I love my work

It's a little bizarre when you're at work, and someone gives you the electric layout of a house to colour-code (so that the electrician knows which expensive light-fitting goes where) and you realise that this is the house belonging to Kumar Sangakkara, the captain of the national cricket team. And as you scan each floor on Auto-CAD, changing and colouring, Sangakkara himself walks in, and sits down at the desk next to yours. He then proceeds to write out a cheque to pay for some buliding materials, hands it to Hasshanthi, politely says good bye, and walks back out.

Our clients, in general, are a varied and eccentric lot. I've never met most of them though, only heard of them through my co-workers. There is one whose house is still unfinished after five years of being worked on by the architecture firm. The reason? He's OCD. He goes around tapping finished walls until he finds a spot that sounds hollow, and makes a mark on it. He then expects that piece of wall to be broken and re-made. Naturally, this actually weakens the walls, so I suspect that by the time he is satisfied enough to move in, his house may fall on his head within a year.

Then there is another family, who are apparently ridiculously rich. At one point, they wanted to have a white gold mosaic pattern in their bathroom. They imported a bathtub which cost one million rupees (something like $10, 000) and then cost ANOTHER million to ship here. I went on a site visit to their house (but no, I didn't get to see the bathroom although I think they abandoned the white gold idea) but unfortunately it appears their maintenance skills do not match their ability to make money.

Then there is there in an Indian couple, who unfortunately sometimes choose to resolve private matters in public, amidst shouting and tears. The husband has the habit of making snide remarks about his wife's weight to the interior designers, while the wife has teh irritating habit of not liking fabrics and furniture layouts that she did in fact approve of six months previously, which is a problem if you've already gone ahead and bought the materials.

My co-workers themselves are hilarious and wonderful, but I think they deserve a post of their own.