Rituals: Workdays

sorry for the lack of posts over the past two weeks. not much of note has happened recently, what with training and getting more adjusted now that the shock has worn off. since the days are just kind of mushing together over here, i figured i'd walk you all through a rough outline of my daily schedule here.

wake up some time between 7 and 8, wait for the water to get hot so i can shower (if i am lucky / early enough to get any hot water). spend a few minutes getting ready for class, including drying my hair (yay for my 240-volt hair dryer), staring at my wardrobe trying to figure out whether or not i need to wear a tie for whichever day it currently is (and whether or not it matches whichever shirt i happen to grab first), and making sure my ipod is well-hidden. i walk over to the training building, which is conveniently just across the road from our hostel (and i usually get yelled at for walking across the grass to the pathway instead of walking the extra 50 feet down to and back from where it meets the road). swipe my security card to open the door, let the guard dig through my backpack looking for who knows what (my deck of cards have already been confiscated once), and head over to my classroom.

from about 9 till 12~12:30 we have someone lecture us on topics which most of us have been taking real clases on for 4+ years. add horrible powerpoint slides, worser engrish, and incomprehensible accents. if you understand the attention span of the typical college kid, you can maybe start to see how difficult it is to pay attention to / care about anything that the instructors are trying to say to us (seriously, we had a conversation with our most recent instructor about the differences between "can't" and "shouldn't", which are completely interchangable in indian-english).

to be fair, we usually get some small break around 10 ~ 10:30, which most of us use to get coffee / coke / the recently-discovered, incredibly, heavenly, delicious chocolate croissants that are offered at the 24-hour snack stand just outside of the GEC (opposite side of the building from our hostel). it's taken about a month, but i think the security guards have finally realized that we can bring our drinks into the building now (it's absolutely allowed, we have had many discussions with HR and finally had to start writing down the names and ID numbers of the security guards who still refused to let us in, which has solved the problem nicely so far).

anyway, lunch whenever our instructor decides to let us go, which can be any time from 11:30 (only once, and it was awesome) till about 1 (which leaves us less than an hour to get to the food court, stand in line forever, stand in another line for even longer, eat, and get back . . . . gross).

after lunch is either time to do assignments or more lecture, depending on the instructor, material, etc. assignment-time is supposed to be from 2 - 6, which more or less rounds out our work day, but i have yet to have an assignment that takes me until after 4 to finish, at the absolute latest (and there were only 2 that took me that long, all the others i have been finishing before 3). i no longer bother to start the assignments in the morning, because then i have nothing to do from 2 - 4:30, which we were told is the absolute earliest we are allowed to clock out and leave for the day. its difficult enough to fill that time as it is; i only brought 4 novels from home and am down to my last 2 already.

anyway, i usually head over to the long-cycle (slower track) classroom and help my friends in there who don't understand whatever computer-programming concepts they are currently learning. after that we try to play a game of ultimate frisbee if the weather is nice (which it occasionally is) and then dinner as soon as the food courts open, which is 7:30. after dinner is anything from playing uno until security yells at us (cards=gambling=illegal, no exceptions, arguments, or explanations entertained), playing starcraft / warcraft via internal LAN, smash bros, mafia, or some other form of winding down.

rinse and repeat throughout the week.