Summer Internship with Larsen & Toubro — Shreya from MPSTME, NMIMS
Wildcard entry for: – 26th August 2012
Name of the intern: – Shreya
Institute: – MPSTME, NMIMS
Organization interned with: – Larsen & Toubro
Experience teaches me that human beings have an irresistible urge to do less and complain a lot. As a little girl, when I wanted to grow up and go to school, I complained. When I was in school and there was too much homework, I complained. When I entered my college years, I missed my school days and I complained. Now that I am an intern in a plush office with a revolving chair and an air conditioned cubicle, I am still complaining. My trouble with most institutions arises from the burden of work, even if I don’t really do it. Yet, I am now complaining because there is too little (read: nothing) to do.
There is something about sitting on a swivelling chair, doing absolutely nothing more than twiddling my thumbs and looking stupid for hours together, that has made me a very introspective person. My mother, unlike me, can sit on a railway platform and wait for the very-very-late train and enjoy herself. She claims her strategy to fight boredom is studying faces. Applying this strategy in the office where I am an intern, made me realise that my Boss’s face looks like a knife (his features happen to be painfully sharp), his subordinate’s face is like a Rottweiler (don’t ask me why, it just is!) and the person who sits next to me looks like… I don’t know… a shiny round thing. However, with everyone else looking like brown cardboards wearing formals, this strategy failed. Once again, I found myself thinking, “What next?”
After much thought (that lasted for nearly 5.27 seconds), I decide to text. Yes, text; something as virulent as Facebook, as natural (and as vital) as breathing. With regard to texting, some may call me quite medieval. I change phones every year, using every one of their functions until they finally stop responding. Now, something I’ve hardly done in the past has become my lifeline. My friend (who is also an intern) and I text like maniacs, even about the most-trivial-and-not-at-all-worth-mentioning things like “Some people in my office are sipping tea!” Perhaps there is some solace in getting constant updates from an equally entertainment-deprived and jobless soul. It consoles me to know that like me, some other soul in a far-far away building, is slowly dying of boredom. Speaking about distances, my workplace is like a mini-city with huge roads and small buildings and no transport (unless you happen to be a steel rod). There is something profoundly stupid about crossing seven seas (seven buildings, placed far apart) and meeting your friend and then roaming aimlessly about the whole campus. But I do it anyway. After all the roaming, I come back to my borrowed cubicle. Yes, I am like a gypsy. I keep changing cubicles every single day. I even pick up calls for these souls and, in my most officious voice, say that they are not available which makes me feel important for a second. And then we go for lunch. And come back. I haven’t mentioned anything about lunch because there is nothing worth mentioning.
The post-lunch period is when the torture begins. Sleep and no work are a lethal combination in an office. With an ultra-human effort I somehow manage to look alive till my boss comes and says something about the work process. Listening is an effort, so I simply stare blankly at him with my head nodding and smiling in auto mode. I ask myself (again), “So, what next?” and my phone beeps with my friend’s message which says “Zzzzzzz…”. Not inspiring.
As the day passes, I happen to get the most exciting work ever awarded to any living being (because after reading it, you won’t remain one.) A report on the work processes and system of telecom lines. So, I plunge headlong into it (because there’s nothing else to do) and start to read. A girl who couldn’t even be convinced to study for her twelfth boards, was sitting and devouring her way through a report that, to say the least, was unspeakably boring. I finish before time. I baffle myself. I now fully understand Einstein’s Theory of Relativity which says that, if you want time to go fast, it will drag its feet like some pesky kid, and when it’s supposed to go slow, it will promptly put on its running shoes and vanish before you can say “Hey!” Obviously, when I checked the watch, it seemed to have died. If necessity is the mother of invention, then boredom would probably be its great-great-grandmother or something. If it weren’t for boredom, I wouldn’t have turned into a work-hungry monster from a work-repelling, blissfully lazy slob (or writing this article). What, then, is the moral of the story? Change is the only constant in life and I would enjoy any modicum of it in my ever monotonous office. If only it weren’t so slow!
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