The great Escape - An update on the Shake-it shake-it.

Ok, so today morning we had to attend a video conference with our offshore team and the conference was scheduled to be held at an unearthly hour of 8:00 a.m. Having managed to sleep successfully thru 3 different morning alarms, all set to beep 5 min after one another, Anup and I were woken up at 7:20 a.m. by a call from poor ole Vedha who had been solemnly promised the presence of the aforesaid couple in office by 7:00 a.m.In my defense I must say that tossing and turning till past 2 in the night really does not work well with getting up at 6:00 in the morning. Sigh!! Anyway after the meeting, with just ten minutes before the cafeteria closed, I was more worried abt missing my regular cuppa rather than the impending imaginary quake.

And so when a couple of equally earth-can-quake-for-all-I-care teammates invited me to join their table,I promptly decided to do so. As we were jabbering away ,there was an announcement over the speaker system regarding the quake and that’s when we decided that we were really not keen on crawling under the cafeteria tables. So we decided to leave quickly and go back to our seats. We walked into the lobby of the building only to have two towering security guys frown at us and say “You shud not be walking around”.

Now as per the rules, if u don’t have a table to crawl under, you are supposed to stand against a wall. I for one infinitely preferred the option of crawling under my table to pretending to be stuck against the wall in the lobby with my coffee in one hand and my laptop bag in the other.No.Thats not for me. So before they cud tell me to do that, I told them “I am going to my desk, to crawl underneath. I am going”, and ran off with my teammates. We hurried into our work bay to find the area seemingly deserted with just one guy wandering abt in a fluorescent green jacket and carrying a walkie talkie.Cripes!!!The bay’s fire warden who is in charge of the drill. I almost turned around to make a run for it before he caught me while one of my teammates instinctively ducked down though there was no table anywhere within 6 feet of her and if it had been a real quake then she wud have been a sitting duck for any debris that fell. But I had a funny feeling that she was really trying to hide from the fire warden. Luckily she straightened up just in time as the warden turned round and saw us.

Owing to the unfortunate location of my darned table, I had to walk past the warden who looked at me sternly and said “You are not supposed to be walking”. Well, I smiled sweetly at him and replied “I am going to my table”. And to show him that I was in earnest, I quickly trotted down to my table, passing my colleague’s bum sticking out from under his table, his head nowhere to be seen (Did he think that his bum alone wud be safe outside or something?) and dropped to my knees, crawled under my table, popped my head out and cheerfully waved at the Fire warden to show that I am in. I wonder why the man didn’t look more pleased than he did.

Anyway I popped my head back under the table and as instructed ,tried to hold onto the table to prepare myself to move with it.Really!!They just had to make the table without any legs, didn’t they? It was the kind that was attached to the cubicle partition and had absolutely no part you cud hold on to. So I held on to the waste paper basket. Before I cud sing the Shake-it song to myself, the speakers announced that the earthquake was over .Huh!!That’s it??? I might as well have saved my poor knees the trouble.

Anyway, am glad to inform you folks that almost everyone in our bay conformed to the rules and got under the table. In fact I was as proud of them as Obama wud have been if they had done the Shake-it dance.Well, except of Anup and Vedha,who were outside on the patio enjoying their coffee and did not realize that an earthquake had struck and gone until our company manager happened to ask us if everyone got down under the table in our bay.Thats when the two men simultaneously turned to me and asked “When did it happen?”

Yeah!!That’s right. With 1.3 million people getting down on their knees and crawling under tables to hide from an imaginary earth quake, you wud think that these 2 wud at least have known it happened.
So much for the Great Southern California Quack-it.