Nita sat at
her office desk, late in the afternoon watching the rain outside. It’s been eight years since she started working and life had changed drastically but perhaps
she had no regrets. She sat thinking about her first day at office when she
joined at Kolkata around five hundred kilometres away from her hometown. It was
difficult to leave home and go, the tall matchbox style office building seemed
scary and it was uneasy to see so many people inside those glass halls pouring
over work. Though she had been a decent student all her life and knew all that
stuff because of her reading habit, she never had been out of her comfort zone.
To say the right word she was a ‘dork’ and almost scared of the public transport,
had never used it before and even if she had she had been accompanied by
parents or elders! She was scared about the elevators too and never entered it
alone. She would wait in the lobby for someone to join her before entering it
and once inside would pray that she was not left alone in it. It seemed to her
like a monster that would engulf her and never let her out, she had these
dreams of getting trapped in an elevator or taking the wrong bus to office and
getting down in a completely deserted place. Hilarious isn’t it? But that was
the story of her life, she was a nerd and a dork, in fact a complete dork. She
was great at writing the toughest code that would crack open the brain of her teammates
but was not at all good at cutting a damn piece of onion or making a perfect
cup of coffee. The complex was easy for her and the simple appeared to be
difficult. It was easy for her to cross the last level of Max Payne unlike
other girls but difficult to even use an A.T.M.! Reason? She had simply never
done it before.
As she stepped out to the real
world she did realise that her coding skills or bookish knowledge won’t help
her anymore and there was a lot more to job and life than that. So, if you are thinking how she survived the
reality let me tell you she evolved or rather made an effort to evolve. In the
first three years of her career she had changed more than she had in her entire
lifetime! She realised that work can be fun too and colleagues can be her
friends, that job is not to be taken so seriously as there can be frequent tea
breaks during work and a little chit chat that can bring a smile even while
doing the most tedious work. That’s how she spend her first one and a half year
at Kolkata working and exploring the place where she actually got her lessons
for life. So, that city holds a good place in her heart, the narrow lanes, the
fish curry, the second hand book stores had their own charm and it has ever
since proved to be her second home. She made some great friends, Bengalis,
people from North East, Bihar and UP all of them had something pleasant about
them, each of them bringing some charming culture. She returned with mixed
feelings to her hometown Bhubaneswar after her project shifted there and has
been based there for rest of the years. Ever since that travel has been nicer,
people have become friends, work has grown interesting and elevators yes the
elevators are just the machines that take you upstairs and must be avoided to
reduce some weight not because they are scary! So, at last friends do believe
in dorks, after all every dork has a day.
