Yes! Branch change is final! Unless you happen to have some dirt on the dean the likes of which our iron-willed* (read stubborn) lad had no clue of.
Yuri and Zabuza (one would think Yash and Zain would be more appropriate in the context, but some people just have cooler names (yeah, lucky Snows and Sands)) were worried. There are perks to having the last roll numbers but they were being overshadowed fast as they realized who was joining them at the end soon. Himanshu was going to be their new lab partner. Shu, with his self proclaimed nick, was a prick. This was not an intrinsic property of Shu, but people did not find it hard to come to this conclusion unanimously. No one actually called him Shu. No one actually called him.
Himanshu was disappointed that a semester full of RGing only got him into a branch that he considered was only marginally better than his old one. He was yet to get his new roll number but he was getting used to dismissing his old branch from conversations unsurprisingly quickly. There were a few more steps. He visited the admin block.
Everyone knew bureaucracy, at every level, was slow and full of paperwork and overall bad. Shu discovered it worse. He saw a very placid and nearly bald Raman and tried to enquire. The placidity vanished. Raman was upset to discover he had to come to the acad section so often that he had blended in.
Raman had recently become a privately sponsored faculty here. He didn’t feel like it yet though, because he was yet to get paid. The sponsor had transferred his annual salary to insti accounts a few months ago, coz procedures had to be followed. And his file had been riding desks ever since. Now they were convincing him that he should receive chunks of it monthly and not the lump sum, and that he should leave the money in their accounts to accumulate interest. All this made no sense, other than that arguing about it would only delay his payday. It was weird when you meet an officer and they say that your file just arrived and that they would look at it only the next day. Raman had looked into all this. Apparently the desks all shuffled around so that no person takes on a certain responsibility long enough to become corrupt. Bureaucracy was all about keeping people’s greed in check.
Shu also saw the girl who branch slid down to biotech there, but he didn’t want to talk to that loser.
*Pun intended. Sorry Meta peeps.
Shu is not very happy about us digressing and not giving him the praise that he deserves. He wants another story, just about him. Should we yield?
