Pressing Pain!

“Senior VP is visiting us tomorrow, make sure you present yourself in neatly pressed business formals”, reminded my Project manager.  Of the 16 words he uttered, one word that kept ringing in my mind was ‘PRESSED’!

Pressing the daily clothes may sound a mundane task which is not worth a piece of your mind. But believe me; it is far more than that, especially if you are as lazy as I am!

Every weekday morning, when I open my eyes to the first rays of the sun seeping through the window, beyond the feeling of a ‘new day: rise and shine’, comes a series of questions on the overnight official emails, the first meeting of the morning which I have to sit through, the lunch I should pack etc.

And the most tiring thought of them all would be on what I should wear!?  Ahem…Let me rephrase this!..are my formal clothes pressed?!

Typically, I press a pair of pant and shirt once and use it twice or thrice before I wash! (Yeah.. I am lazy!). Now, that makes a minimum of two pairs of pant and shirt or four pieces of clothes to be ironed for the week. This sounds simple as all I have to do is press two pairs over the weekend and I am all set! But then, I wish I would listen to myself once!

I might not be entirely unreasonable on why pressing clothes is painful, especially when one adopts the Just in time pressing! (Most of them may sound ridiculous, but hey! That’s me)

One: Time is precious. When you wake up 10 minutes before you start to office, there are other critical and socially essential tasks that take precedence such as brushing your teeth, take bath and of course pack your lunch.

Two: when you choose to press in such an ‘emergency mode’ every minute pressed is two minutes lost (Einstein’s relativity perhaps!) and you feel like you are wasting time and end up messing  other tasks!

I did have a work around to by pass this pain. Sadly though, it works during winters alone! This is why I like the Orange county winters. It is not too cold to painfully wrap yourself up in ‘n’ number of layers.  The temperature would drop to bearable levels where a full sleeve sweater would serve the purpose! And this turned out to be my solution to my ‘pressing blues’.

All I used to do was to put on the sweater when my shirt is not pressed. This also made me count half sleeves, shirts which would otherwise be a strict no in the formal attire category, into my office ‘wardrobe’!

I went on to add four more sweaters, just to not be repetitive!

 One interesting thing I noticed was that there were quite a few in my office who started wearing different sweaters everyday!  Did everyone have a reason like the one I had? Everyone is as lazy as I am?  May be true or may be not

“You are not alone!”, I smiled at myself

Forbidden Apple?!

How many of you have iPhone?, asked my prof in the class. My thoughts travelled 23 months 13 days back in time, the Christmas of 2007 to be precise when I first laid my hands on the brand new iPhone.

 11 months had passed by since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in his Jan 2007 keynote at MacExpo. What Steve Jobs showed the world was way ahead of the contemporary handheld devices. He literally made a mockery of the stylus that comes with these handheld devices and showed the world why stylus was such a redundant piece of stick when you have the natural stylus, five of them in each hand!

My love story with Apple started off in mid 2006 when my cousin gifted me an iPod Nano. It was hard for me to fathom that stuff like music could be made so organized and portable. I was impressed by click wheel and the option to choose the song you want. From Walkman (the tape cassette one!) to iPod was an astronomical leap of sorts. Apple made it possible. It was indeed love at first sight!

By December that year, I moved to Los Angeles, a bit closer to the birth place of Apple. I was on the lookout for buying my first notebook. MacBooks were a bit heavy on the purse. All I could do at that point in time was to hope that Apple would give away free MacBooks to people who want to own one but cannot afford one! ( Yeah! Brand Apple makes you Insane!)

 Again, my cousin came to the rescue! He offered me to get a 25% discount on the MacBook from one of his colleagues at Apple. Flying to his home in Bay area, the birthplace of Apple was the next thing I did.  I landed at his home on a cold December morning. The MacBook was waiting for me on the table. Pure, white, gorgeous and oozing style in every inch of it. Carefully connecting the charger to the power point, I switched on the Mac Book. The Apple Logo lit up in a white light brighter than the MacBook’s skin. I had never seen anything like that before. I cherished every moment of it!

6 months on, iPhone was launched. And I did call my cousin for that 25% discountJ. I was not fortunate this time around. My friend and I used to track the reviews and feedback of iPhone users. There were quite a few complaints ranging from a battery that would not last more than a few hours to poor camera quality and what not. We were disappointed. Although we did not care much for these complaints, we still could not find a reason for not buying it. Probably there wasn’t one. 

On the Christmas Eve of 2007, my friend got a crazy offer from Amex, offering its card holders a 10% discount at the Apple stores for any purchase of over US $1000.  We sensed that probably, this was the chance. Two iPhones would bring the bill up to 880 USD with taxes (by 2007 rates). We went in search of someone who can buy for the remaining 120 USD! Fortunately, my other roomie was ready to get his iPod. We were off to the Apple store and the next call I did to my mom was on my iphone!

From being clueless on what an iPod was to a Crazy Apple Loyalist possessing three of its beauties! All this in fewer than 8 months! Although I did see that there were lots of compromises like changing your service provider, entering a 2 year contract with ridiculous terms of breaking it, compatibility issues and limitations with the iPhone, brand Apple did push them to the background. Definitely, too good to resist!