This phenomenon is brought out when the company is expanding (hmm, I wonder when that word will ever come back into vogue) and runs out of locations for its employees. There are more people than the number of "actual" seats on the floor. Someone in their infinite wisdom decided long ago that all cubicles should be sufficiently spaced. Why? Don't ask me. I can only come up with some very weird-but-makes-sense possibilities that I don't want to share.  Anyway, what this visionary achieved was that there was sufficient space in every 4-persion cubicle to squeeze in a fifth person. Sometimes even a sixth person.

So there is an eco system within the cubicle that established itself. All the occupants - four humans, sundry lucky bamboos, sometimes a fish or two, mugs, bottles (of water) - are in a state of equilibrium with each other. Routines get established around this ecosystem with the occasional visitor disturbing the peace by grabbing a chair. There are always chairs going missing, chairs getting switched, paper dump boundaries getting crossed, etc but the equilibrium remains. At least on the outside.

Into this eco-system, the admin team introduces a poor dunce who is usually new to the team, project or even the company. To accomodate this new addition, the current masters of the eco-system have to move around their little strewn personalizations. Then comes the power sharing agreements - which electrical socket to plug into and which network port is free. The poor addition begins to settle into his/her seat trying to not let focus wander onto the neighbours' computer screens. 

Remember how when you walk down a dark street on a dark night, you get the vague feeling of being watched and of a presence? That's what a squeeze-seat feller goes through. There's always the irksome itch that makes you believe that someone is staring into your screen, that someone is watching every line of code you type or every line of chat that you send. Cross talk between the cubicle pals goes around your shoulder. 

Got the idea? Ok! I was that unfortunate one for 3 months at my new workplace and fortunately for me I am out of there (I mean the squeeze seat). Got my own niche now. Ha!! My space, my stuff!

Having to live up to the various sobriquets - Silicon Valley (of India, of course), Hi Tech City, etc., - Bengaluru's dear old traffic police (also known as "mamas") decided it was time to go techie. So we have traffic junction cameras, synchronized greens and many such other. It's an entirely different matter that nobody really understands these things and none definitely care about them. Given the prevelance of illiteracy even amongst the educated, the traffic lights don't serve any purpose. After all, a red could mean anything from anger to hotness to non-veg food but I digress.

As I said, the traffic police is busy installing hi-tech devices to help solve the problem. In all the hoopla, what they miss out on is the fact that most of the traffic lights don't even work properly. Take the HSR BDA Complex junction for example. If you are driving down from Agara junction towards Silk Board, you actually have to cross this signal under a red. Yes, that's true. This particular traffic light hasn't been working for weeks now, so the road-user is left to ensure that the other directions are red and then assume that s/he is good to go. Excellent road signal training it becomes for the road romeos.

A month before it was the Iblur junction signal that wasn't working for weeks. Thankfully, someone had the brains to fix it up. How difficult is it to track and maintain traffic lights? Must be awfully tough as no one seems to do it.

Then there are times when the traffic policeman takes over signalling without switching off the traffic lights. This doesn't happen too often but when it does it adds to the confusion.

One of the main segment that is conveniently ignored by our road makers and police is the pedestrian crowd. The pedestrian lights almost never work and even if they do, the traffic marshall himself ignores it and goads the vehicles to move under a red. On a regular morning visit Silk Board junction to see what difficulty the pedestrians face. There are tens of pedestrians zigging and zagging their way amidst moving vehicles. Of course, the speeding cars don't ever slow down adding to the risk that you have to take to get across a road. Busy building multi-year, multi-hundred-crore flyovers, elevated roads and grade separators, the authorities don't have the time and the inclination to put up some very basic foot bridges for the pedestrians. I would especially like it if they could build sub-ways for pedestrians but I guess that's asking for too much of our incompetent BBMP and others.

I mean, come on!! People are being fired to cut costs and these head-honchos continue to get paid a lot more than they deserve. Why fire people? Why not cut costs by chopping off salaries across board - starting with the chief executives?  

And then there was what-should-have-been-but-was-not- embarrassing episode of the Big Three heads flying down to Washingtion in individual private jets to ask the government for money. Oh, yes, they did promise that they were looking at ways to cut costs in their respective companies. Yeah, right!

I am a fan of that ubiquitous sitcom - "Friends". Yeah, call me lame but I did like that. Now, once I got hooked on to HIMYM, it's move over "Friends" I've had enough of your re-runs.  Agreed, HIMYM has almost the same ingredients - 5 friends and a bar (yeah, this is a grown-up version) but it's quite good all the same.