All Nighters - Then and Now

Being forced to stay very very late at work the last two nights took me down a Memory Lane, the map of which anyone who has been to college (especially an engineering one here in the US) can draw from, well, memory. However, there were differences to those youthful, initially exciting night outs which started mostly the evening before a major assignment was due and could continue as late as noon the next day. Oh yeah bebe, engineering students can partay like no other similar species, in the labs and libraries of universities that is.

The major difference lies in the number of characters in both acts. Scores of Desi engineering students have eventually transcended into the American workforce by consistently upholding the great traditions of the famous buddy system in college. Now, when the buddy system no longer applies and other people are paid to be your 'buddies', you find that there is no such well-meaning (I am sure) soul around on nights when your employer really makes you earn the butter for your that day's bread. Of course you are not alone. You attain near fluency in Spanish due to regular nocturnal conversations with the almost monolingual Mexican janitors, apart from learning the names of the leading goal scorers in the Mexican premier football league and the latest angles in the love polygons of Mexican soap operas.

Also, there is no whiff of that familiar female deodorant now - the generic one affordable by Engineering students. The one that lingered strongly enough to motivate you to debug her (your) code slower so as to prolong the evening so that you could boast about spending most of the night with the user of that magical spell to your chums the next day. However, now you can afford one of those colognes that handpicks a 6-packed supermodel to endorse itself but, even the unadulterated (woody, in my case) odor only ends up increasing the speed of your debugging skills, unless of course if you are a homosexual narcissist (aren't all narcissists homosexual, or at the very least bi, anyway?)

What's common in the two settings is the grease filled satisfactory belch you express at the end of a bagged meal, incorrectly titled dinner that you wash down with something that parents and ex-GF's say will kill you in the long run. Of course, the meal is now eaten in front of your computer - alone, OD-ing on some fellow bloggers' freaky experiences rather than over female laughs (even if fake like most things about that blessed species) at your pathetic PJ's, maybe even a few minutes of the No Smoking Abrahamian moments of soul searching in front of the mirror or practice of Robert Deniro's facial impressions by turning off your monitor, which return no hits on the soul, but end up posing life altering questions like whether the waviness (and thus supposed grooviness) of the hair is aesthetic enough to distract the imaginary attracted lookists from the ever increasing forehead.

Some things never change though, like telemarketers and their benevolent marketing techniques that awaken you the next morning like the kiss of some charming prince on some narcoleptic princess and send you scurrying for a dawnish lecture in some obscene course like anthropology or invertebral sociology where pop quizzes are as common as cheese in non-Italian pizza, or nowadays, for meetings where you have to cover for your boss since they are too early in the daily schedule for her. The crow bath strategy has replaced the no bath one, but what remains with you till the end is the zonked out feeling, only paralleled by an elaborate ballroom dance with Mary Jane.

And then, there is the end. The sweet sweet anti-orgasm of the whole experience, the whimpering end to a cathartic passage, stamped with near-invincible finality that only a deadline extension can shatter. Thank God (sic) for unyielding Professors and stringent marketing folks who ensure that extensions too are as repetitive as colored moons. Then all that remains is the guilt of failure on the surface, and a highly contrasting gratifying calm inside.