My most memorable fools day

After waiting for 10 years and realizing that the April 1st 2001 was the best, i have decided to write about my most memorable fool’s day. Thanks to Lalita Upadhye, for reviewing my blog content and correcting the grammar. If you see any grammatical mistake please catch her.

That was the 30th of March 2001 - Friday evening. I was in San Antonio with a few of my friends - Ashish Hate (Lead), Aziz Tiwari and Manoj. This was my first trip to the US. We were almost done with the project implementation and were relatively free the coming weekend. We had decided to explore the city on Sunday (1st of April), as we were bored of being home all the prior weekends. The lead made the plan and we poor little soldiers nodded our heads in acceptance. Here goes the plan

11:30 AM -> Catch the bus to downtown

12:15 PM -> Reach downtown and start shopping

1:00 PM -> Have lunch

2:00 PM -> River walk (San Antonio is famous for river walk)

3:00 PM -> Continue Shopping

5:15 PM -> Reach the nearby theatre

5:30 PM -> Buy tickets and watch the movie

7:00 PM -> Move over and do some site (Beauties) seeing

7:30 PM -> Back to near by bus stop

7:45 PM -> Reach the bus depot

8:00 PM -> Get into the bus

8:45 PM -> Reach home

I am not sure if my lead ever made any software applications with such care and foolproof design, but he definitely spent enough time on this plan. The D-day arrived. We were all excited to have a fun Sunday. We reached the bus depot around 11:25 AM and the bus arrived as expected @11:30. We got into the bus and reached downtown on time. So far, we were executing the steps as planned, everything going fine. At around 5:15 pm we reached the theatre and purchased 4 tickets. To our surprise, they charged us only 5$ per ticket, whereas the original cost was around $8. We were actually saving 3$ per person, WOW!! Either they made a mistake in calculating the cost (which American's would never do as they are more well versed with computers than Indians) or there might be some discount on movie tickets for Sunday. Again, Sunday being the day to enjoy, the tickets should have been more expensive. Anyways, we Indians were not bothered. The bottom line is - we had got the tickets CHEAPER!! . We spent some time here and there and entered the movie hall around 5:25 pm. To our surprise, the movie was already running. The intelligent Indians started reasoning and thought the previous movie might be running late (IST).We thought we should continue sitting and lookout for the next movie (Our show). Another surprise in store - the show continued for only 35 minutes. Now if we would have waited for the entire duration of the next show, we would have ended up missing our bus back home. So the lead suggested that we should watch the movie only upto where we joined in the previous show. We all liked the idea and stayed on in the theatre even after everyone else left the hall. 15 minutes of staying put in our seats and there is no sign of the next show! We did not want to leave as we had paid for tickets. However, not yet ready to give up, we thought we should wait outside, do some beauty…oops …site seeing and get into the hall when the show starts. At some point, I casually glanced at the wall clock hanging somewhere in the theater and realized it showed the time as 7:15 (Not 6:15). I crosschecked this with a cop standing near the gate and got his affirmation that it was indeed 7.15 pm! He said that it was the 1st Sunday of April and that is when the DST begins - so the time moves one hour ahead. That can't be right!!!, I shouted. We got our 11:30 bus at 11:30. My newly found friend then informed that there was another bus at 12:30 too. That clarified the entire story to us. How we became fools in the most memorable way. We ran towards the bus depot to catch the bus, otherwise we would miss the last bus and would have to stay back in downtown for that night.