Daily travails of a s/w engineer

9.30 AM : Swipe in.I show my access card to the proximty reader and get inside. I slump into my chair cursing the Chennai traffic and the unforgiving sun. Unlocking the idiot box , i check Outlook. Good....no new bugs, no escalations, no input from onsite abt the feature i am coding. So it is gonna be yet another No Action day. Next , i go on a mail checking spree in all my Web accounts.

9.50 AM : I seem to receive less emails than i used to. Folks , write to me. Itz time to engage my two best buddies. Yahoo and MSN messnger. Next 30 minutes just melts away exchanging sweet nothings with all my friends around the globe.

10.20 AM : Time for blogs.....i fire up Firefox and hit bloglines. I subscribe to around 50 feeds and today there are about 100 posts to be read. Anybody who is somebody in the business world seems to have taken up blogging. Good.

11.00 AM : Tea time. I go to my friend's cubicle to collect him for tea. He as usual complains abt some pending check-ins. Some ppl always manage to stay busy ! God help them !

11.30 AM : Tea wakesup my grey cells . I vow not to waste time in office again for the God-knows-how-much th time. I google for some tutorials in .net and start reading a promising article. Attention span is less with web pages..... i click a series of hyperlinks and suddenly i dunno what i started reading in the first place !!

12.30 PM : Time to decide abt the restuarant for Lunch. After many missed calls , IMs later we settle to the usual Sangeetha in Greams road.

1.15 PM : After a sumptuous lunch, here we r in the cool confines of the Fruit shop . We know the menu by heart now. After ordering , we settle into a thought provoking conversion abt office politics !

2.00 PM : Ah..another one of those lean , languorous time in the office . I seem to be brain dead. Cat napping to the sweet lullaby of Illayaraja's songs.

3.00 PM: Status Review meeting. I begin to suspect that the whole team is cooking up something to show that they r busy all the week ! My entry is simple .... Bug fixing 8 hrs per day for 5 days. Nobody raises an eyebrow on that .

4.00 PM: Coffee break. Oh....anything for the sweet aroma of coffee to lift me out of slumber. Caffeine takes hold and i am intelligent again.

4.30 PM: Again more vows on Time management .Begin to wonder whether i wud get anywhere in life if i continue like this , whether doing an MBA wud brighten things , whether quitting wud help . Thousand questions but no answer .

5.30 PM : Time to say gud bye to my idiot box. I take a couple of print outs , just in the remote case i decide to read in home. Swipe out.

Phew...... what a tiresome day !