Ok, tired is not tired unless you have had something like this – unless you have done severe physical labour. There was a curfew (harthal) due to political parties having a big tiff with each other and the citizens of Cochin have to face the brunt of it. There was rioting on M G Road and the police had to interfere. The rioters from the political parties started attacking the cops and they had to resort to beating them in a ‘lathi’ charge! Needless to say, the scenes we saw on the news were not pretty to say the least. In effect, late last evening, a ‘harthal’ was declared, from 6 am to 6 pm. Fuck these political assholes!

My company, being a 24 hour customer service call center, cannot close down operations even for a few hours so forget about a day. Last night, it was arranged for early pick ups ; people coming in at 7 am, 8 am & 9 am were to be picked up between 3:30 & 4:30 am and brought to the office and the shutters were to be pulled down. Everyone would have to stretch from 12 to 15 hours today. So we did.

I was told that logistics would call me to confirm the timings of my pick up. I reached home a bit before 10 pm yesterday, watched some news for a while. Unable to sleep I went online and only laid down on the bed by 2 am and I got the call by 2:30 am to inform me of the timings! So I got up, brushed my teeth, made a coffee and took a shower. By 3:30 am I was ironing my shirt and got ready. The cab was delayed, so I kept calling the driver every 30 mins to find out where he was. I waited for 3.5 hours and finally got into the cab by 7 am. We reached the office in a half hour without any issues and went to work.

I and my department got into our work, with some music playing and tried to finish our work. Having had no breakfast, except for 4 cups of coffee, at 12:45 we took a break to go and have some lunch. Then it was back to sorting out our work and we took our next break at 4:00 pm. But it was a short break – two of us had to go to the operations floor and I went to the support & admin functions to help to arrange for the next list of employees who had to come in to relieve the ones working now. Then we went back to finish out work and it was done by 6 pm. We waited for a cab to take us back home and in a crowded fashion we finally got in one by 7 pm and I was home by 7:30 pm, tired & washed out. Who is up for a repeat of the same?

Song for the day – “My Heart Has A History” – PAUL BRANDT