Calling it a Day

How do you objectify a day? One question I hate answering is "So, how was your day?" (But I am guilty of posing this question many times though - it's is one of the easiest things to say when you can't think of anything else.) How do I answer that question without seeming curt? If I had an exciting job, maybe my reply would have sounded like "Yup me had a good day, managed to isolate yet another stable isotope in the lab today" or "Not so good pal, broke my neck while bungee jumping today". Unfortunately moi is just yet another Indian software engineer. Most of my days are spent looking at and some days writing code. And more often than not, the person who is asking this question is also YAISE and I am always worried that answering this question might lead to the complete dissection of my job profile, my project, the team I am into, the method of source control we use, C++ or Java yada yada yada or worse it could lead into a detailed monologue of his/her job, the kind of project she is into and so on.

So leaving the work part aside, the other parameters that I could use to evaluate my day are my journey to work which takes approximately 15 minutes, my lunch and my travel back home! I can imagine myself answering "Yeah I had a great day, in the morning I got an auto very easily and they actually served gobi for lunch today" and the other person's opinion of me will sink to an all time low.

After a lot of pondering and rejecting many possible possibilities, I have hit upon this one - "Yeah my day was not bad. Survived a man eater in the morning, and then the afternoon was spent disproving the Pythagoras Theorem. My evening was good, I swam across the English Channel - nothing more invigorating than a brisk swim. And now here I am talking to you." Either she will give an awkward laugh and quickly change the topic or hang up - works for me eitherways! :-)