the 'phase'

There's college life. There's life at work. But there's also middle-ground. Lets call it the 'phase'.
The 'phase' is the time when you are trained before you begin work. About 30 of us train together and we are the ones selected to train together because we are products of institutes which impart high quality education. Most of this education is not relevant to what we will be doing and we make sincere efforts to ignore (or forget) it as soon as we can. We are mature enough to know that all of us are equally skilled but each person is also quick enough to assure him/herself that he/she is the best among us.

Formal attire is the customary dress code at work and most of us dont like it. After two days we requested the men-in-charge to relax the rule temporarily and they gladly obliged. We knew they wouldnt mind. The next day most of us were back in formals because we were not sure if they really didnt mind. After that nobody was interested in being the odd guy in casuals and now the formal-wear norm doesnt seem all that bad anymore.

The classes we attend seem pretty interesting. More so after someone pointed out that we are actually being paid to listen. We try and listen carefully in order to answer any question that the instructor may hurl at us. Answering questions is a pretty neat way of conveying to everyone that we are here to kick ass and we mean business. Everybody gets to answer one time or the other, leaving us with atleast 30C2 = 435 potential ass-kicks.

We also love to get any doubts we have, cleared promptly. There is great joy in getting a doubt cleared. There's greater joy in realising that the instructor himself is unaware of the answer and we secretly wish that is the case as often as possible.

At such times we try to argue it out among ourselves. Once we had a lot of trouble understanding a particular mathematical concept and somebody went to the extent of providing an anology involving hot girls. At the end of it we still had no idea what the thing meant and now we couldnt get our minds of the hot-girls topic.

One thing that doesnt go well with most of us is a slow-paced session. We wouldnt want the instructor to drag on till the scheduled close of session, wasting so much time on something so trivial. We would rather have him wrap it up quick, so we can go back home and waste the same amount of time in ways that we want to.

Over-all we like what we are being taught. Probably because we know we'll use most of it very soon and because we are being taught by people who have used most of it successfully. More importantly, the 'phase' is such a wonderfully convenient transition from being a college kid to becoming a 'corporate bitch' (as someone cynically and enviously put it).