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Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Last week had been quite eventful for me. Considering that a 9-hour job in an IT MNC does not entitle one to have eventful weeks, I should say the last week was "one of the eventful" weeks in my life.

It all began on monday Feb 4 when my project manager came into my cabin and asked me if I was willing to go to Pune that very evening. He added that I had to go in place of a colleague who was down with chicken pox after eating what seemed like chicken 65 made out of a H5N1 affected chicken. I readily accepted the offer as there was not much I was doing in Bangalore. Train tickets were booked. I was to travel with three of my colleagues by the 9:50 pm Bangalore--Jodhpur express. The train reached Pune the next day at 7 pm after traversing through jungles in Karnataka and mountains in Maharashtra.

The four of us arrived at the company the next morning only to discover that the project-related programmes had begun on Monday itself. And we were expected to be present on Monday and our not doing so generated the first impressions on the client, who had come all the way from UK to facilitate a few presentations. People from the client's UK office made presentations none of which were worth understanding or listening to. The rest of the day passed off peacefully.

The next day, during a mock testing process, one of my teammates was asked to open a log file. The software which we used to do it was different from that used there and my teammate ended up saying he did not know how to open the file using the existing software but added that if Mr. Aattudhaadi (the design manager who had a goatee), who was administering the system, could open the file, he would be in a position to atleast explain the contents of the file. Mr. Aattu declined to do so and formed the impression that we did not know anything. After a couple more useless presentations, we called it a day.

Little did we know that Aattudhaadi would escalate the issue to the testing manager, the UK guy. That he had bothered to treat it as an "issue" surprised us. The actual testing was to begin on the following Monday and we tried telling Aattudhaadi and the UK guys that we would make ourselves aware of the technical aspects of the testing process. But communication was totally cut off. The UK bosses preferred not to speak to us directly. Instead, he communicated his views to a junior manager who in turn communicated it to us. The only direct thing he told us was "I don't want you guys in the testing team anymore". We came out of the building and spoke to our project manager who, after a 30-minute talk with his senior managers, concluded that the best possible option was to recall us and send four experienced people for a job that could be done by a kindergarten kid. We got tickets to Bangalore in the next available bus and returned on Sunday.

Clearly miscommunication was the problem. My project manager told us what was to be done there but not how it should be done. The testing manager expressed his disgust by not talking to us directly. The design manager did not give us a chance to speak, either, and formed a wrong impression about us. In addition, our senior project manager told us to refrain from sorting out issues ourselves and that any problems will be handled by him from Bangalore ! In that case, he should have come with us to Pune, we thought. But the damage was all done.

We returned to work on our projects which we had left midway before leaving to Pune wondering, at the same time, how the four highly experienced professionals, who were there in our place, leaving their tough and challenging work behind in Bangalore, were handling work meant for school kids.

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Property of Sheks @ 11:15 am   1 comments

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Name: Sheks
Home: Madras, TamilNadu, India
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