Bursting the Carefree Bubble!

Lets face it

For some of us the crucial switch from the carefree university life to the rest of the life is going to come as a surprise to say the least. The friends, environment, atmosphere you thought would be with you till the end disappears all of a sudden leaving a strange sense of loss. The biggest challenge is that no one sees it coming, albeit knowingly. You start to get comfortable in the university life, slowly and gradually start getting tuned to the routine so much so that you cannot think beyond it. Finishing write-ups a day before the submission, pulling all-nighters, studying chapters for the first time before an exam, projects, presentations etc., you get so caught up in the challenging routine that you fail to realize how much is going to change.

Life after graduation can be tough and challenging in its own way. I for one have seen it unfold in front of my eyes not once, but thrice. I have seen my three siblings graduate from university life into "real life" before me with their own concoctions, ideas and goals of life but all that changed. Although all happened for the better, it all unfolded differently from the dreams they had. We have no idea whats in store for us out in the real world. Chances are that some of us MIGHT NOT get into universities for higher education or the careers or job that we always dreamed of after graduation. I have seen FOREIGN QUALIFIED graduates from "prestigious" universities, Queen Mary and the like, work in the worst of government offices in lahore.

Rarely does life go as planned. All that planning seems to laugh at you as it starts to crumble, chaos surrounds you and the artificial world, that you made in your innocence, swirls away. Life is tough.The truth is, some of us can not even work outside our usual group of people, our friends, our batch fellows. Some of us cant even go a day without our "dawgs".

I,however, followed a different path.

While others have been looking for friendly internships filled with people their age, people their type and cool companies with corporate atmospheres, i took a different approach, a real, closer to real life approach. One that involved experiences that other organisations just can not provide. I worked at a government office where i knew no one, where employees aren't familiar with the concept of internships, where you cant differentiate between a customer and a service provider on the first day because it resembles a road side Truck Hotel/Tea Stop except for the food, where air conditioners don't work (A.C. ducts have rats the size of a small cat running along the edges), where people use fans to cool themselves, where wearing full sleeve formal shirts results in as much sweating as in a football match, where you have to work on wooden/broken chairs and desks, where (i am not kidding) a meter wide registers and type writers are used instead of computers for storing data, where the cafeteria is built in the storage rooms and the biggest source of entertainment in the break is having tea, which is a little bit of tea in cup of sugar. There is evidence to support the claim that government offices are hideous, you can't find a single picture on Google.

Similar is the story when i worked at a Call Center on the 12P.M to 7A.M night shift which gave a real feel of the pain people take to earn it in the real world, where people make a living out of making phone calls. Although i was lucky enough to have a few cousins working alongside me but most employees at that mediocre call center were working alone. The tedious duty of making repeated calls which almost always resulted in refusals by the customers gets boring, frustrating and intimidating in the very first hour of the job. When your employers key for motivation of the employees is a Rs.1000 for every successful call in addition to the basic salary, it is self explanatory of how tough it is to make a sale of a product the U.S, a product that you have never seen and all the knowledge that you have about the product is the specifications sheet you have rote learned. Every time you dial a number and hear a "hello?" from the other end of the phone you had to open fire of the rote learned specifications at the "potential customer" and most phone calls resulted in slamming of the receiver while you were still in the middle of your speech.

The biggest moment of excitement came when they give you a break from 4A.M to 5A.M, a time at which you are about to drop dead and all you can think of is your bed to sleep, in complete tranquility but that is just the starting of the last two most crucial hours of the job when the manager comes in to supervise because that is when the employees slacked off the most.

I have worked at another private company but lets not talk about that!

The gist of the matter is, wisdom comes from over coming whatever comes your way and i believe those summer internships added REAL EYE OPENING experience that no university, school, college,MNC like P&G or Unilever or a prestigious Bank could ever add.

"The realization of how lucky we are, we forget those who are so much worse off."

The point is to open your eyes BEFORE the wave hits you, because this is not the same as going from a high school to college to a university. Things are about to change.

But the end of innocence is not the end optimism. Life is a mixture of what happens, which you can't control and what you do, that is totally in your control. There are its moments of joy, the memories that are sure to last forever. So relax, accept, move forward and be wiser and happier than before.