Awesome Experience

      It had been a crazy but interesting week. I have never experienced such a fast-paced life. Quoting a friend of mine, who rightly describes the experience as “Go to office..come from office...sleep....get up and repeat”. For me it has been more than that. Be it the travel in airplane to Hyderabad or the stay at the guest house or the experience at Microsoft office, everything has been equally unique and enticing for me. Please note here that I had never travelled in an airplane or stayed at a guest house and obviously never worked in a company before. So, it was all very NEW. The whole experience could be segregated into three sub-experiences and let me describe each of them one by one.

The Airport

        Thanks to Mayank and his parents who were helpful enough to fetch me and my BIG bags to the airport in their car. The airport has been amazingly built and the cool morning breeze made the whole view even more delightful. We reached pretty early at the airport (you should never take risks with Delhi traffic jams, not even in early mornings) and had to wait long for the other guys to join us. Then came the turn for security checks where we felt almost like stripped when we were asked to get rid of all the electronic items we had with us. They didn’t even left our laptops, and the laptops were taken out of the comfortable laptop bags and they lied naked in front of the security machine (my poor lappy! L). Anyways, by the time we were done with the complex security checks, I and Saurabh decided that the first thing we should do after reaching Microsoft is to design a product which could simplify the whole airport security-check process (probably the thing we are best in is to design air castles, haha). Btw, if anyone reading this doesn’t know who Saurabh is, let me introduce him. Saurabh is my batch-mate at NSIT and fellow MS intern with a scientist-like brain, who fortunately is also my room-mate. And then came that “Aha” moment when we were taken to the plane by the airport shuttle bus. There were hardly any seats in the bus, so we had to travel standing (strange, and then they promise to give world class facilities in their flights). Looking the plane with such proximity was AWESOME. As soon as we boarded the plane, my perception that “cheap flights do not employ beautiful flight attendants” was SHATTERED. You could guess now that it must have been a great flight. Anyways, mine was a corner seat but after requesting to the co-operative uncle and aunty who were sitting next to me, I managed to get the window seat (skills to convince others are required ubiquitously).  And then flies the plane (Woo! Hoo!), “AWESOME” that is all I could have said. Within a few minutes, it rose to high altitudes and from getting tiny to tinier to tiniest the buildings on the earth surface just disappeared. The milky clouds appeared to me as if we are floating on the sea and I was even able to visualize fake islands far away on the clouds (I have become really good in imagination after honing my skills for years by constructive imaginative air castles). Every good thing comes to end, and so did our flight when we landed in Hyderabad (Hyd, I am back after December). Thanks to Dhruv, another of my super-brilliant fellow MS intern, we got a lift to our guest house from the airport. Time to move to the next section.

Serenity Inn

        Then we came to the guest house which MS has sponsored for us for the first 15 days of our internship (please note only the lodging, complimentary breakfast everyday and 2 bottles of Bisleri. For anything else we need to spend hefty sum of money from our pockets. You would get some idea when I will tell you that the laundry here takes 20 bucks for washing and ironing each cloth). Anyways, the place does not deserve any criticism and justifies its name “Serenity Inn: Rest @ Peace” very well. In this part of the story, the “Aha” moment came when we reached our respective rooms (double occupancy, wanna make it clear). And again I could only say, AWESOME. Equipped with TV, fridge, AC, Sofa, connected wash-room, balcony and wi-fi connection with 256 MBPS download speed, the place looks no less than a 5-star hotel. Dhruv and Ashish (another of my super brainy fellow MS intern) were favored though. They were given rooms double our size, on first floor (ours is on the fifth floor), their AC cools much more (our AC is of Godrej and remote of Videocon, so it hardly works), their TV remote works well (our TV remote sucks). Since no such discrimination was made on the part of MS, I guess the guest house staff hypothised that I and Saurabh do not deserve such a room. And their hypothesis has been proved by us unchallenged till date by the fact that we keep our room in such a messy condition that the staff people must have thought, “kaise kaise junglee logon ko chance mil jaata hai”. We could clean our room but it’s just that we like to live that way. It’s not just that the guest house staffs are the only people we have irritated; we have not even left Dhruv and Ashish. Every morning they keep on calling to wake us up, but we wake at the maximum possible delayed time, get ready at the slowest pace and eat breakfast in a sluggish manner and they get late everyday because of us. They have got so irritated that they have finally decided to leave for office without the two of us. Dhruv and Ashish believe me you have made the right decision. Yeah forgot to mention one point, the staff here is really very co-operative, they enjoy helping others, great!

MICROSOFT

        Now, comes the part of story which many people might be interested in reading about. If anyone asks me how I like the place, I would just say, “I couldn’t have expected any better”. The ambience once you enter MS campus is completely different. The people here are diligent, humble, fun-loving, great coders and managers. And yeah you can find beautiful women here as well. The campus is big, really big and buildings are the show-case of great engineering. The timings are flexible, no formal dress-code, no hard rules and regulations (of course you need permissions for some things). You can come and go at any time, wear anything (but yes you need to wear at least something), roam around the campus like a free-spirit, they won’t care. The only thing they care about is that you should be good (no BEST!) at your work. You just need to meet your deadlines with quality work and that is all they want. So, sitting at such a great place on my desk, I said the third time the “Aha” word “AWESOME”. Sitting there the only thing I felt was “It is different”. No one forces you much, no one monitors you strongly. But the kind of enthusiasm you discover in people working all around you compels you to give your best. For all those who freak out reading about so much of work, cheer out guys, there is a huge fun factor which can be found here as well. There are large football and cricket fields, tennis courts (it’s always booked though and you won’t get much chance to try your hand at it), foosball and TT tables, caroms, free cafeterias, and blah blah blah. There is a whole lot of entertainment facilities available here. And yeah there is a visitor center as well where you can play around with MS Surface, XBOX and other such cool stuff (I still need to visit this place). In short, it’s a fun place to hang around at.

       No doubt I am missing my family and friends here, but in the company of Dhruv, Saurabh, Ashish and all the great people here, I am surely learning new and great things day in and day out.