Friday the 13th

For a long time now people have believed this crazy superstition that Friday the 13th is a day when one can expect hell to make its presence felt to him/her. We just happened to get through one of these days… “October the 13th, 2006”.
I didn’t realize it until my friend pointed it out and then, from that very instant, I was on red alert taking care to see that I do not screw up any thing. The day went on with me on guard and nothing happened until about 5:00pm. I had totally forgotten about external factors that could make my day hell. I heard rumbling sounds coming from the roofing. Sounds like those of barrels being rolled on wooden flooring. I had no clue of what was going on. A loud thud broke my thought process of trying to figure out what could be the cause of the sound. It was crazy, a thud followed by the rumble again.
I sprang out of my seat like a jack in the box, looked around, found nothing different, and looked up just to notice that one of the roofing panels had broken open. Things were getting scarier now. What was it up there that was so menacing?? What was it that had enough brains to get roofing panels off their supports??
My first thought of answering that question went in the direction of tiny little evil creatures which have immense power, thanks to the novel “Darkness Comes” which I had read a few months back. It was a thought and it ended there, I don’t believe in black magic anyway. The rumbling continued, and this time it was even louder, loud enough to get some more jacks out of their box. We all wore a similar kind of expression, a distinctive scared and curious look.
It was time we needed a brave knight or a wise magician or just about anyone who could save our souls from what we were experiencing. At that time another thought struck me… it was happening… Friday the 13th in all its horror. Well, we finally got someone brave enough who took measured steps to get under the opening. He peered into the darkness of the opening while we were praying that horror movies do not turn to reality in a place when adventure happens on a regular basis anyway. He looked around for some more time; we looked at his reactions trying to judge what could be in, and then spoke. “There are monkeys up there!” he said. And we were like… “What!!!”. “Lots of them!!” he said and moved away. That word “monkeys” released all the air stuck up in our lungs and we eased out.
Yeiks!! Now this was turning interesting, monkeys doing monkey tricks in the roofing of the first floor of a four storied building. All I had on my mind was “How the hell did they get there???”
The rumbling got louder, faster. We got the hint that the monkeys were now restless and trying their best to break free.
We were asked to move out of our seats and go to some place safer. We chose to go near the pantry and be VIP observers as the house keeping guys came equipped with sticks. More and more panels started falling off, all in random places, the rumbling continued and we were enjoying seeing the house keeping guys try and get the monkeys out of there. All work had stopped and this gave way to relaxed minds creating jokes related to monkeys and all the happenings at that hour. A few colleagues of mine came up with employee ids, usernames and passwords for the monkeys. They also came up with a separate tab for the issue tracker with the tab named “Issues related to Monkesh”. They were having a gala time while the house keeping were sweating it out to get those menacing creatures out of the place.
An hour passed by before we realized that the panels had stopped falling, the rumbling all silenced, the house keeping guys all confused. Where did the monkeys go after all??
Good they found a way out of the roofing without being escorted through our work area otherwise we would find a crowd of civilized people behaving worse than monkeys.
All this made considerable damage to my day. I had to wait an extra hour to end my day which meant that I would reach home real late and not have much time to do anything else but eat and sleep.