The reconfirmation bug!

When you took the Mumbai Local, you followed a particular drill. The train to “Mankhurd” always started from the same platform at VT station. Still, you scanned the overhead indicator, to confirm the train’s destination. Eventually, after getting onto the train, you asked the man standing next to you, “Bhau! Aye Bhau! This train is going to Mankhurd…no?” The relief was immense once the man nodded in the affirmative. What if you bungled and boarded the wrong train, that too, the one going to Karjat? Better to be safe and reconfirm now, than be sorry later, right?

You never shook off this reconfirmation bug. Later in life, the same drill continued, only in a different setting. It does not matter how many times you have taken the flight to the US. After several rounds of security, by when, your boarding-pass is checked and rechecked umpteen times, you finally board the aircraft. After settling down in the seat, and buckling the seatbelt, you cannot resist asking your neighbor, “Excuse me sir! Hello Sir! This plane is going to America…no?” For a moment, the neighbor is all confused. He glares at you incredulously, as you repeat your question. You can see the alarmed look on his face, as he recoils to the far end of the seat, and orders a drink, to soothe his nerves. You try to calm him, “I am verifying, just in case! Don’t want to take the wrong plane and suddenly find...I am in Iceland!”

The reconfirmation bug bites you well before you reach the airport. It begins the moment you place the passport and ticket in the waist-pouch. On the way to the airport, you check and recheck. “Here is my passport. I am carrying my wallet, my cellphone, and my ticket!” Five minutes later, you dig into the pouch for repeat assurance, “Yes, I have my passport, my wallet, my cellphone and my ticket!”

Reconfirmation becomes particularly crucial after locking the main door of the house. If you forget that vital point, self-doubt can spoil the entire day, even the entire vacation. “I am not sure if I locked the main door!” you suddenly murmur. Like the deadly “Piranha” fish, the doubt eats into your being, midway through the journey. To avoid this crisis, you resort to reconfirmation. If it is a padlock, you take help from multiple family members. The entire family tugs at the padlock, hanging onto it for dear life, to confirm it is locked.

If the door has an automatic lock, the kind that slams shut on its own, reconfirmation requires a different technique. You run from a distance like a fast bowler and slam your body against the main door. The enormous thud, coupled with your body-ache, confirms it is shut tight. By now, the main-door and the lock, are mortally wounded and hang by a tenuous thread, thanks to these violent antics.  Once you leave, burglars can lick their lips and have a field day!

The reconfirmation bug is not a recent acquisition. It was a part of the personality profile, way back in school. “How did your board exam go?” sister asked. “The exam went off fine, but I am not sure if I wrote my examination-number in the answer booklet!” “What do you mean you are not sure?” sister questioned. “That’s what I am saying…silly! I am not sure…IF…I…WROTE…MY EXAM…NUMBER! Don’t you get it?” you enunciated one more time, this time with greater emphasis. From the next exam onwards, all you did was focus on confirming and reconfirming that the examination number was written. It did not matter how you wrote the paper. At least, there was no self-doubt at the end of the exam!

There is no area of life that is exempt from doubt. There is doubt if you took the tablet already, or the recollection of swallowing the tablet, dates to yesterday’s memory. If you dropped the cheque in the drop-box, you wonder later, if you filled the amount field or left it blank!  Among the worst fears, is the one related to the kitchen gas-stove. Well after you are 1000 miles from home, a sudden doubt bubbles up, “I am not sure if I switched the gas off! That’s why I told you, not to hurry me up!”

The Doubting Thomas is not just a Biblical problem. It is a pervasive phenomenon. In the novel, “Around the world in 80 days”, Passepartout, Mr Fogg’s valet, is racked with a similar doubt. “I think I left the gas burner on!” he confesses, well after they have left London, on their way to the Suez Canal!” Tough luck! It will take him 80 more days, to get back to London and switch the burner off, by when Passepartout would have forfeited his entire life’s earnings!

Doubt and the consequent reconfirmation-bug are essentially…a scatterbrain’s products. The mind focuses on everything, but the job at hand and does not register the imprint of the action. It is rightly said, “We live in absentia!”