Yeah right. We were fools to believe such a statement.
It all started on a lazy Saturday afternoon when Vishnu returns from the mess empty-stomach’ed complaining “it’s the same old crap again, let’s go somewhere else”. Having seen a tiny cockroach in the food I got in Hall 1 canteen, I expressed my desire to avoid the canteen as much as possible and go to the Campus Restaurant instead.
Vishnu, who had taken an oath not to go to the CR ever again, surprisingly agreed. He probably considered anything to be better than the sort of food we get here sometimes. The SBI ATM in front off Hall 3 was non-functional. During the registration time I had taken out money from the adjoinig UBI ATM and had failed to notice and surcharges, I thought we should take it from here again. I wasn’t ready to spend that extra 50 Rs. we thought would be charged and instead took our chances of finding the SBI ATM at the ShopC working. Bad luck, or was it procrastination on Vishnu’s part? The ATM wasn’t working!
We step into the bank and enquire about the ATM. ‘bas das minute lEga’(should take ten minutes) was what one of them told us – to which Vishnu said, “shall we go and order our food in the CR then?”. After such a re-assuring assurance he had given us, he goes “woh mat karna! (don’t do that! LOL)”. Fine, we decided to wait. We even had a lecture on GIMP we wanted to attend at CS101 – for which I had personally put up posters at places inside the campus. We waited from 2:15pm to about 4:15pm. Yes, we did. We were probably jobless. Not really. We probably wanted to behave like we were jobless 😛
So, why that long you ask? Well, there did exist a cash-counting machine (German-made, 700 million Indians don’t have sanitary facilities – it’ll take another century for India to make a cash-counting machine) and the person whose sole job was to put cash into the ATM whenever need be was counting 500 rupee notes by hand! When Vishnu asked a co-banker why the cash-counting machine wasn’t being used, the reply he got was “he has already used it, he’s manually checking it to see if the machine was right”
“…”
When we had just reached the bank, India had beaten Australia (cricket ODI, don’t really care) and people were celebrating and congratulating each other (yay! Harbhajan made another fortune in this match, let’s be happy and continue to shit on roads). This banker whose sole job appeared to be “taking care of the ATM” was apparently watching the match in the bank – yes, there was a TV in the bank, not in public view. And just when India had won, he had stepped out of the bank to buy sweets for the family to celebrate the glorious state of their toilets which happens to be funded by Harbhajans earnings in each of the matches he plays.
There was a characteristic colour of incompetence painted all over this character. Apparently he was nearing his retirement – according to the watchman. This watchman was considerate. He appeared to have gained wisdom by observing people. Soon, other co-bankers on looking at our pissed-off faces, helped get 1000 bucks out of the ATM. So much for the “A” in the ATM. (Forget about the cash-counting machines)
Finally, we ate.
And Praneeth showed up. He joined us to watch a documentary movie (Q2P) on the state of public (female) toilets in the metros. This was Umang season BTW, film-festival.
We walked through SAC on our way back to Hall 1. Got eliminated in the preliminaries of the investigative journalism contest. What a day. Mid-sem exams in 10 days. Two major coding-assignments to go.