How does it feel to stand in a busy subway, facing the scampering crowd, and being stared at unanimously, in as long a bracket of time as their fleeting moments of distraction can accomodate? Well, not exactly the kind of questions I think upon at leisure, but I sure found out the answer the hard way.
Why are the authorities so hell bent over us bending over backwards in an industry where our presence is as out of place as a Storm Trooper in a traditional Indian wedding, is another question altogether, when owing to our absconding interest, learning anything of consequence is a function of individuality. I am in the class that spends their time in the Industrial Training making a mental list of all the possible (or impossible) "I'd rather be".
So the first day, chronologically, the most awkward, started off with me standing like a mime, and the people passing by giving me "the looks". And this continued till they individually had not gone beyond sight. My choice of clothes did not help much either. I was the sole guy in a T shirt, to start with, amongst the blue factory shirted "gentlemen". Also the semi naked, long haired, wrapped in barbed wire guy in a foreground of "Dimmu Borgir" exacerbated their misery. (I personally like this shirt the most among all my band shirts. >.< )
After some inevitably and insanely time consuming formalities, they admitted me as a summer trainee. I was apparently in a "Winder ASSY" division. Not the perfect aperitif for curiosity. Yet the impressive line up of "Winders" in the factory did take me off guard. I was introduced to the workers at every assembly division, and was soon going through a graphic description of the type of winders in gory detail. I was trying to imagine the same book as a Frank Miller graphic novel. Not much reprieve. Not to be inacceptibly cynic, there indeed were a few, countable on fingertips, interesting aspects to it. I saw the machining of a CAM shaft, which KronoS had taken pains to explain over dinner so many times, just before we switched to Star Wars. It is a pretty neat mechanism. Also, I saw some larger than life equivalents of ineptly drawn textbook machines. Ah, protocol dictates I write down everything I see in the factory, and truth be told, I did just that. My personal observations, uncensored. Here are some of the consequential things I happened to notice, written with the appropriate expression, although am not sure whether the university will approve of these in the report.
It starts off with "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'intrate" written over a huge rectangular block labelled "factory". (For those who haven't read Dante, and also for the majority, that means 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter'). The more factual observations follow suite right after a hangman and scribble "Die fatso die", (to document the 'fatso', who took inane sadomasochistic pleasure in being rude for no apparent reason, apart from the horrific realisation of his being mockably overweight), "Whoa! Respect! They seem to love localites", "sigh, could do with an espresso (martini?)". Then there was "The day of the Vernier". When I measured everything I could with the digital scale. For the records, the Vernier Calliper manual was 27.38 cms thick. "Lol! Rude dude is wearing a Pink shirt... FAIL!!!", "Resins, A La Carte", "Hey, Wait, I've got a new complaint..." and by then it was pretty much out of hand. This is all exclusive of the unaccounted doodles of The Grim, Batman, The Batman as Grim, blank white spots labelled Cullen pest, and some goal depraved storm troopers...
I finished the effective "training" in a weeks time. They realised I am pretty much incorrigible (I did try to give them a spoiler alert on that earlier) and any attempt to teach me uninteresting garb will be a waste of their, and what's infinitely more disturbing, my, time.So the rest of my "official" time there is spent "unofficially" practicing the Iambic Pentameter, reading all the books I wanted to, designing my tabletop contraption and pursuing my insane fanaticisms like 16X16 Knight Tours, factorising mobile numbers and throwing mental insults at the engineers who bother me, in a politeness distinctive of Klingon alone. In my defence, the regime was boring. Beyond the point of reversal. To be honest, were it slightly more interesting, I would have still been bored, but maybe willing to pretend I wasn't.
A week more. If possible, even less. Time for my 2 credits, please. And yes, I would like some fries with that.
PS: I have left out some gruesone details of the commute, boredom (wonder if that is evident), and the confinement. Will come back to those in a later post, perhaps. In the stages of development. Contemplative, for now.
