Square One

Real life first days don’t start with melodious background scores in a magical land surrounded by luscious greenery and friends you’ve known for ages. Instead, they often begin with bedheads, infuriating alarm clocks, ridiculously long car rides and a numbing pain in your head telling you that picking up a call from your best friend in the middle of the night might not have been the best idea when you already haven’t slept the previous couple of days.

But that’s okay. I’ve learnt today that even the most initially unsettling first days can often take a sharp turn for the better; especially when greeted by two beautiful dogs and a little girl who kindly informed me that she  prefers to be called strong over cute and says that she’d rather eat chocolates than ‘actual breakfast’. They get even better when you are told, to your face, that you’re not expected to know a whole lot. In fact, you’re expected to know nothing so that you can skip the part when you try to play it cool and impress the people around you and instead, get to put all that energy into working and learning things the right way rather than going through the whole tedious process of unlearning. And the icing on the cake is, sometimes, the fact that people around you don’t always comply with the socially accepted laws of normalcy, hierarchy or even, for that matter, personal boundaries.

The sarcasm, the eye rolls and even the nit-picking and the leg-pulling that I’ve seen around me today seems to be the basis of a camaraderie that forms the fabric of this office- a place that could be well on its way to creating a new word that combines casual and professionalism ( like athleisure, but unrelated to clothing).

I had an inkling on the day I got my first mail that I would like this place, today confirmed those feelings and hopefully, the next few months here will only add to it.

Signing off for the first time,
Namitha