Awkward numbers

The season of good cheer, festive season, happy holidays is a great time. Everyone is on vacation or atleast in a vacation mood. Work is generally light and bosses look at your work with an indulgent eye and a Santa Claus-ish smile. The smell of bon homie and camaraderie positively reeks in the air, and sigh, it’s a good fragrance.

Accompanying this are two problems. One is the obvious one – the season..er..it ends.

The cheery smiles and indulgent bosses turn into hungover grimaces and red-faced dictators respectively. Work casually completed and applauded last month is reviewed and turned red with corrections. As you gingerly support your bloated-from-eating-too-much-cake-tummy and try to slide behind your desk without suffocating yourself on the first working day of the new year you are invariably faced with a grumpy boss who says ‘Happy New Year’ and promptly dumps huge piles of work in your lap (And how do you imagine this is going to make my year happy??). And to add to your woes the brain refuses to fire up to its normal razor sharpness, its subdued and slow and rusted from lack of use – in fact it’s a miracle that you were able to drive to work that day with your brain working atleast 5 seconds slower than normal – ok, ok maybe 5 minutes slower (Sheesh, cut me some slack here, it’s the first working day of 2008).

The other problem is a bit deeper and more awkward. With the advent of cell phones and rapidly reducing rates (see? A weak weak alliteration. That’s what Jan 2 does to me) people find it very convenient to send wishes and greetings for the new year via sms. Of course, because of the brain rust they fail to add their names to their beautifully crafted (er…forwarded) messages. Now I’m a popular guy (what…? You’re reading my blog aren’t you?..bleh) and receive a number of such messages. The problem is that despite all my other awesomeness, I haven’t yet managed to make a habit of storing a lot of numbers in my cell phone.

So my inbox is full of long, cheery messages which are orphaned by a lack of RSVP on them. Now when they are generic Happy New Year to all kind of messages, I’m ok, I do not feel bad that I don’t know who’s sent the message because a very small amount of effort has gone into wishing me (and the odds are good that the person also doesn’t remember me as some special friend on whom wishes need to be showered. It could be that I just happened to be in the phone book and nothing more than that. ).

However, when I see messages starting with Swapnil, followed by beautiful poetry or customized greetings and NOT followed by a name, I feel terrible. It obviously means that I have not been paying attention to someone who considers me important enough to take pains to wish me, and I haven’t even got his/her number saved in my phonebook – terrible, terrible feeling.

So now I have two beautiful, personal messages and no clue who sent them… :(

PS: Time for a new year joke:
“So whats your new year resolution”
“Well I thought and thought and have finally got a perfect one”
“Cool, what is it?”
“To adhere to my previous resolutions atleast till Jan 3!”

Now if you didn’t laugh at that, you didn’t enjoy your December well – brains not rusted enough :)