The Unexpected

The holidays are over and the warm winds that cascade through my hair and touch my body from Bahamas are a thing of past. Life has started as usual in the new year with many challenges lying ahead and dreams that are never ending to accomplish.Yet one thing has remained constant. The element of surprise and the unexpected things that life brings to us.

I had not even completely settled down in life from my vacation, forget about the office mode, i heard my phone ringing at 8 AM in the morning. I looked and saw that it was my boss.... Not being rude, I picked with a cheerful smile on my face and a tone that was refreshing and filled with zeal to start my work week, I heard my boss saying that " Welcome back from your vacation. I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted, as come back to work and we have tonnes of issues that have piled up while you were gone. I even have a bad news for you...........".

I was surprised and those 40-50 min or so to my work were the worst that I can ever imagine. The thoughts of what bad news would I receive when I arrive all refreshed from a wonderful and relaxing vacation had already erased the sweet memories of my vacation the previous week. All thoughts of talking to my friends and peers about the adventures that we did in Bahamas were shattered.

Once I reached work, I was greeted by my boss only to realize that there was a major issue with one of our systems and that was causing loss of revenue to the company. "All hands to deck" was the slogan for the day and everywhere at work people were simply amused and working mechanically to resolve the issues and stop the bleeding that the company had witnessed. Adding more the the agony was the fact that my computer died on me (hardware crash) and I was good for nothing for couple of hours.

Although the days succeeding to this event passed with high alert on work and overall monitoring of the systems, I had never imagined that life will be so unexpected specially after getting back from a vacation. The whole work week felt as if I had worked for more than 2-3 weeks without a break and I was all ready to go back for yet another vacation.

I sit here in my living room remembering the golden words I once heard from many learned and educated elders, "Gold shines only once it's baked in the immense heat".