DEFCON 1

Not much noise…except maybe the occasional subdued beep from distant vehicles. Out in the yard, and seem dwarfed by towering evergreens, coconut trees and even mango trees around. That’s the sedate environment of a quiet suburb of the city. Several independent bungalows in the area and one of ‘em serves as the office of the designer/publisher who’s doing our yearbook. One can imagine why he’d like working in such an environment, being the creative kind. I mean, the setup was nice and cozy…3 computers…looked ordinary enough…but the speed at which they boot and the ease with which they ran resource-monsters like Pagemaker gave an indication of tons of RAM and high-perf graphics cards. Also, carnatic music being piped (at a low volume) from a 2+1 system to get the juices (no..not those..the creative ones) flowing. I’d expected to take a liking for a work-environment like that…but surprise surprise…I found it positively coma-inducing.

With graduation day not a hop-skip-jump but a drunken lurch away…we went to DefCon 1 in an attempt to actually hand it over to our batchmates, considering that for several of us...there might not be another opportunity to make it to campus (sounds melodramatic…but true). So it was an evening of adding substance to stingily written anemic profiles (read: he is a good friend [under “stuff only friends know”]), cutting down those where the friends had been a tad too loquacious (read: droning on and on about how they like to fold their underwear in a particular manner), identifying mismatched profiles (wrong name/picture) or worse, pics of married folk with their alleged significant other, who in fact happens to be their neighbor’s other…believe me, there’ve been enough of all those instances. And there’s this other thing…Formatting of laptops which essentially means being locked out of the network…so starting sometime this week (next coupla days)…the batch of ’06 will be cutoff from the outside world…no lan…no internet…can’t wait! Tomorrows another session with the publisher…hopefully will have ironed out all kinks… now for more ‘profile-repair’…almost wish this was something that did not matter…like a Fin assignment… ;)

p.s: DEFense CONditions describe progressively alert postures for use by the Joint Chiefs of staff (http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/c3i/defcon.htm). Simply put, the title means…”We’re screwed!” :)