What Do You Do at Office?

Ten things you do at Office:

1. Read google news.
2. Read some more google news.
3. Read Cricinfo.
4. Look up for useful stuff in Wikipedia like: Cannibals of India, Megapodes of Andaman, Financial turmoil of the mid 1920s etc.
5. Pick up the headphone (connected to your phone and not IPOD) put it on your head like you are doing some very useful talk.
6. Don't forget to put the phone on mute. Do speak up a few times in between of course while on mute.
7. Go for 3 coffee breaks.
8. Go for 3+3 Cig breaks.
9. One lunch and two breakfast and two tiffin breaks.
10. If someone asks you something about the area of your expertise, respond: "Yah, I will look into it and get back"
11. Don't ever get back. That will be asking for trouble.
12. Check the date thrice in a day (especially in the last week of a month).
13. Read and re-read the salary check 5 times to ensure your company is not looting you (on the first week).


Many more to come...offices are after all supposed to be hectic!

Perils of a software engineer

“So what’s next?” Asked my boss.

I looked at him. My eyes piercing, trying to gasp what could be coming in the next sentence! will the next sentence blow a deathblow to my career, will I be laid off, will I be given the pink slip and told “Many thanks for your service which were of no use to the company, and you with all your dignity may leave us now.”

Was this question a rhetoric one? the answer hidden in between to indicate, there was, actually, nothing coming up. We finally  were standing at the end of a road, which suddenly without giving any prior notice plunged into the ocean from where we stood. There was no way out. There was nowhere to go. I was the puppet of a closed system, and suddenly that system was dying. It stopped circulating blood and things got deteriorated.

“Well?” Came a probing voice. From the same source. With the same kind of pre-destined sense of finiteness in itself.

“Could be anything. There may be an escalation. Or there might be a complaint.” I vaguely tried to reply.

We were standing in one of those numerous glass rooms of the IT park I work in. It was a bright day literally, although the outer brightness did not bring any happiness to me.  glass-rooms were scary. And you go in them seldom. It was like a federal jail really. There were stony faced Project Managers, angry tech-leads, and in some cases when things went really wrong, group leaders. I had never been to a glass-room before. I had heard all sorts of stories about it.

One of my friend told me his horrific experience, where one glass-room visit had brought down his rating from an impeccable top to the dirty ground, in spite of clearing all the trainings in time, in spite of being the first one to fill in timesheet. Such are the perils of glass-room. Another friend told me, how he felt like inside a glass-room. The AC can not cool down a glass-room. Its usually like a blast furnace. Temperature grows up, up and above. Extravagant jargons fly around. The youngest person in the room is really fried on hot oil, messengers of satan beat him with harsh words, and the listless hapless fellow is reduced to dusts, with all his defense broken, all his mind crooked.

And there I was, in my short IT career, for the first time, in a glass room. I could see my project manager asking me questions impossible to be answered. Obviously I ain’t a clairvoyant fortune teller. I am just a mere coder, who can never foretell what will be the output of his code, leave alone this sort of turmoil filled earth where your whimsical client may kill you (not literally you but the contract) the next minute or he may himself go bankrupt.

I was afraid. I was thinking of all the gargantuan effects my mistakes can have on the company, the industry and the economy of the country.

These days its a fashion to go bankrupt for US companies. Who knows my American client will grab this smallest of opportunity to go that direction, and declare himself as one. US govt. in turn will have to come in rescue. They might see a deep conspiracy by Indian economic powerhouses in doing so. They might declare a war against India which will turn into a world war III demolishing economy of India in turn. OMG, demolishing indian economy is a bit too much I thought. Isn’t that the new avatar of invincibility ? Like they at Dalal street say so coolly?

 

My boss, turned his bespectacled, rude face towards me. “Do you even know what this can turn us into? We will be called novices by the client!”

Errr.. Novices?? Is that what this thing all about is?

After much ado I found out…

There was an error message I wrote in my code, “please do not provide garbaje values in the xml as it will be difficult to read by our production support guys who will read it manually.”

 

It was sent to the client who did not read the document. It was tested by professional testers (or so they claimed) and they did not find anything wrong with that. Now when it has gone live, a user has raised a defect stating that the spelling mistake in garbage is so eye catching that, there has been a million complaints about it.

 

And now we were, in the glass room! Doom looked at me with disdain. A million years of zero rating if I still manage to save my job, is sure to be the next best punishment.

The perils of a software engineer continues…

A Saturday worth Blogging!

A busy Saturday at last. Oh how much do I enjoy busy Saturdays. Lots of useless stuff to do. Lots of useless places to go. Lots of useless people around. And endless useless stuff to rant about.

How did I pass the day? A great movie! A great dinner! Some long forgotten faces! And a fight in the club.

Phewww… now that’s something isn’t it?

We friends went to a movie at Harrow. Which one did you ask? Well what else the (in)famous Jodhaa Aakbar. And I must say the movie isn’t even worth spending 3 and half hours in the hall. Well there were couple of typical gwarikar’s romantic moments which I liked. I liked Hrithik’s childishness in somescenes and some places his emperor like rage. His command on acting is increasing and that’s a healthy sign for Bollywood. But the movie shows how pathetically inexperienced Bollywood is in handling periodic dramas.

I wonder why Indian directors fail take a clue out of great Hollywood epics like Gladiator or Troy or Kingdom of Heaven. People in India who are eager to make a historical movie should take some training sessions from Ridley Scott or Peter Jackson or Wolfgang Peterson. I mean the war in this movie almost is from the age of Ramanand Saagar’s Mahabharat and nothing more than that. Although the movie improves in the later half where Sujamal is being chased by afghan archers on horse and being shot at the scene is taken excellently.

But overall the film made me feel sick. On one side there was this gibberish farsi urdu mix that was given to Hrithik as his dialogues on the other side really bad acting from Akbar’s mother, some of the extra actors. Then there is endless useless song sequences and a timeless movie Yuckkkkkkk

Whatever the rest of the day was good. Met some old time friends. Tom and Shelly who got married recently had come to Watford to catch up. So we had gone club hopping. Then there was a fight at the Columbia press. Bloody noses, torn shirts, yells of “Freeze! Or I will shoot you!”, Swearing, in the fucking mean time getting served drinks for free and a bloody hell broken loose! All at the same time.

Hostel part 1

[This post is for consenting adults only! I bear no responsibility for those echor e paka, less than 18 year olds who read this! a guardian must accompany them while reading this post, and decide whether or not to let their sons to an engineering college hostel! For girls who have lived in the pinky pinky paradise of their mother's lap the following post might seem to be rude, for the guys and other type of girls this was my life in hostel and I am being absolutely honest about it...There will be more posts coming on it as time passes by]

No dude, this ain’t gonna be the review of the Quentin Tarantino flick. Those are not as amusing as real life can be. Trust me my hostel life was ruder, violent and a step in the guy’s world with a hilarious touch on it. A whole new world where you get to know guys from Bengal’s remotest places to the posh and sexy ones telling us stories of hooking with a high class escort! Life was never as educating as this.

I went to a residential engineering college in West Bengal. Life one fine day became different for me. There you go alone in a completely different world devoid of any parental insurance, empty of motherly care. It was a man’s world.

First day when I faced ragging I just came to the college to get admitted. My father was with me. He was a man of middleclass values and morality. Already pouring his anxiety in my ears as words of wisdom and advice, he was visibly worried to let his son be alone. There were those much feared tribe of people around, the so called seniors looking like street goons with their unshaved faces. I got called from a second year hostel. My father waited outside. I, worried and nervous, went ahead towards the hostel while my father waited on the street. It was a classic scene. I was growing up.

My first ragging with my father standing nearby was not much exciting. It was a bunch of kind seniors who were good natured and asked me couple of half wit questions before asking me to go join my father.

As time passed by I grew into the hostel. Or rather hostel grew inside me like a parasite. Or better to say probably a mutual symbiotic relationship was created between me and hostel. All the hostilities from the seniors were nothing before this growing bond. This was a bond which taught me life.

I still remember the first few days, every day after college some or other seniors used to call me. I was probably one of the most unlucky guys around. I was a quiet calm fellow always living in the shadows. But somehow my hunters would find me out. I was pretty naïve at that time. Having come from Siliguri I didn’t know many things. Yes, I hadn’t seen a full porn movie yet. It was banned on siliguri cable not even on the late night. I hadn’t known the local slang for masturbation! I didn’t know the exact terminologies of a female anatomy. I didn’t know cursing to the fullest extent.

So the ragging sessions became learning sessions for me. I learnt all these things plus a few more. I learnt how to read a news paper when after every word you insert “My C***k” and then after another word you insert “your c**t”. I learnt what will be the trajectory if a drop of water falling from tip of Madhuri’s nose to the very end and places it would travel. I learnt how to calculate PCM of myself. I learnt also how to propose to a senior girl!

Our college in that manner was civilised when we joined. None actually got me naked and spanked me on my butt. None actually ordered me to have a zebra fashioned moustache (probably because my moustache was quite thin and unnoticeable that time). None actually made me play “lalu bhulu” with a fellow guy. And I am thankful to my seniors for these. As, if I were asked to do these things, God knows what I would have done, but for one thing was sure the guys who were coming to join this hostel as our successors, things could only get worse.