When was the last time I had longed for the dawn of a day and the run up to that day had been killing me with anticipation all along
Was it my final year tour in college?
Not exactly since I was one of the tour coordinators I pretty much had my hands full and everything that could go wrong had gone wrong even before we commenced the journey.
So let us rewind a bit back
Grade 9, my first overnight excursion with my classmates in Loyola school, Trivandrum to Ooty and Black Thunder(Metupalayam,Tamil Nadu). The blue eyed teenagers were eagerly waiting for the excursion to happen with great anticipation so much so that none of us slept the previous night.
Don’t get carried away by my reminiscences of the couple of tours. Relax, I am not going to write about one of my getaways to an exotic international destination. But rather something very far from it.
The occasion was the homecoming or rather the office coming of our team after a gap of more than 1.5 years. Except for a couple of folks the rest of the guys including myself had to travel from the length and breadth of God’s own country in the days leading up to the de-day on Dec 10. What is even more, 60% of the team had never been to office nor met each other since they had joined amidst the pandemic.
As I reached the office the excitement was palpable in the air and it was delightful to be welcomed by Anooja with a warm smile. Apparently she was the only one to heed my instructions of making it a bit early to the office. After a few pleasantries I had to rush for a meeting with my boss who was visiting us from Germany. As I came back to the floor you could hear the chatter of the team raising the decibel levels of the otherwise quiet office by a few notches. The party was heating up I guess.
In response to my request to write a welcome message to the artistically inclined folks of my team elicited the following.
The duo are acclaimed artists one a mural painter and the other a bottle artist. My pleas to add a few flowers or crank it up were turned down saying that they had work to do. Trust me it isn’t a pleasant feeling to be getting a taste of your own medicine. Well there is a backstory, a few days back in the excitement of meeting in person one of the guys had asked me if we should actually work on that very day. I quipped back “Of course you need to work else wouldn’t you get bored if you party the entire day”.
By midday the entire team congregated and the decibel levels reached its crescendo. A couple of them remarked that it never felt like we were meeting each other for the first time. There was a lot of warmth and camaraderie on display between each of the team members. This was testimony to the fact that remote working does not mean that you can’t develop deep relationships.
The team lunch at the Sheraton was incidentally the first solid meal of the day for most of us because a few of them had started really early from our respective homes. The luncheon was also long overdue because we had never gone for lunch since our team had formed way back in the last quarter of 2019. The delectable spread on offer culinary delights captured all our imagination. Post lunch the team retired to the rooftop for photo sessions conveniently leaving me behind with my boss, oh I felt so left out.
Having been interacting in Zoom has got its pitfalls: you don’t get to size up the group of people whom you are working with. For instance Athira is really tall towering over the others when she stands along amidst our team. Milda, one of the recent joinees of the team was telling me “ Wherever I have worked or studied I have always been the shortest in the room but here you have no idea of how happy I am to be having Anooja alongside me”. This wasn’t evident to me until she made the remark . Maybe, Anooja as a team lead is intimidating enough for us that we choose to overlook her height.
Gulliver's Travels
Jeff is frightfully thin with piercing eyes while Vaishnav is more than his great hair and beard which is a prominent feature in the zoom calls. Densil has lost a tonne of weight while the rest of the folks like Akhil, Rithika and Anooja remain the same. Nigil who joined us 4 days back looks really young.
The experienced folks showing the wonderstruck newbies around the office was indeed a sight to behold. The exercise ended at the cafeteria with coffee and a demonstration of what all is available in the fridge for our consumption made the bunch look like a group of excited teenagers discovering a new hangout. A little after dusk the ladies of the team had completed their day and made a graceful exit. At the end of the day as we were walking out of the office Vaishnav brought to my attention that this was the first day at office of his career and he couldn’t have asked for more. Jeff nodded in agreement as the gravity of the milestone suddenly hit me. Damn, the things we take for granted I hope the day was special for them.
As rightfully summed up by Sunil, our Vice President, the energy and the happiness of the team in the company of each other is infectious. This is a story that needs to be told and the best practices that you guys follow should indeed be replicated.
Next evening Jeff implores me to play along with his cock and bull story that he wants to tell his parents on why he missed the train back home. In reality he had met up with a friend from college after a year or so which eventually led to a group of common friends coming together and having a whale of a time. The next day before dawn as we commenced our journey back to Trivandrum I couldn’t feel any more old when he remarked that he had only slept 30 minutes the previous night.
Oh it is good to be young !
