Met Expectations*

I had the office to myself for three weeks. I enjoyed the peace and managed to do a lot. My officemate was back from his vacation just in time for the football season. I sure did not look forward to the guys' discussion on their fantasy football brackets and analysis of games before and after lunch time.

It was his first day back, after lunch time. He came back to the office, with some of the other guys following him. I was used to this by now. They would talk a few minutes to end a discussion, or just to linger their fun time. I thought naturally they had more to talk about, catching up for the three weeks. However, I could see my officemate was trying to get rid of his friend, while they were both laughing. "Where is it? Is it here?", the other guy asked. "There is nothing here, I promise you", my officemate repeated while laughing. I entered the game of giving my officemate a hard time "what are you looking for, maybe I know where it is". Finally, my officemate could get rid of the annoying colleagues. A few minutes passed and we were working in silence.

He broke the silence: "I wanted to tell you first this morning, but you left for a meeting". It sounded serious. "I proposed when I was in India", he said. "Congratulations!", I said with a smile. I was surprised I was not surprised! I think I surprised him too. I had seen so many of my Indian friends going to India and coming back with a wife that deep down I knew one time he comes back from India he will have such an announcement. Apparently, he had surprised himself too. It was not an arranged marriage like most cases, but traditional for sure.

He had met this girl in a party, really liked her, kept talking to her during his stay, and he felt he will be losing something if he did not try his chance. He said "I had to ask her, if she said no, I knew at least I tried, but she said Yes!". Here I was, listening to this colleague and friend of over seven years, telling me he is getting married to a girl he met three weeks ago for the first time in his life. He had also got the parents' approval and had some sort of ceremony indicating they are now together. "The time difference is the worst part, I can call her at night, but I do not want to wake her up early in the morning", he continued. "Call her before coming to work", I suggested. "But when I wake up, I just want to get out and come to work, I do not feel like talking in the morning", he said. "You know, she is going to be there every morning", I said. He held his head with both hand "Oh, no, do not remind me", we were both laughing. "You have no idea what you have done, do you?", I asked jokingly. "No, I have no idea what I have done", he admitted as he was laughing. "And then there are all these emails coming, I think they want to know the date of the wedding to start planning for the party, and I am like, I do not know, I just proposed." I knew his real problem. He did not know how to handle all those emails from the girl and her parents and relatives. He is not good with emails even for work. He prefers meetings or phone calls. When he has to respond to the management, he has a hard time coming up with sentences. He often first writes one or two lines, asks me to read it over just to tell him if it would be appropriate or not, or to suggest how to edit it. I continued: "tell them I do not like emails, and I do not feel like talking on the phone in the mornings, see you in six months at the wedding", as we were both giggling. We even went over a related sitcom's episode, as we usually do about any event from printer jams to memos in our office. "This is so much fun", I could hardly stop laughing. "Wait, your time will come too!", he responded. And that is how we celebrated a new beginning in our office.

* Our performance appraisal has different categories including "fails to meet expectations","meets expectations", "meets and exceeds expectations", etc.