If you can smile when everything around you is going wrong, you’re probably in the repair business

It is sometime in the late afternoon and I recollect how just yesterday I was scurrying to reach work at that hour in the morning when most people are still snuggled in bed dreaming of an excuse not to go to work that day. My damp hair was just how it always was on most mornings, limp and facing extinction but at 7:30 in the morning, my only prayer was to be able to find that crazy access card that would allow me the key to the castle of radio madness.
As I entered I saw the ‘On Air’ sign, lit boldly up on the wall next to the studio and I knew that Seema ‘ji’ was singing sweet nothings to the listeners coaxing them to wake up. When she (Seema) had first walked in to work, my immediate reaction was to add the suffix of ‘ji’ to her name, not in an endeavor to make her sound elderly and worthy of the suffix, just out of sheer respect. Little did I know then, that it would become the proverbial albatross around her neck. Excess baggage. That is what I handed to her as she became a permanent resident of the hallowed halls of Radio Today.
The clock struck eight and my co-host was found bellowing from the insides of the washroom for me to scurry and that she would follow. The morning washroom visit; It has become a ritual for Jaishree (my co-host). No matter what time we arrive n the studio, she almost feels compelled to fulfill that rite before she takes on another kind of pressure starting eight o’ clock.
That is the time when the breakfast show comes in to play. The show we proudly call Meow Zindagi, which has been our playground, haven and sometimes even the squabble-zone. As we both rambled on and finally played a song at quarter past eight, I found myself rather itchy, as if I had accidentally rubbed myself against poison ivy. As the show proceeded, so did my itching. By the end of it, I resembled a raspberry cheesecake (not that delectable though). As we stepped out of the studio and exposed my cheesecake self to everybody, like a truly democratic society that we are, everyone used their fundamental right of free speech to mull over what the rash on my skin might be. Some jumped right to questions about who I was dating and if that person was hygienic. I was reminded of how sex is like air. Its really not important till you aren’t getting any. But of course, sympathy on that count from anyone was ruled out. Then of course I was told that I could be suffering from measles and not have known it (I was told even Aishwarya Rai has them, so its quite proper in that fashion to have measles and if it’s the German variety then better still, at least Id exhibit being a bit status conscious) or perhaps it was a rash from the thermal shock of being out in the sun and then coming back into a temperature controlled environment or as my Programming Head pointed out, it would probably be my desire for a vacation and her constant refusal to give it to me that had manifested in a fabricated disease to facilitate the much awaited holiday.
As speculation of my rash subsided with greater matters like the ‘viagra computer virus’, which threatened to turn the 3 ½, inch floppy into a hard disc, at hand, I was finally asked to hurry along to a doctor’s office and get a final opinion (I am sure people back at work laid bets about whose version the doctor would side with)