monday morning

It's raining. The sky is crying [cliché]. You're sitting in a car staring at a distant billboard in the distance. WORKING | HARD | TO BE | NO. 1 | GOOD CREDIT | BAD CREDIT | NO CREDIT | REPOSSESSION. Fazil Say (solo and overdubbed) is drumming out Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps on piano. The wipers are in tandem with the rhythm of a relatively straightforward section of this avant garde composition.

Minutes later, you are walking out of the rain with a wet umbrella into the College of Computing, to spend another day applying for jobs. Sending emails to destinations that don't even bother to acknowledge receipt these days. No one is interested in hiring people who can pick up technology within a snap. In hiring people who can add more value to a company than a hardened N-year-experienced (N being a suitably unfairly large number) professional. The College hired a new Dean last semester and he seems to have taken a leaf out of the rule book of Indian politicians (who believed that the best way to leave a mark of your tenure was to rename streets and junctions and important locations to the vernacular, causing rampant confusion and fondling unimportant egos). The new Dean has ordered physical restructuring of the place. You walk past rooms in disarray. Past equipment for construction and deconstruction (pardon the pun). Past walls with holes in them. Past doors that have been replaced by translucent white sheets. Past walls that have become orifices protected by solid glass doors. The ironic expressionism of the moment does not escape you. Outside, it's still raining.