Paint my grade sheet a bright Medi-ocre please…

Dammit. What a way to start a post. But seldom have I come so close to pulling out all the hair in my head. Everything that could go wrong did. Except for Nistelrooy's goal. What a beauty I say. One second he is rushing towards goal, and the next moment he is a flaming orange ball of arms and legs. Oh yes and nose and hair. And suddenly its one goal each.

But apart from that contortionist treat my day sucked big time. I am a heavy sleeper. When I was a child my dad used to douse me in cold water to get me to wake up. Thus began a lifelong aversion to water. At that age things get internalised. Cemetaries horrify some people. Some people get freaked by tall places. For me it was aquariums.

Nothing short of "Banshee Screamer" can wake me up in the morning. Now most software thingies dont live upto their name. (Like Sylvia Saint..) My pet peeve being anything that has the words "Easy" or "Simple" in its name. I had Easy CD Creator on my laptop once and tried making copies of music and movies. Got dad to buy me a box of blank CDs from the office. After two days of zealous "Easy CD Creation" I had two small wall mirrors and a car ornament with ribbons through the hole in the centre.

"Banshee Screamer" takes two seconds on average to wake me up. Three if I'd passed out the night before. It emits this shrieking screaming gut-wrenching noise that immediately permeates whetever dream I am seeing then. For instance suddenly Pam Anderson starts singing the Opera. Or it replaces all the creaking noises in my dreams. I wake up in a flash. Cold sweat and all.

But today I woke up before my alarm. Which is possibly the worst thing that can happen to you. You wake up, look around. Thrilled you made it without Banshee. Its lovely to sit in bed with that drowsy just-up feeling isnt it? Not if banshee has a thing or two to shriek about that. One minute I can hear the birds outside, the staccato of the fan, the light flapping of my bed sheet in the fan draft. "Its a wonderful life I think..."

And the suddenly, like a roast chicken flying into a Pure Veg. Saravan Bhavan, Banshee hit the speakers. The shriek ripped through my tranquility. In one fell swoop I leaped across the bed, severely shoved away the phone with the bridge of my nose, catapulted off the table top on my left cheek and thumped the keyboard. The roast chicken made a deft exit. Nistelrooy would have been proud.

And after all that I missed my first class. Six minutes late. Dammit.
I was max peeved. Had breakfast and trundled back to my room.

But the worst was yet to come. My video card device drivers crashed. That too when people had just started sharing stuff on the lan. I spent four hours sitting and reloading everything.

Of course why I lost the drivers was because my smartass antivirus thought one of the dll files was an antivirus. And what does it do after that? Does it tell me, the owner, about it? Does it quarantine the file? Give a test report? No no a million times no. The bloody idiot thing deletes it. Wipes it right off the hard drive. So much for "Simple AntiVirus 6.3" or some such thing.

All these terminator movies and AI conspiracy theories are crap. Which reminds me of an interesting thing that happened to a roomie in Chennai many moons and one venus transition ago.

It was the month end and we were playing that game again. "Has it been credited in the bank or not" game. I wait outside while he confidently walks up to the local HDFC atm. Roomie was not a man for subtle moves. He bursts into the ATM room, flashes a pearly white one at the lady diligently working at the counter top next to the machine and slips his card in.

The machine whirred once and beeped thrice. Universal machine language for "Time to make expensive repairs. Please call service centre."

Roomie runs to guard and informs him of the predicament. From outside I can see all three of them through the glass door. They are looking at the machine now. The guard is tugging and pulling at the card slot. Do I see a fist or two raised at my roomie? Is that a sheepish look on his face?

Outside he quietly mounted our Bajaj Sunny.

"Put the card in the wrong way eh?" I ask. My roomie was not the type to give up on a slot just cause it pushed back.
"No no I used it right side up."
"Then?"
"Nothing yaar leave it..."
"You were inside for fifteen minutes..."
"Leave that. Did you know that the slot can actually take two cards? One over the other..?
"What the ???!!!"

The lady had been writing her account balance down in some book. Roomie shoved in his card with all might. The slot cried foul play. Roomie would stand for no such thing. He was persuasive. He did not notice the utter lack of vacancy in the slot.

Oh and his salary hadnt been credited either.

P.S. I wrote this late night in a daze. And almost missed class again. You guys owe me big time. If I dont see atleast a dozen comments with credit card numbers the refuse will impact the ventilation device.

P.P.S. I got my third term grades today. Despicable. But I think there is a message in it. A subliminal one. I got lowest in "Written Analysis and Communication 2". Dammit.