the same cutlery
• Gorge on soup, salad and croissants (for lunch!) and finish up with a dessert of chocolate sauce over watermelon slices (…err..that was me)
• Love shopping even for things available at half the price back home (the women)
• Love guzzling beer and rooting for people they can’t name in a strange pub and paying thrice for it (the men)
• Lie about their age (women) and marital status (men)
• Pack their airline tickets into the checked-in baggage
• Shuffle between tomorrow’s tickets, the travel brochure, and the hotel bill while looking for the boarding pass
• Find the boarding pass lodged into the unused wallet pocket on the left, and wonder why it looks different from everyone else’s (it’s the one from the arrival flight and we’re now on our way back home!)

In short, the suits and ties fall away revealing a bunch of feather-brained, illogical, annoying people who remind me of myself. Does that make me feel better? No.