A Day in a Software Company

[Note: The following is a description during the pre-Y2K years]

There is a characteristics named punctuality in English which right now I doubt even the British now of, but this word has never been used or put to use in my company. This of course does not immediately precipitate a fact that all IT workers are great procrastinators. The world has two kinds of Men and I am one of them, you know which one I am if you can catch my drift.

A morning in my company, though not at the crack of dawn but surely somewhere before sunset, is very slow. The typical time would look as though the hen and its family had been to a night show, thereby doing its duty a bit late. The fact is that this typical nature of the hen and their family enjoying seems to be repeated everyday that it has become a customary event that the day breaks a bit late in our office. Even by the slimmest chance one wouldn't try to be earlier than the usual time excluding the day when we are called for a client interview or a scheduled meeting.

The next part of a rather arduous day begins by punching the time. This rather heavy duty I think should not be entrusted on the employees on a daily basis. This issue was raised and then the management made use of an electronic watchdog who unfortunately worked only in the mornings. The dog I suppose went for its evening nature calls under a lamppost thereby missing a few records of the leaving time. This made us perform what any other major IT institution would have done. Arrange for a congregation, and then proceed to see the pros and cons for reverting back to the old system.

The old system too had its drawback, mainly the instrument for punching our time (in modern era called as the PEN) would be missing. This disappearing act is generally not a magical vanishing trick but a calculated and organised civilian act known as PINCHING (in American Slanguage). These events that occurred in really rapid successions made the officials think for their first time and they attached a string to the PEN. Now the employees are pinching the pen along with the string as a bonus.

Once entered into the office area, like a roman lion in the coliseum, we are left scot-free to do anything of our own until your manager arrives. Still, since many of the employees have never tried using the small amount of gray cells that they have, resort to mimicking others. The others, who assume that they use the gray matter in their rather small head, start the day by checking the mails.

Mail checking forms an important ritual in ones work and it has to be done at the earliest possible time frame. In fact the scene in the office if the mail server were to be down would look exactly like the NASA building just before the launch of Apollo 11. Perhaps, even there it would have been less chaotic.

This daily ritual lasts around half an hour and then we start to settle down, not to work but to browse. One is not mainly interested in browsing to know the happening in Slovakia or about the tribal events in Scandinavia but mainly because of peer pressure. If a person doesn’t browse on his own interest, he is termed as a Rotten Cabbage. (This word was coined from the Spanish term "esCabbageol de Rottenishale".)

Browsing in our office is a pleasure in its own kind. The maximum speed that you get is possibly the equivalent to the pace at which your fingernails grow. Still the employee strives hard to improve the execution of his machine to match this speed. The ice topping on this cream cake is that many of the employees browse the network using illegal logins and proxy servers. In fact, the maximum privileged user never dares into enter into the web.

The employees browse different category of sites at different times. The sites are NEWS related in the mornings, later during day it’s looking for technical help (another meaning for Job Search) and finally in the evenings to areas where females never dared to go. Not those blocked sites – you stupid, it’s those matrimonial sites.

Talking of females, this concept is virtually not present in our office. The only close resemblances that we have to females are Non-Males and the ratio is something like 1:4096. This ratio remarkably looks close to the company stock division ration between an employee and the management. The work place in all aspects can be renamed as a Boys Camp where even a stick clad in female attire is considered as a Winner in the Miss Universe competition. This is the only issue where all the male employees join as a group and agree in unison. One exception is when we crib about our low and paltry salaries.

This cribbing brings us to the first drinks break at our workplace. Usually drink breaks are for breaking the monotony of work but for us it’s a break to spread gossips and all collected valuable information such as which projects have failed and which clients have run away etc, if you can catch my drift.

The office does provide us with a pantry which offers edible drinks like Coffee and Tea tasting exactly like a dishwashing liquid, methyl-isocyanides, or phenol. The only choice that you get out of this service is to "Take it or Leave it". The other choice of course is to have it "Hot or Cold". In case did the tongue ever talks about this to the management, their first words would be "Shut this services off, they are here to work and not to drink". The only possible Homo-sapiens other than us to accept this kind of an offer would have been the Wachati Zulu tribes.

The gathering looks very similar to a Discovery channel documentary where the lesser privileged animals come to the waterhole for relaxation, while the hunters (much privileged – like a Lion) are on the prowl. The only point where we differ is that the management has never tried to step into this place since the words such as Clean, Spick and Span doesn’t apply to this area. Also it looks like cleaning not going to happen in the near future i.e. till 2300 AD or when we get salaries at par with the multi-national counterparts.

Now, we are talking business … after 3 hours of start the employees finally take their plunge into the work. This is the only part of the time you could see the screen-savers getting activated. The longer the time it's activated implies the harder the employee is trying to solve a problem. Elucidation is a word that any employee dislikes in our organisation. The best possible solution he can suggest in quality related terms is MEETINGS.

This is also the main defense that an employee has got to counter the management questioning his capabilities. The meetings are generally called for around 1130 hours so that we can prolong it by talking till lunch. Wherein the meeting status would be half-complete and it will resume at 1430 hours which is immediately after lunch.

Inside a meeting room there is nothing to talk about but from the outside it would look as though the next generation technology is going to be launched right inside this conference room. Though the language used inside is never up to the mark, the thoughts are certainly. Like the West Minister Abbey, there are a lot of back benchers who are solely there to make themselves settle into a cozy environment for sleep. The worst of them are those sleepy guys who come out of their coma once in a while and post some impossible question which makes life miserable for those who are awake. There are different types of meetings which have to be addressed in a separate document since it’s too big to handle in this one.

The period when there is a lot of buzz is during the lunchtime. This is the most productive period in our organisation. All though there is a canteen with no subsidized meal scheme, only a few of them stay back in the office to have lunch. This I guess is due to the high quality of food and the delivery model chosen by the caterers.

This water hole is the main area where the organisation’s gossip starts. There are a few chosen ones who are the only folks involved in creating the gossip. The close kith and kilns of the creators are handed the important work of spreading the gossip in plain English terms known as a Broadcasting Engineer. The other innocent bystander and those who have consumed the lunch are the ones who unknowingly give out information for the next rumour. These people are treated like dust but their information is the main ingredient in the Masala Mix that is prepared on a daily basis.

The evenings, time referred is as post-lunch, moves even slower than the so-called brisk mornings. The major activity during this time is either sleeping or sleeping with snoring option enabled. One can't deny the fact that the south Indian delicacy called Curd Rice is the best suited for Madras weather. Still the after effects of consuming quiet a sizeable amount of that brings you to a glorious state of mind … SLEEP.

Sleep is very much entitled to be envied by anyone who is awake having work after lunch. Each employee in the company has got a knack of sleeping without letting the screen savers to get activated. The exception for this case is “if and only if” the screen saver is that of an actress. The managers have a gala time during this period where they enjoy this funny episode of making surveillance rounds across the length and breadth of the floor. The reason they do this round-trip is to shake themselves out of their sleep.

The few who are caught red handed in this surveillance are called in for a one-on-one meeting and the events that follow are same as mentioned in the before paragraphs. With time employees have learnt that this is an easy way of escaping work in the post lunch. The main difference between the general meetings and these one-on-one meetings is in the latter case, one has to give a nice plausible reason for your inertness and then your boss would explain ways on how you can be proactive.

Just after this meeting one gets a feeling that he can achieve a lot for the organization by being proactive. All this really makes him start work until the guy in the next cubicle calls you for an important help that he requires. This help in an employee's term is known as a "Tea Break". The evening tea break is a bit different from the morning one. Although Gossip is the main ingredient, this time it also consists of the number times that someone has got caught sleeping and all the blunders that have been done till now from the management point of view are all discussed in length. Since this extra amount information has to flow the break takes a little longer.

This last session of work again is very similar to the morning one. People generally start to send mails regarding work that is postponed to tomorrow, which had to be completed the day before, and any work of yours shall be relegated to others stating that you are overloaded. To be really frank, this document was initiated and finished in the evening time, this is the man reason for my work overload.

The managers are too tired since they had a lot of meetings and let the employees carefree during this session. Of course, nothing more can be told since almost all employees leave earlier than the official time for some reason or the other.

Since I too am having some personal work – have to apply for a new Ration Card, so let me put a stop here.

An Indian Bachelor's Room in USA

So you are trying to visit my room at college on a weekend, which is a nice event that will give you a chance remember your old rooms and find the similarities with mine. Let's start from the very beginning; the Door for all obvious reasons should contain stickers reading "END WORLD HUNGER TODAY" or "SAVE THE KAULA BEARS". This reminds me that there was a time in my life, years ago, when I was so full of energy that I was going to not only END WORLD HUNGER, but also STOP WAR and ELIMINATE RACISM. Whereas today my life goals, to judge from the notes I leave myself, they tend to be along the lines of BUY DETERGENT/COOK DINNER etc.

Upon entering the house, you will look like you were transported from the Federation Ship of Start Trek to the deepest part of the Amazon jungle. Usually, no less than 4 people and approximately 200 empty boxes of Pizzas share the room. The next thing one impulsively looks for is generally the furniture, which is at the barest minimum (Zero in plain English). Of course you would find a couch, but a person who likes to be clean would never in the wildest dream take the risk on getting seated on it. The sofas are the main focal point for the collection of books.

The fundamental reason behind this is that more the books you keep on the sofa the more the fines you got to pay the Library. In fact, it is found statistically that my room contributes to more than half the library funds by the way of penalties. Most of the books which we lend somehow fall behind the sofa and get lost in the space-time continuum. Certain community firmly believes that some one from the "Lost Book behind the Sofa Committee" would come and ask for those age-old books and pay you handsomely since by the time they arrived the books would have been classified as RARE CATEGORY. (I am still waiting for one of them to arrive)

The other main items that one finds in the living room are the cordless phone and the TV. The TV will rarely feature channels such as "Discovery" or "The History Channel" but shall have HBO, CineMax, and TNT (these are the Favourite Channels List on the Remote). Speaking of remotes, the best place to find the remote would also be behind the same sofa where "The Principles of Parallel Computing" book is. At any given time of the day, both the TV and the Phone would be used not by the persons who are living in the room but by other unwanted visitors.

The next place where your eye moves is on the walls and the floor. The wall decoration is of two types - by Females and by Males. The rooms of the females have curtains and matching pictures on the walls. Of course the nature of the picture varies with the type of the female whereas the Male's room is painstakingly decorated with: Nothing. The only designer touches that you could find in a guy's room are some shoe marks, cigar stubs and some half emptied laundry powder on the windowsill. Coming to the floor, the female section of the crowd somehow manage to keep things clean, while the male room's floor looks far cleaner.

Shocking? Yes this is achieved by precisely placing a lot of shoes in random order on the floor such that you obstruct the eye to detect the flooring. The shoes are without stating the obvious dirty so the floor appears to be clean relative to the shoes. The inches of dust make the floor fluffy and as the Fluff-O-Meter index goes up, we vacuum the carpet. The normal duration between each vacuum event is a very reasonable period which when calculated turns out to be 6-8 weeks.

The very next room is the Dining room, you may immediately wonder: "What would happen if a burglar breaks into the kitchenette and steals those pizza boxes?" Do not worry; we keep a reserve supply of pizza boxes in the living room. If a burglar tried to get those, he'd trip over the cord that stretches across the room from the TV to the video-game controller held by a young man who is permanently installed on the sofa for this purpose. The only word that he would say (Polite at certain times) is "Hi" that too whenever you trip over the chord. He is allowed to stay in this room for the sole reason that he shares our monthly grocery bill.

The utensils in the dinning room are very limited, in precise terms just one spare set than the number of guys living in the apartment (Officially). Before I forgot let me warn you that the utensils may be cleaned once in 6 days without fail. It's your luck if that happens to be the day you come to dine with us. If the sofa in the Living room was the place for study books, then the dinning table is the place for all scrap books from comics to ^%^&*&, Yes those kind of books. You need to be very calculative to find a space between those books to sit and dine without damaging the existing ecosystem balance between the dusty books and cockroaches.

The adjoining room to the Dinning is always the Kitchen; this is a tradition that has been followed right from the Mohican tribes. The kitchen is an important area for the guys. This is the place where you find the refrigerator so that you could stick a lot of papers stating "You Cook Tonite - Shanks" and another on top of it, "Shyam shall cook instead of me" and just besides it would be "Jugs - Shyam is out of Town!!! So, I am ordering Pizzas". You now clearly know the source for those empty Pizza boxes around the house.

Kitchen is also the room where most of the guys don’t like to stay for too long. The average floating population would be around 1 per day since the person who stays longer has to do the dishes. Although there is an unwritten fact that the kitchen is the only places in the world that is far beyond human control, that even cockroaches fear to enter this area. Possibly, "Danger - Environment hazardous Area" is an apt hoarding for these rooms which are maintained by bachelors. This scenario however doesn’t fit for the women, who have all their crockery and dishes arranged according to chronological order in the morning and the reverse chronological order in the evening and inspected by the other roommates on every Thursday evening.

After passing through all these rooms, you finally enter into the untamed area-51, the bedroom. Although cleanliness is in our blood but this is the room that is the last in which it is reflected. Many people would be reluctant to enter this room for one main reason; you shall have to walk over the clothes. The clothes are assorted in a prearranged order that is decipherable only by the living in-mates. They shall with all their adept skills in cryptography be able to pick between a clean and washed shirt from the dirty ones. The distinction is that if the dress is not washed for over 2 weeks it’s termed "DIRTY" otherwise "CLEAN".

Another strange thing that would strike anybody is that there isn’t any bedspread over the bed, after a few moments another strike would occur in our mind; there isn’t any bed in the first place. The bed is made of make shift sleeping bags which are washed once every 2 weeks. The bedroom is the garbage dump yard for everybody when they want to make the living room a cleaner place. All the things are carefully moved and reconstructed into this room until you arrive at a drastic idea - you plan to clean the bedroom. Taking your roommates help you reconstruct the mess back to the living room thereby saving the bedroom from extinction.

This type of cleaning routine continues until you decide to change the apartment as a whole. This doesn’t mean that the new apartment will maintained just like Martha Stewart's Winter Home, but is liveable for at least one year without any problems. All the above description would be thrown into a toss if one of the roommate’s family members pays a visit to this sanctuary. The other roommates start to move (i.e. from Sleeping to Active). The best part of student life is that you enjoy the inertia. My roommates term sleeping as "Creative Inertia", and it’s really tough (I am not making this up) to move them from this state unless acted upon by some external cousins/family visit.

When I look back on these days, I get a hearty laugh since the argument is that students are there to study and not to do household jobs and in reality we are forced to do household jobs while studying. Perhaps this is the main reason for our low scores.

I guess my son will narrate stories like this in a few years from now – I hope he clean his clothes at least once a week, otherwise I have to plan for a weekly visit!!!