The chewing gum under the table…

I have the habit of sitting comfortably… that is I don’t mind stretching, slouching, compressing, leg crossing, putting the leg up on the adjacent seat and adjusting my posture into one of the innumerous positions I can shift into in the middle of a class… that is just my daily bit of exercise for my tired muscles… an average person has about 21 sleep positions… I would have about a 100 at least while sitting…

Now one of my favorite postures is to tuck in my legs under the table such that it is firmly positioned between the table top and the floor… sometimes I even cross one leg on top of the other to gain the necessary height from the floor and also for some comfort… now this serves as a sort of fulcrum for the chair on which I sit is a typical software engineer wheel chair – you know the one with the barest minimum of plastic so that your butt is just supported and your back pains but they provide the flexibility of sliding away from the desk when you are least expecting it… but I still enjoy it – as such events provide me with my much needed exercise and some distractions to my otherwise engrossed batchmates…

Now coming back to the issue at hand or should I say on my knee… on this particular day, I was wearing my favourite formal black trouser impeccably and smartly dressed for the presentations… and I tuck my legs under the table to get a more comfortable position to view the great visual effects that we MBAs are so good at making… that is when I found that my favorite trouser seemed to have another great property – it had the highest coefficient of friction with respect to the under-surface of the table-top (???)… (a small explanation for my non-engineering friends – the higher the friction coefficient the better the grip… it is something like saying higher the NPV, better the project; neither of us understands each other)… I wowed at my trouser’s ability to understand its master’s needs and it became more favoriter…

It would have been drunken bliss at this realization had it not been for the break that our prof declared… I got up to get myself a cuppa-coffee and I found that my trouser was behaving very naughty… it remained stuck to the table… I bent down and pulled it out carefully to find a huge off-white lumpy sticky ugly dirty yucky patch on it… immediately I realized without putting it into my mouth that it was the by-product of the sleep deprived’s desperate attempt to keep awake – a chewed chewing gum…

Now I am totally intolerant to such initiatives (or rather the lack of it)… and I do thank god for making legal guns so expensive… well on this particular day I could not lay my finger on the person who did this… then I would have laid my whole hand then maybe a foot before actually stuffing the piece of shit, that was stuck on my trouser, back into his mouth…

After doing something that is the most obvious thing to do about it, I came back with an embarassingly large wet patch on the right side of my trouser and sat down in class in a new place (this time I was careful to check under the table). But I could not concentrate partially due to the anger that my favorite trouser were affected but mainly because of the irritatingly cold wet piece of cloth sticking to my thigh… that is when my mind wandered off into getting material for this post to crib about…

Now what had this guy who had chewed the gum done wrong… if you think nothing is wrong, you can stop right here and appreciate my agony and my English language skills and I won’t waste any more of your time… but for those who think that he is guilty, I dedicate this post to you…

How many of us take the trouble to find a trash can, to put in the chewing gum covered in its original wrapper? Instead we are so pressed for time that we just take it out and stick it wherever we can find a surface it would stick to… now it is not your genius or divinity that makes the gum you chewed stick to the table… but it seriously creates problems for people like me who have only one favorite trouser or a pair of favorite footwear…

How often do we actually encounter such instances… at the railway and movie ticket counters where everyone wants to be the first to be serviced, while the harassed ticket issuer after some vain attempts to bring some order just walks out for a tea break despite all the shouts from his customers…

or when there are 2 people washing their face bent over close to the water pipe, the third person gargles and spits the water from at least 2 feet away from the hard surface that it splatters the two guys (who will need more than water to wash their face now)…

or in your deepest of deep concerns to save electricity, this guy switches off all the lights and cause the occasionally blind people (those who cannot see in the dark) to bump into the innumerous objects that have been strewn across the floor… or worse still you leave someone in the dark when he is in a precarious position (I would not add more to this experience, as I don’t want everyone to know what actually happened. You are free to imagine the worst, I won’t give it in writing.)

or when everyone is moving in an orderly fashion at some queue for example say lunch buffet, this fellow either barges in the middle of buffet table upsetting a couple of dishes onto your shirts or walks along in the opposite direction filling up his plate in the reverse… or the worst, he carried a full plate precariously balanced against your back while your shirt is soaking up the liquids from it…

or when it is already 15 minutes past the class end time and that everyone is hungrily waiting for the lunch (not that the food is something great to look forward to), there is suddenly a desperate class participation question that would get the prof carried away and continue the lecture for another half an hour as he has to come back to the topic he has digressed away from thanks to this insightful question…

or when there is a huge wind blowing and the doors are banging, why not use the door stopper… especially when somebody enters a quiet lecture hall, to bang shut the door… or to pull a door open when it says push, or vice-versa… or to push open a two-way door without caring about giving the person on the other side, though foolish enough to stand so close, a bloody nose…

I think you get the point… I don’t want to join the category I am talking about…

Is it is a sin to think about the repercussions of your action before actually doing it? Would it take us so much time to assess the situation and act a bit more empathetically and not stupidly ? One of my profs in school used to repeatedly say in a sarcastic way to a couple of dumb people in class – before you say something, think about it for a 100 times and then don’t say it… he could say that and get away with it because then he was a powerful grown up man and those listening to him were just kids… today, I would like to say this to every damn bugger who irritates me in these and many other ways… “think a 100 times before you do something, then don’t do it…“

Or dear god, please give me a gun and a license to kill…