Ravi Tandukar

Getting to the offices of my recently change new job is bit of a distance by both car and train. Driving is a nightmare no matter how early you start from home, traffic in Sydney has a slim chance of getting better, its a utopia that we can only dream of. By train, it requires a changeover at Town hall station, in the city. Its partly due to the main office being located in a slightly inconvenient location, by which I mean a bit far from everything – shops, train stations, people, eateries and so forth. And that basically also means its slightly in the ‘middle of nowhere’.

One of the main customers that I am working is based in the border of CBD. So my time is divided between  the company head office and the client premises. I use a company provided laptop, a touch screen, mid size Lenovo with a bulky power pack from the IBM days.Getting from home to work means carrying the backpack with the following:
– the hefty laptop and its power unit combined
– my iPad for commute
– lunch box and fruits
– a notebook (paper)
– company phones
– cables for network, phones and so forth
– coins bag – for coffee
– occasionally spare jacket when its hot
(taken off due to heat) or cold

The weight totals 7-8 kilos or even 10. For the first few weeks I thought I was going to break my back. I even had to go see a physio, it hurt that bad.  I thought of buying a wheeled backpack and shared the idea with a colleague, who laughed heartily at it, he went ‘You are young!’ Well  I had no choice but to push on. Unexpectedly and discreetly, after a month, I started to notice a bit of change. Unmistakably, I was getting toned! Not because I was doing any extra exercise. It attributed directly to my daily commute of about half an hour from home to train stations and work, with the ten kilo backpack mostly on my hand. I stopped hanging it on the shoulders, since then the back and neck pain started to disappear. I would shift arms and even lift the backpack as if it is a weight, in gym, from time to time.

I no longer needed to use my home treadmill, not sure if that can be added as a benefit. But here you go, life sort of adjusted, and evolved around the situation, like a tree branch grows around the obstacles in the way of its natural growth.

One evening on my return from work, I found son of a neighbor at the main door waiting for his parents to open it from inside. Shockingly, I looked at the bag he was carrying and noticed it was actually as big as mine! The boy is hardly twelve, and is about four and a half ft tall, I asked him to take the bag off his shoulders and lifted it myself, it was as heavy as mine! I told him what’s inside, he replied ‘Books’.
I couldn’t imagine if anyone would carry books anymore, sign of total conversion into digital from my own ‘book, book’ days, to ebooks now. I couldn’t help imagening
the little guy’s vertebra screaming and grinding under the mountain of books he was carrying. For myself, I now look forward to my gym session every day
and back. No complaints.