Why me?

Client visit on Friday...Office abuzz with insane excitement... The team that is meeting the firang, strutting around like they have been awarded the Oscars...

As a part of the privileged team who was meeting the guy, I had no choice but to be a part of the general cheer. As luck would have it, I was plopped right in front of the conference hall, about five inches away from him and his PowerPoint slides.

He began his monologue by killing my name. After becoming 'vaash' for him, Jabeen became "Alright, next", and Kalai, Senthil were reduced to mere nods. Then was the time for my biggest gaffe. He opened a huge plastic cover and said, "I've baght some thin for ya guys. Jus a bag of caramels. Pass it 'round", and passed the bag to me.
Beaming, I said, "Thank you so much" with so much of passion and vigor and Jabeen nodded encouragingly. Desperate for some chocolates, both of us ripped open the bag to find 'cameras'!!! Both of us had heard him wrong. We then passed the bag around with a face that made Droopy look cheerful.

After what seemed like ages, it was time for lunch. One of the biggies in the company that I worked for also joined us. As my lady luck had decided to go on a vacation that day, the bigwig motioned at an empty seat next to him. I had no choice but to oblige. The minute I sat down, another 'no-so-big-but-still-big" manager sat on the other. Before I could change my mind and get up from the table, the firang decided to sit right opposite me.

Trapped without an escape route, I decided to concentrate on the food. When I ordered a roti, the client made a wisecrack on my diet and the whole table guffawed like it was the joke of the millennium.

This is a serious lesson, all restaurants should learn - Indian food cannot be eaten with a fork dammit!!! The waiter, probably mistaking my 'is there any way to get out' look for the 'I could eat a blue whale' look, decided to plop an extra large piece of cauliflower on my plate. Without a choice, I took my spoon and started sawing the vegetable with fervor. What I did not realize was that the spoon had made noise equivalent of making marble cutters blush. Earning glares and ‘shhh’es from even the next table, I abandoned my effort.

After lunch, there was some live demonstration with cameras for about an hour, of which 55 minutes was spent on getting the wires fixed. The only thing that went alright was a surprise birthday party-complete with surprises and a chocolate cake for the team.

Moral: Faux pas and forks go hand-in-hand.

If you start with a bad-hair day....

...then your social cum work cum love life is doomed. After spending fruitless 15 minutes into taming my hair into an agreeable mess (the privileged others who have straight hair call it a pony tail), I was wondering what else could go wrong when...

a. I choked on a piece of idly; I was trying to gorge down in nano-seconds. Normalcy was restored only after a few gulps of water, two hard thumps on my back from mommy dearest and a long-winded ‘how-idlys-can-be-life-changing-if-you-eat-them-slowly' speech.
b. A group of frustrated men in the bus suddenly decided to vent out their pent-up emotions. What ensued was a 'not-too-pretty-to-watch' brawl involving a group of huffy-cheeked men against another group of huffier-cheeked men.
c. The impact of losing all my contacts on my mobile phone hit me fully only after I started getting the routine, customary, and almost revoltingly sweet ‘good-morning’ messages from friends today. I hardly recognized the numbers and was forced to ask them their names. This little activity of mine managed to get the majority of them pug-faced. I also earned the ‘How-can-you-forget-MY-number’ wrath from all of them.
d. A seemingly cute guy in the atrium of our office building decided to walk through me like I never existed. Cursing silently I reached the lift, only to find him inside, still looking away.
e. Tripped in front of a million colleagues, and had to swerve in the most uncomfortable way to avoid falling flat on the face, and ended up looking like a crooked, contorted Oscar statuette.
f. One more attempt at taming my hair in the office loo went astray as my comb decided to plop into the wash basin with a loud clang. The other peacocks, pruning their feathers gave me their looks of purest contempt.

It was then, that I gave up!

Moral: Maybe the guy didn’t look because my puerile hair looked like a bramble bush that had a magnetic attraction to anything even remotely dusty?? (Nah…Not a good enough moral you say?)

Well, then....The real moral: If anything just cannot go wrong, it will anyway...Courtesy Murphy.