Monday, August 30, 2004

Life Socks!

The Law: The time required to find the pair of socks is directly proportional to the time by which you are already late.


The Boss, by first principles, is defined as someone who is early when you are late and vice versa. For some vague reason, the vice versa part happens more often than what classical probability calculations would allow and there is a phase when you are led to believe that there is no vice versa component to the vice versa part. That is when you shut the alarm off 13 times instead of 11, linger a little longer to the newspaper in the toilet and whistle the 2nd line of the 3rd para of your latest favourite song for the 4th time in the shower.

Finding shirts and trousers is seldom difficult because they have size on their side. The fact that you generally have more than one of each also helps. Having more than one pair of socks never does. On a lucky day you would find a brown to go with a black. On a not so lucky day you are stuck with just a green one. (Yeah, I've a green pair and a purple pair. Sometimes it becomes quite embarrassing to have a mom with a sense of humour. The reason cited is that the flashy ones are better sighted. Yes they are, by everyone you happen to meet)

So today is a not so not so lucky day and you dont even have the green one. You take a look at the alarm clock and realise that you just have enough time to make a simultaneous entry with the boss, assuming that the curve of his arrival pattern doesn't choose today as the day for inflection. Though it's not a good day for matters related to your feet, you could still be the winner by reaching 30 seconds early and beaming that confident smile on your boss appearing quite at ease in your chair when he enters the office.

What is bad is that you suddenly begin to have a faint recollection of having thrown out the batteries when the alarm had gone off for the 13th time. Now you don't know what the time is because you don't know where your wrist-watch is. You make a dash towards the bed and your feet rolls over one of the batteries and the next moment you find yourself appreciating the designs on the mosaic floor. Being the smart oppurtunist, you know how to turn this fairly untowardly occurence to the best of your advantage and just continue rolling on till you are under the bed, looking for the other battery. You begin cursing yourself, the batteries, the alarm clock, the socks, the Indian hockey team, Shahid Kapoor, Ken Ghosh , in a fairly random order.
After tracing four circles of approximately 360° each under the bed and making sure that you can't possibly leave without another shower, you are struck with another brilliant memory wave which tells you that you had thrown just one of the batteries and the other one should be inside the alarm clock, if the turn of events that you are faced with, have taken a turn. You put the battery inside and hear the deadly tick. Deja Vu. The time that you see is the time you saw when you woke up. Duh. You go on the cursing routine again, this time cursing only Shahid Kapoor and the alarm clock. Saala! Mera time hi kharaab chal raha hai.

Stressing your mind to extremely ambivalent emotions, you finally decide to skip the 2nd shower of the day and shift your focus to the next mission, which is searching the socks. The idea in it's very basic sense seems quite intriguing and you start recollecting all the Sherlock Holmes stories you have read. After admiring the genius of the man for a few moments, you know that interestingly , The Story of the Missing Socks has been eluding you so far so all you have, to take inspiration from, are the other stories. After promising yourself to google for the socks story and feeling particularly adventurous, you pull up the detective in you and meticulously turn the room upside down. The new orientation doesn't offer much help and you go for the downside up variation. As you sit on the floor looking at the square mosaic patterns, one of your smarter alter egos cries out, "Back to square one!". You decide to give the socks a skip and wear the shoes anyway.

#@$@#$#@. "Now how can the #$#%$ shoes shrink overnight! I cant #^&#@ get my feet inside properly" Apparently, the shoes somehow took a trip to Siberia while you were sleeping and came back shrunk.

Alternatively, the socks were shoved up inside the shoes.


[Moral of the story: Always follow first principles. Start from the shoes]