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…

Simple Fun

Fun can be very simple. Like what we did today. There is a notice in men’s toilet in our office. That says “if any of toilets go faulty please contact so and so…” We wrote a comment below that- Toilet Assurance Solution Design(trouble to report).

Now that wouldn’t be fun for those who don’t know what trouble to report is and what solution design means and what is assurance. But it was for us who all the time are talking about assurance, solution design and troubles.

Another kind of fun was seeing a friend drunk the other day. He went drunk after a couple of glasses of wine and started shouting how much prestige Himesh has brought India with his latest flick (or should I say freak) “Aanpka Sunnroooooooooooor”!!

First few times I took the representativehood of all those blasphemous bastards and tried to point out how miserably we have failed to hide Himesh inside India and now he has reached Germany. And people all over the globe are laughing at our cinema. But he was not to be taken aback by all those bloody nonsense. And then my anger my nationalism and my rudeness gave way to humour. The next few hours were simply fabulous watching someone praise himesh as if he were his boyfriend. God save India.

There was a third funny incident which I didn’t find funny. Happened in transformer movie. Where an Indian call center guy with his funny accent tries to sell a package deal to a US Marine (those who do not know what a us marine is please read “Jarhead” by Anthony Swoff. Its basically a special species of animals who are terribly dangerous, expert in rape and murder and dreaded for their futileness all over the world.) and in that process gets the major almost killed. The public were roaring in laughter as if that is the funniest thing they have ever watched in their life.

So fun is of various types. You can have fun by pulling a girls skirt in the wide daylight and laugh your ass out all your life thinking about it and how you the goddamn lucky bastard didn’t get caught. But I would call you a rapist and demand for a prosecution. You can have fun at saying all bongs are horrendously meek and they don’t work they come to office late everyday without fail and all those normally people say about bongs, but I would call you a racist. You can say that all tamils are bloody idiots who do not know anything outside tamilnadu and my take on that would be such a poor take on joke.

Such was a funny movie which my room mate was watching today and laughing his ass out. “Partner” as the name says (could have been also named hitch-hindi). Well there is nothing funny in an over aged Govinda who it seems have left all the wonder with his dulheraja days and now have been left with a huge amount of buffoonery along with another muscular buffoon who calls himself Salman Khan (what a dhabba in the name of all Khans in Bollywood)!!

Fun my dear its all Fun.