I woke up at 9:00 AM on a cold Bangalore morning in Feb, to my 6^th un-snoozed 8am alarm. I kept saying to myself, “Get up Akshay, get up!” but I knew that ‘actions speak louder than words’, so I slowly dragged myself out of bed, not ready to face a day of work after my week-long vacation at home. There was a part of me that was hesitant and I took one step out of bed because a ‘journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’. But most of me was excited for the day to come. I walked into the kitchen, prepared the batter and made pancakes, added some syrup and had my breakfast, proving that ‘I can have my cake and eat it too’.

This was going to be my new job as I had left my old one because ‘all good things must come to an end’. I wanted to write all about it and share it with my friends on Instagram but instead, I took a picture because ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. I got on my bike, without putting the location on Google maps because ‘fortune favours the bold’. I walked into the office at 10:30 AM, impressed that I made it on time, I soon realized that the reporting time had been changed to 10:00 AM. Oh well, ‘better late than never’. Carrying my laptop bag under my arm, I walked into the area where everybody was sitting, slyly looking for a desk under the AC, but had to settle for a desk furthest away from it because ‘beggars can’t be choosers’. The first people I met were Danish, head of Client Servicing and Robin from the Copy Team, who I was with all day because I had to ‘keep my friends close and my enemies closer’.

I was given an introduction on how things work around the office by lunchtime. That’s when I saw how difficult it is to convince 20 people to order from one restaurant. After a lot of deliberation we eventually ordered food and that’s when I realized, ‘you can’t always get what you want’. I was asked to pay for my share as well because ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch.’ Our vegan, Head of Copy, Saroj didn’t order lunch with us because she believes ‘the grass is greener on the other side’.

It was a very long but fun day, especially meeting all the different people from various departments- Design, Copy, Client Servicing, Digital Marketing. My takeaway from my experiences on day one was that ‘when the going gets tough, the tough get going, home’ (after 7PM) because ‘there is no place like home’.

About the author: Akshay Mariraj is a Client Servicing Executive and an idiot who loves idioms.