I am under STRESS

The Ball incident

No doubts about it. The sales team is the most stressed out functioning department in any organization.(its true…its true). Atleast that is what we like to claim. So it isn’t a great surprise to see the team relieve its stress in one way or the other. Stress busters are plenty and varied, from cigarettes to bottomless cups of machine chai / coffee.( although I wonder how people can drink that vile stuff to distress when all that you are doing is transferring stress from the mind to the stomach)

Invariably one stress buster that is most commonly found in any cubicle desktop is the stress ball. It’s a soft piece of sponge ball which people can press, destroy, contort, distort, damage( all these actions are done with the intended party being someone else, mostly their bosses). There are plenty of such stress balls floating around in the market( I suggest you get one for yourself, or if you are like me just fill out an order form for a year’s supply)

My boss got some stress balls from us, more of a promo ball with logos of a local mobile service provider. The balls were distributed amongst all of us (not oddly enough, they were handed out on the day we had our weekly meeting).

The next day, a colleague who was absent the previous day landed up in office. He was a pretty new recruit and was quite the intense type who rarely cracks a joke (more likely to crack a safe…too intense a guy…he definitely needs to chill out more). There is another colleague (minding that some of my colleagues read this blog and the fact that I intend to spend some more time at this office, I don’t want to disclose any names) who was just enquiring why he had not come to office the previous day.

I was sitting in my bay, trying to sort of melt into the chair as I was feeling pretty tired that day. (had actually done some work that day…being unaccustomed to work, this sort of breakdown occurs from time to time). That’s when I overheard this piece of dialogue

Colleague 1: Hey man, why you didn’t turn up yesterday
Colleague 2: had some work outside, couldn’t finish it in time and make it to office.
C1: hey where is your ball ( I still want to innocently think that it referred to the stress ball)
C2: what ball. I don’t have any balls. I didn’t come yesterday.

Imagine my face reaction. My tiredness was gone. I never knew that god was out in our bay handing out organs to everyone… if I knew I have some request too…. I would have liked another eye at the back of my head…WHAT DID YOU THINK I WAS TALKING ABOUT…DIRTY DIRTY…. HA HA