If anyone reading this is also a ‘friend’ of mine on Facebook, you might have noticed that most of my status updates consist of snarky/silly comments on various television advertisements. Unless you’ve blocked/unfriended me, which I totally do not blame you for. Who in their right mind enjoys seeing ad rants for status updated when they should be reading what I devoured for lunch or how my favourite football team just performed (more on that coming soon)? Not even me. So, totally with you there.

Digressions aside (should it really even be called a digression if I get derailed in the second sentence itself?), when I recently saw the following ad on TV:


my natural instinct was to reach for the laptop and bang out another surefire gem of observational humour. The jokes practically wrote themselves:
1. ‘What will you do to get your first android?’ Save for a Droid X or an Evo 4G.
2. Why should I have to do anything for it? What is this, the ending of Requiem for a Dream?
3. ‘What will you do to get your first android?’ Anything and anyone. Wait, we’re talking Lisa-from-Weird-Science-android, right? No? Bugger off, then.

But, I stopped just short of clicking the ‘Share’ button, as I realized that this particular ad was the polar opposite to the story of how I got my first mobile phone. I didn’t impress my dad to get it; I actually freaked him (and a bunch of other relatives) out. [Of course, it wasn't an android but a good ol' Nokia 3310 - this happened quite a while back, when mobiles with color screens were still a wondrous sight and an android was what you called Data from Star Trek:TNG or the aforementioned Lisa]. So instead of a snappy status update, you get a needlessly long-winded entry (with a needlessly long-winded intro) here. For the sake of the TL,DR crowd, I’ll also include a short version at the end.

This tale takes us back to the hoary days when I was an engineering student in a sweaty corner of Kerala. My roommates and I were neck-deep in a project that was due soon. This being an embedded systems project, we needed to program a microcontroller (in case you don’t know what that is, it’s something like an awesome mini-microprocessor) to do our bidding. And if we got anything wrong, we had to re-program it. Plenty of times. Being that our college had a grand total of one (1!) of the machines that you’d use to program a microcontroller and this machine was always in high demand, we decided to borrow one from a senior of ours who owned one and used it for freelance embedded projects, but lent it to us out of the goodness of his heart. We promised that we’d return it in two days. We didn’t.

So, we took the machine and got to work. Having some other friends who were working on a project of a similar nature, we shifted base from our place to theirs for about a week (remember this – it’s relevant). So we spent a few days brainstorming, programming and soldering at our friends’ place (alright, I was mostly playing video games), but not making substantial progress. The next few days were the holiday for Maundy Thursday-Good Friday-Easter, when all of our families were expecting us to be home. So we decided that we’d adjourn and get back to work after the holidays. But some last minute changes meant we worked well into thursday afternoon, when we forced ourselves to stop and go home.

So far so good, except there was the problem of our senior’s machine which we’d already had for close to a week. And he was back in his hometown, a good three hours away, so one of us would have to go there to return it to him. His pleas for us to return it as early as possible – he too had a deadline soon – rang in our ears, so we decided to do so rather than keep it any longer and risk his wrath. But, of course, all of us wanted to go home, too. So we drew straws to decide who would take the trek to return it and apologize. Long story short, I lost.

But I had another complication to deal with as well: we left our student PG in such a hurry to start work that we hadn’t informed the landlord. All calls from our homes came to the landlord who had no idea where we were for so long. And my uncle and his family were expecting me home for the holiday (my parents being in the Gelf). Being immersed in our work, we weren’t really able to call and let our families know we’d be late. And when I tried calling my uncle to let him know I wouldn’t make it for Maundy Thursday, no one picked up the phone. Crap, were they already at church?

Having no time to wait till they got back, I took the train to my senior’s place, with a rough idea of where he lived. Once there, I called his home and got better directions. I tried calling my uncle again. No luck. Were they out visiting relatives? I got to my senior’s place and sheepishly rang the doorbell. He answered the door with an expression on his face that suggested he was looking for the right set of expletives for me. After an uncomfortable silence on his part and profuse apologies on mine, he answered with an extremely restrained, ‘well, at least you were good enough to come and return it’, took the machine from me, and closed the door.

By now, it was already 9 pm and I needed to get back home. Tired, hungry, and running out of cash, I made the first of two crucial mistakes (other than not calling home): I decided to go back home, instead of calling any classmates who lived nearby and crashing at their place. So I ate a little, tried calling home again (no success) and made my way to the railway station. There were no trains that would take me back anytime soon, so I walked over to the bus stand, which was nearby, to see if I would have better luck there. Now, I needed to get from where I was (let’s call it Point A) to my PG (at Point B) to collect all my things and go to my uncle’s. To do this, I had two options: wait for a direct bus from Point A to Point B, which was infrequent, but would get me where I wanted with the least hassle, or catch a bus to Point C (very frequent) and get a connecting bus from there to Point B.

Going with option B was crucial mistake number two.

How or why I settled on this particular brain fart of an idea, I still do not know, but I suppose the factors I mentioned above may have had something to do with them. So I got on the bus to Point C without asking anyone, assuming that I’d easily get a bus to Point B, since the road between the two towns was always busy with traffic during the daytime. I got off at Point C at around midnight, and marched straight to the station master’s room to ask when I could get the next bus to Point B. He sleepily answered, with no trace of concern for my plight, that the last bus had left an hour or so ago, and my only option was to wait for the next day’s first bus at 5 am. I swear I could feel the ground under me give way at that moment. Not knowing what to say or do now, I left the room wordlessly and sat down on one of the benches at the bus stand.

My uncle would surely be asleep by now. No point in calling. I then thought of taking a taxi to Point B. This seemed reasonable, under the circumstances, so I looked into my wallet to see all of Rs 32 in there. No use. And I was starting to feel hungry again. What was I to do?

I quickly calculated that the trip to Point B would take me Rs 20, so that gave me all of 12 bucks to splurge on. I went to one of the all-night tea shops near the bus stand and bought the smallest packet of Parle-G biscuits I could find. I ate a few and washed it down with a bottle of soda. Rs 7 gone. I returned to my seat with nothing to do and no one to talk to (well, there were people around, but most of them were piss-drunk and/or already sleeping) so I clutched my bag to myself and tried to sleep on the stone seat. Oh, did I not mention the seats were big slabs of cold hard stone? Anyway, I lay down on one of them and tried to close my eyes and think happy thoughts.

I woke at around 3:30 am. I didn’t know when I drifted off, but now I was awake and had an hour and a half to consider the crapstorm that surely awaited me once I got to my uncle’s. Not wanting to think about it too much, I walked around a bit, finished off my biscuits and drank some more soda. Then I spent some time observing the giant stacks of newspapers on the bus stand floor, which apparently served as a distribution point for for the paper company to the various paperboys who collected their stacks, loaded them onto their bicycles and went about delivering them. The thought crossed my mind of whether the bus stand could be used as a paper distribution point, and whether anyone was getting any money off this business being conducted here, or if the paper people were in the clear to do so in a public area.

Anyway, by this time it was 4:45 and some general commotion had started among the people gathered in the bus stand (there were more people now) as a bus moved slowly from its parking spot to the boarding point and stopped there. The conductor dusted off a dusty destination plate and put it in place. ‘Point B’, it read. With praises to high heavens, I ran to the door and managed to get in first, beating about twenty others. I do not believe I have ever run so fast before or since. I settled on a nice window seat and waited for the bus to start up and take me to Point B.

When I got to Point B at about 6:30 am, I beelined it to my PG, showered, gathered some money I had lying around my room, packed up whatever clothes I could find and was about to head for home when I thought I should inform my landlord that I was still alive and tell them not to call the cops or anything. Answering the door, my landlady had a similar expression to the one sported by my senior the night before. She said my parents had called more than once and were concerned. So had my uncle. Crap. I apologised to her and caught a bus to get to my uncle’s place (Point D).

I thought all would be over once I got to my uncle’s, apologized for all the confusion and got some sleep. But it wasn’t over just yet. When I got there, I was met at the door by my aunt who wore the same pained expression I’d gotten so used to over the last 12 hours. She told me that my uncle was so worried that he just left a while back to go to Point B and find out where I was. She advised me to go just to sleep; she’d explain to my uncle once he got back so that I wouldn’t have to undergo another round of interrogation. Thankful beyond measure, I plopped onto the nearest bed and woke only in the late afternoon when it was time to go to church for the Good Friday service. My uncle never mentioned anything to me about this afterward. When dad called later that evening, he too just told me not to go anywhere again without letting anyone know where I was.

And so, I thought the matter was closed. But, a couple of months later when my parents came to India on their vacation, dad did something he had objected to before: he gave me my own cell phone. Now, I’d never have an excuse to be unreachable. Well, until I figured out how to use ‘no coverage’ as an excuse, anyway.

Short Version for the ADDled TL,DR folks: I went missing for a week and ended up sleeping in a public bus stand, which caused dad to freak out and buy me a phone so I’d never be unreachable again.

As I proofread all of this, I guess I should have just gone with the crappy Facebook status update. :/