Good thoughts have power to transform all that is ugly and drab to things that are not so depressing. With a little dash of imagination and cultivating a sense of humour in you, you have the strength to metamorphose situations to your favour.

The coffee was hot and her mood cool. It was the perfect time of the evening to contemplate about the day. She usually never did so because she used to be too tired after returning from that dreary workplace of hers, but today had been something different. Busy with work, she didn’t have had time to put it all together back then, but this sweet recreation made all the events flash back.

After her busy morning at home, when she had crossed the threshold of the office, she had been filled with dread, as usual. And now was to begin another bleak day, she had thought. And to some extent, she had been right. Starting with a conversation with the lecturer in shorts (for she worked as a finance employee in a reputed institute), who probably thought that his ‘leggy’ style was very fashionable and students would pay more attention in the class if he wore them instead of a decent pair of shirt and trousers, the day had begun tensioned. The lecturer very politely had asked her to make some changes in the budget of an upcoming programme, which in turn would fetch her not very polite remarks from her senior. However, no other option left, she set herself to do the task. Luckily, without much ado, it got finished by midday.

She had been going to lunch, thinking about the man in the canteen who had that foul face while he served you food, as if the food had been saved by him through years of toil and now people were shamelessly taking it all away, when she suddenly collided with a student. He very dejectedly informed her that the food was perfectly fit for dogs today.
“Great”, she thought, “Yesterday it had been fit for pigs. The standard is surely improving”!
But unfortunately, she wasn’t feeling like a dog that day, so she quietly snuck to the nearby restaurant for a meal that was fit for humans.

The end of the lunch hour brought with a dread and an extra task for her, heralded in front of her by the peon. A document had to be scanned. But as she went to do it, she not very happily discovered that the scanner had run out of order. Now she would have to explain the matter to her senior, who in the morning had taken the budget matter a bit irritated. How then, oh, how ardently she had wished that they could connect plugs and a monitor screen to the deeply religious Mr. Keshavan, the Registrar, who was so into scriptures and God (because he had published at least four books on religion till then) that he saw the image of a goddess in every lady he came across, be it a student, lecturer or employee, and scanned her top to bottom and inside out. Hence, scanning a few mere documents would be no big deal for him, instead he would be very efficient at it and a lot of time would get saved.

As she continued to work, the lion walked down the hallway. Oh no, not hallway; the lion was the king of the forest, so for that brief moment of his walk, the whole room had turned into a forest. A pale shadow had spread on everyone’s face because the lion is generally disliked by all other meek animals in the jungle, and Mr. Kumar, an administrator, certainly thought everybody else useless (as he was the lion). But perhaps it was wrong to call him a lion, because certainly lions never indulged in office politics.

Anyway, the change of ambience was now over, and so were the office hours. It had started raining that evening.

Fortunately she had an umbrella. So did many others and some others, as if they were film-stars, were zipping up their raincoats. So discussing the weather conditions over the past week, they filed out of the main door. But today, strangely the umbrella man was without an umbrella today and looked helpless. How ironical! No, no, he wasn’t an umbrella seller. He was another lecturer, but he was like an umbrella. What is meant by this is that like whichever side there is rain, there is an umbrella needed. And this man, like an umbrella opened up (supported) on either side, depending upon the rain (any situation that suited him, just like rains suited umbrellas). She had felt like giggling then, but quickly had checked herself.

And this is how the day had ended. It was the same, usual actually. But she had never thought funnily about the people and situations like this ever before. Amazingly, she found that thinking like this did make the day seem a bit cheerful and the office didn’t become so dreary…
So, she realized, if one has to enjoy one’s work, even if the work is hardly enjoyable, good, positive thoughts always make it easy to do so.