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I need a goddamn break!

Now this incident might startle those who have not experienced high pressure at work. But for those, who have, it might be something which they had always wanted to do, but feared the inevitable. It was a Friday evening. I was shuffling through my emails. One of my colleagues dropped in to tell me the boss wanted to see me right away. I took off from my cabin to see him. The webpage open in my workstation was on vacation travel packages and a simultaneous search for hotels. It had been a long year, and I had not taken a break for quite some time now. I moved into my boss’s cabin. He offered me a smile and a seat. I took it with the nervousness of what was to come. Smiles from bosses mean 2 things. Either they were delighted with you performance, which meant, you being assigned to lead a project, which inversely mean more burden and goodbyes to those proposed vacation plans. The other meaning of the smile was sarcasm. It was like this calm before the storm. Start with a smile, and make it a howler, leaving you mentally disturbed.

As I kept calculating the possibility of each of these meanings for the wry smile I had received, my boss spoke, ‘Um. We need you to work on some of these core files. They need a re-assessment. Please add this to your work.’ I smiled back. Probably a faint way of saying ‘No Thanks. I have other plans.’ It did not take me more than a couple of seconds to walk out of the cabin. I moved into my cubicle to see that the system network had hung, which meant I had to wait for a good hour, till it returned. At this moment, I yelled my heart out ‘I need a goddamn break!!!’

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