Living my life too much in in the sun...Only until your will is done...

It appears to me that weather gods do indeed exist, and that they all (or some of them, at least) read blogs. One of them must’ve read my rant on confused weather, because come 10 a.m., and the weather suddenly rocketed from pleasantly cool to not-unlike-an-oven.

Bastards! The filthy, heartless bastards!

I’ve also missed Day 1 of the Eastwind Festival, and missed it in high-fashion. To cut a long story short, kiddies, if your parents are in the habit of sniffing for bargains in every market and every fucking corner store, then it’s prudent to be AWOL when they go shopping for stuff like laptops and printers and hard-drives and the like. Especially if they pick the most inefficient, overcrowded and geographically disseminated computer stores to go to. Like the one I got dragged into a little while ago. It had to be one of the craziest stores I’ve ever been to.

3 objects needed buying - A new laptop (for Daddy Crowley), a replacement DVD burner (for Crowley’s ancient ThinkPad), and a cheap optical mouse. Simple enough shopping list, I suppose, yes?

It took us an hour and 15 minutes to buy all of this. Yes, fellow Romulans, one whole HOUR and fifteen frigging minutes to rub it in!!!!

Am I kidding? No. To buy a laptop, for example, the following procedure is to be mandatorily followed at a dive ostensibly named “Computer Empire” (where’s your crown, King Nothing?):

1. Queue up for a printed slip of paper, which specifies that you want to buy a laptop;

2. Proceed to a little hole in the wall a few shops down the corridor, where sit two 20-something lads who animatedly point to a blurry, Xeroxed list of available models (none are on display, by the way. A little display board in the corner reads “ONLY SEEE, NO TUCH”), and try to point out the pros and cons of different models in broken English, naturally making sure that the higher-end models are definitely better. Daddy Crowley (for reasons unknown to me) reposes immense faith in these greasy charlatans, and my patient pleas of “Dad, 160 GB of disk space doesn’t mean 160 GB of system memory” rebound off the gray-haired skull like a lot of Flubber;

3. Once a suitable laptop is chosen for the slaughter (A sleek, shimmery Vaio in our case – Papa’s Got A Brand New Pig Bag…and isn’t he kicked with it), one of the greasy kids scribbles out a sales receipt on a grubby scrap of paper, and sends you back to the guy in Step 1 (see above);

4. The fellow in Step 1 apparently doubles up as the cashier, who takes a wad of 1000 rupee notes from Daddy Crowley, and flips through them faster than most counting machines (did I mention that there was a queue for this thing as well? And a separate queue if you’re paying by credit card?);

5. Once said Cashier boy is satisfied that you’re not stiffing him, he prints out a formal looking Sales Invoice and a Tax Invoice…all very professional…and then points to a guy sitting about 10 inches down the counter, and says “Delivery wahaan milegi” (“Ee’s the check-out guy, talk to ‘im”);

6. You shuffle back at the end of ANOTHER queue to take delivery;

7. When your turn comes, and you expectantly hand over your invoice for delivery, the fat man at the ‘Delivery Counter’ gives it a once-over, grunts (the 2 pimply kids in line before us got farts…just sayin’, y’know), picks up the intercom and mumbles into it. He then looks at you and tells you to step to a side;

8. 10-15 minutes later, Daddy’s new toy turns up, resplendent in shrink-wrap. The invoices are stamped and handed back.

Buying the replacement DVD burner involved one additional step…precariously making your way up a dimly-lit and cracked concrete staircase to the 4th floor, where Computer Empire has its parts store.

And this little circus is 50 yards in line of sight with the Microsoft corporate office in Delhi. Will wonders never cease?

And to add to the evening entertainment, I walked back into office to find out that it’s Bleeding-Hearts Friday today. My boss has called an all-hands meeting to discuss some AIDS-related public interest litigation that our office has been handling.

Though I’m not actively involved in this matter, there was this suitably cute NGO-type chick present for the conference, and since Crowley works in an office which suffers from a constant drought of the female of the species, Crowley was most interested in making the acquaintance of this wonderful creature.

Said wonderful creature, while waiting for the conference to begin, raved and ranted to nobody in particular about HIV, acute retroviral syndrome, care centers and agammaglobulinemiawhatsit (blub, blub). Crowley caught himself dozing.

Crowley has to go watch some paint dry. He will return soon with stories from the Eastwind battlefield.