Nov 1 - First Salary

D-Day had finally arrived … First Stop – The TBI ATM at the corner of the street (I hope you still remember that we “had-no-other-choice-but-to-choose-TBI” for our salary account). I had already begun to build castles in the air. I was already thinking – “what will I do with that “extra” lump of cash? Maybe I should buy that Nike shoe I always wanted. Or maybe I should get mom a Saree and dad a Shirt. Naaa … Mom already has more than enough saree’s and dad has way too many shirts! Maybe I should just get myself those shoes. After all – I deserved a little pampering!”

(Selfish me eh!!!)

Still … Deeply immersed in thought, I arrive at the TBI ATM box only to find another 5 people standing in front of me. Basically, I am a very impatient person. And the sight of such a huvge queue would’ve ordinarily made me come back later. But today was different wasn’t it. It was salary day. The most anticipated day of the week. And there was no chance in hell I was too about to let a 5 person queue make me head back. So, still dreaming, I wait patiently in queue. A grueling 5 mins later, I get my turn. Yahoooooo … Finally, I get to lay hands on my first salary.

I punch in the pin code (I ain’t telling you what that is), and hit the button that says retrieve balance. I am eagerly hoping to see the message “Your Balance is – Rs. 14,500/-“, but the stupid machine displays the message – “Your Balance is – Rs. 8,841/-.

What was the old saying??? Ah … yes … “Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched!” Well, I got a taste of that right there!

All upset, thinking there must’ve been some sort of mistake, I punched the buttons that would give me the details of the last 5 transactions, and there it was, right in front of me

Last 5 transactions:

31/10/05 – Salary – Rs. 8858/-

My dream world had come down in a jiffy. It felt like someone had hit me on the head with a sledgehammer. Obviously, I was in a mixed state of emotions – Confused, anger, despair, upset. You name it – and I was probably experiencing that!

Anyways … I realized that standing there in the ATM cube and cursing the machine was not going to help me in the least. Maybe, my pay-slip would give me the details of where the remaining 5600 odd rupees had disappeared. (And besides that – the other people outside the ATM had begun to bang on the doors by now!)

The dream Nike shoes I wanted to buy remained what it was – A dream! With a heavy heart and a completely let down feeling, I started my bike and headed over to work.

Stipend Period Ends – Salary Period Starts

I had been with the account for close to a month now. And still, there were no signs of any good work (except these assignments that we were given) coming my way.

By now, I had bought a bike. A brand new Hero Honda Glamour. It’s a nice bike – for city driving. But, for all those bike enthusiasts out there who are looking for a bike that you can use for long distance commute – stay away from this one. You’ll scorch a hole in ur pocket (on petrol and maintenance) and if you’re lucky – you might also get a Slip Disk complaint in the process.

Well, more on that later. Talking about the bike, just so that you know - I had taken a Rs. 20,000/- soft loan from Diapro (on of the perks that we got) for the same. Where else was a person like me, who had just started off his career, go for the huge down payment required for a bike. But, the bike bought me a lot of joy, and I had started roaming around the city a lot – thanks to my bike. And I never regretted the decision to take the soft loan. Atleast not until the 1^st of Nov (that’s when I saw my first Salary Slip).

:)

It had been four months since I joined Diapro, and my stipend period – of 3 months – had ended. This month (October 05) onwards, I was supposed to get salary. Yahooooooooooo … No more 9,500 bucks per month (stipend). From this month onwards, I would be getting 14,800 bucks per month (Oh … That was what my offer letter mentioned. But boy – was I in for a rude shock or what!!!)

Meeting with the Delivery Manager – Samesh Balluri

It was about 10 days since we had entered the account. We had been assigned mentors, and guess what – My mentor was SUJATHA (A few months down the road, when me and Suj were best of pals, she told me that Srikanth had assigned me to Suj on purpose. Just so that we could iron out our difference. The moment I heard that revelation, my respect for Srikanth went up a notch!) …

It reminded me of “Murphy’s Law” – ‘’If something can go wrong – It WILL!!!’’ I mean, I couldn’t find any other logical explanation for that, besides being an exercise to validate Murphy’s Law i.e.

So … There I was – Stuck, I believe is the term! And that too at the hands of a lunatic bungling baboon, who had a special liking for making a fool out of me.

But heck, I was not the sort of person who was going to be intimated by some women who was out of her mind. Another week passed, and still no solid “work” had come our way. We were asked to learn some stuff like EJB’s, JDBC, Weblogic Tuning, etc and complete some menial “understanding based” assignments on these areas. But, they were not the sort of “work” I was looking forward too.

Being a master as plagiarism (thank my 4 years at NITC for that), I’d wait till Ram or Meen completed the assignments and then ask em to share it. Once I had the code on my machine, it was just a matter of mins before I changed the variable names, tweaked the code to be more efficient, add a System.out.println once in between every 15 lines of code (in the name of “aiding debugging”, and ‘Hey Presto’ you had a completely original bit of code ready for submission.

No idea why – but the folks never caught my little trick. Maybe, they didn’t give a damn. But, I prefer to think that - I was successful in “pulling a fast one” on the unsuspecting souls. Either ways, bottom line – It was close to 2 weeks now, and I for one was getting bored at not getting a taste of the action.

During one of those days, the entire team got together for a meeting. It was in this meeting, that I came face to face with Samesh Balluri, the Account Manager for Pespi ODC. Every single person in the account was full of praise for him. He welcomed us freshers on board (obviously – it was about 2 weeks overdue, but heck – I’m just being over critical here).

Maybe its just me, but in life, you come across some people, who for no reason scare or intimidate you. Take the policeman for instance. You know you haven’t stolen anything. But, for some reason you see him and you start panicking. Similar was the case with Samesh Balluri – atleast to me. I still have no clue why I was scared of him. But, every time I see him or run into him, nervousness hits me and I end up all tensed and worried. Maybe it’s the perfume he uses. Or maybe it’s his aura. Or maybe his Yin v/s mine. What the hell – bottom line – I was and still am a little intimidated by him!

Pespi Account – Day 3

Somewhere around 11.00 am we – the “freshers” – were pulled into a conference room. We were supposed to meet a new manager called Suresh. He was supposed to try and allocate us to projects. (Atleast that’s what we all thought as we went for our first “meeting”). It turned out that Suresh wanted to assess our comfort levels in different areas of Java Technology, and thereby wanted to plan our trainings and self learning modules.

He decides to start off with Ram. Now, let me talk about Ram a little bit before I go back to the meeting. Ram, is a wonderful, albeit reserved, person. He makes an excellent techie, a wonderful communicator, and above all – he helps people with their work. The only thing is – he’s a little proud of his knowledge in Java/J2EE (we can attribute it to the fact that he had been working on it for a longer while than any of us in the training batch). But who isn’t proud of his/her knowledge – eh?

Well … Now back to the conference room.

Suresh: “Ram … Tell me something about yourself and also, how comfortable are you with Java?”

Ram: “Well … I am Ram … I did my BTech from MIT (Madras Institute of Technology) … I’ve done GNIIT program and hence, I am very comfortable with Java/J2EE”

Suresh: (jotting these things down) “Oh … Good … Will you need training in any particular areas?”

Ram: (confidently) “No … I don’t think so!”

Suresh: “Good … Now … What about you Sharath … tell us about yourself, and your comfort level in Java.”

Well… Obviously, I had my ego to protect, and I was not about to let Ram steal the show:

Me: “Well … I’m Sharath … And I did my BTech in Mech Engg from NITC … I’ve got an IBM certification in C++ and my comfort factor in Java is reasonably good.”

Suresh: “Any training/improvement areas?”

Unlike Ram, I didn’t have the luxury of saying – “No … I don’t”, because frankly, I needed some help in certain areas. And I definitely was not going to let my ego come in the way.

Me: “Yes … I’d like some help in learning Threads and Swings. Never understood them properly!”

Suresh: (continuing to make notes of all these) “Good … Lets see what we can do about that”

The baton eventually passes on to Meen and then Prema. And in another 10 mins Suresh wrapped up the meeting and we guys – prema included – headed over to the garden for a coffee, and a gossip session on the events of the day.

Pespi Account – Day 2

When I reached the ODC in the morning, my desktop had already arrived. My pride and happiness knew no bounds. Finally, I had my own work PC. Yahooooooooo !!!

I settled down to tweak my system, configuring the mail server, etc etc … A couple of mins later, I hear a lady shout out, “who the hell was using my PC?” I look around and see that the source of this entire ruckus is a short, kindda plump lady standing in front of the machine I was using yesterday.

“Maybe this was Sujatha… The owner of that PC. But from the looks of it, she seems very upset. Maybe I should let her settle down before walking over to say hi … But – hey – she seemed upset about someone using her system … What did I do wrong? I didn’t surf any porno site did I .. Hmmmmmm … No … I am sure about that … Then what could it be???”

While I was sitting at my desk thinking about all these things, oblivious to my surroundings, Sumija had informed Sujatha that there was this fresher called Sharath who was using her system and maybe she should talk to me directly about screwing up her PC.

(Somehow – Sumija didn’t look all that cute to me now!!!)

:P

A couple of seconds later – I’m still immersed in thought – Sujatha walks up and raps me on my shoulder. I am jolted back into reality, and I must say I was shocked to see Sujatha standing in front of me all perplexed and flustered.

I wanted to say – “Hi … You must be Sujatha … I am Sharath and I am new here …” But try all I could, all I did was stare at her like a moron. In my defense - I had a good reason for that.

Sujatha was giving me this murderous look of rage!!! It was as if I had killed her husband and then slept with her sis – back to back!!!

Sujatha: (In a very angry tone) “Are you the fresher who was using my machine yesterday?”

Me: (Trying to sound pleasant) “Ummm … Yes”

Sujatha: “What were you directed to do?”

Me: “Complete a couple of courses on VelociQ”

Sujatha: “And … Did you do anything more than that”

Me: (My mind still racing … Did I by any chance watch porno on that godforsaken machine???) “Well … I don’t think so … Why do u ask?”

Sujatha: “Did you use yahoo messenger?”

Me: “Oh yes … I did … Actually …”

(But before I could complete my sentence)

Sujatha: (shouting) “Who the HELL asked you to use that …”

Me: (It was as if she had slapped me in the face … Esp with the usage of such aggressive language! And by now the entire ODC was looking at us) “I … Me …. Ummmmm … Ohhhhhhhh …”

Sujatha: “You were asked to do a particular task … And you should’ve just done that … Not tinker around with other things on other peoples desktops!”

Me: (By now I had begun to look like roadkill) “I’m sorry … I … I’m really very sorry … I didn’t mean to intrude into your privacy or anything like that!!!” (But what was actually going on in my head was, you stupid bitch … why don’t you just log back into the application. It doesn’t take 2 mins to do that does it!!!)

Sujatha: “Who the hell do you think you are??? You’re just a fresher … Remember that!!!”

I guess it had to do with her talking about me as if I were some sort of scum (referring to me as “just a fresher” – I mean how dare she!!!), but in a jiffy, all the remorse I felt for jacking her system just evaporated. And the next second, I was giving her an “I don’t give a shit” look. I think she must’ve got the hint. Or for all you know – she must’ve thought she had conquered me. I didn’t give a damn!!!

But, I saw her storm towards Srikanth, and because he was a manager, her demeanor towards him was in stark difference to the treatment that was handed out to me. Obviously, she was not stupid to shout at a PM the way she had shouted at me. But, then she had sent the message across to Srikanth – That I was a trouble maker.

But, Srikanth being the gentleman he is, calmed her down, and didn’t even question me about what I had done or why I had done it. I mean – he had understood and accepted the whole incident as a honest mistake, and not as a malignant intention to mess up a computer, then why didn’t that idiot Sujatha?

What the hell, you can’t be friends with everyone can you. And I’m sure I am not going to be friends with this bitch!!! (Boy … Was I mistaken … Because a couple of months down the road – Suj and me turned out to be the closest of friends … But, I’ll get to that in due course)

My friends – Meen and Ram – had also witnessed the commotion (thanks to Sujatha being so loud, I think even the guys in the next building would have heard the ruckus), and obviously they wanted to hear my end of the story. I decided to break the event over a coffee. The three of us grab a cup of coffee, and take a “seat” in the garden to discuss. Obviously, I was pissed. For one, I had been insulted in front of the entire ODC … And that too on my second day at work. And more importantly, a freaking lady had made me look like pink arsed baboo!!! What could be more insulting that that???

Hence, I started bitching away to glory. (I don’t want to get into the details, but I am sure the guys who’re reading this will know what sort of shit men say when they’re upset and more importantly – Insulted!!!) Maybe to boost my morale – but the guys also chipped in their 20 cents. Aaaaaaahhhhhh … One coffee and 30 mins of bitching, and I was back in business!!!

:)

I announce - “Back to work … “ and we three head back to our cubes.

Ofcourse, Sujatha was there at hers – giving me wicked sneers and stares of contempt. But, I couldn’t care less, and now that I think of it, I remember having returned her stares.

Well … Thankfully, I wasn’t reporting to her!!!

Pespi Account – Day 1

All eager and raring to start “working” I head over to the location specified by Karthik during our meeting. I recalled Karthik telling me that the Pespi ODC was located at 1^st Floor, Block I, Right Wing. On entering the aforesaid location, I notice the Words NIKE ODC written in big letters. “Maybe I got the directions wrong!!!” I asked a lady sitting there busy typing code (FYI – She was unattractive) – “Excuse me… Could you please direct me to the Pespi ODC!”

Without even looking up – She said, “Go down the aisle and then take a right!”. Muttering a thanks, me, Prema, Meenraj and Ram headed over to the Pespi ODC.

We were supposed to meet a project manager called Srikanth. A little apprehensive as to what sort of person this Srikanth was going to be, I braced myself for the worst. I stopped to ask another person – who was busy checking his mail - for the location of Srikanth’s cubical, and then 4 of us headed over to meet the great Srikanth.

I had heard a lot of stories of these so called “Project Managers”, and I must add that none of my seniors and colleagues had portrayed this genesis of people (i.e. PM’s) as particularly friendly. Given that I had received this sort of a brainwashing before coming over to work, I was – in the least - expecting Srikanth to be a big burly figure that constantly issued orders to his subordinates and went around sucking the happiness out of every developer that reported to him.

My first meeting with Srikanth is something I will never forget. I went up to his cube. He looks up at me (us actually), and this is pretty much what happened

Me: “Srikanth?”

Srikanth: “Yes”

Me: “Oh … Hi Sir … My name is Sharath. And these are my friends here (pointing to the rest of the crew) … And we were asked to report to you today!”

Srikanth: “Ok (with a completely stoic expression) … And please call me Srikanth”

Me: “Ok … Sir …”

Srikanth: “I said – Call me Srikanth! (Raising his voice a bit this time around!)”

Me: “Yes Sir … Sorry … Srikanth!”

Srikanth: (Smiling).

The rest of the group introduces themselves, and he shakes hands with each one of us.

(Wow … Maybe my seniors just wanted me to be paranoid. If Srikanth was as friendly as he seemed to be, I think I’m going to have fun working under him!)

Srikanth asked us to wait for few mins so that he can check what are the activities planned for us for the day, and we willingly obliged.

A couple of mins later, Srikanth approaches us and tells us – “We need you to complete a few online sessions which are mandatory before you start working. The machines that we have requested for the new recruits (us) have not yet come in. But, the good news is that 3 guys are on leave today, and you can use their machines for the day!”

Wow … He had just said the magic word – “Work ….” Till date it had just been assignments, and tests. Now, I was getting to do work (or atleast I would get to do it shortly).

“ Yahoooooooooo … I had arrived !!! “

Srikanth calls a guy called Ramesh Rajalingam and delegates the task he had just briefed us on to Ramesh. A smiling Ramesh tells us the locations of the machines that are “free” for the day. I decided to pick the machine in one corner of the ODC (because – it was farthest from Srikanth’s desk, and also there was a cute chick – who I came to find out in the next couple of hours was Sumija - sitting there … Maybe I could hit on her!)

One thing I noticed was that people in this ODC were very friendly and all the more eager to help. Everybody was all the more happy to take a couple of mins of their busy schedules and come over to us, introduce themselves and make chit-chat. Ice Breaker – I believe – is the term, and these guys knew to do it in style.

Once we had settled down, I set out to complete the task that we were assigned to do (complete those darned online sessions). It was a piece of cake, and in 3 hours time, I had aced the tests that followed the sessions. No biggie … Pretty straight forward stuff …

“Another 4 hours to go before I can head home. Kya karrae … How do I kill time…” As they say, “An Idle mind is a devils workshop”. It was so true in my case. I decided to browse the internet. (You know the regular stuff. Search for some godforsaken thing using google and then sit and read about it.)

As a bonus, I saw that the machine had yahoo messenger installed. Awesome …… Now, I could tell my friends about how much fun I was having. I could see that some person called sujatha raj was logged in. Hmmmmmm … Must be the owner of this PC. I looked up at the name plate adjacent to the machine and it read “Sujatha Rajagopal”. Well … what the heck – she can log back in tomorrow. And I logged in.

Today, when I think back, I think of it as the first himalayan blunder I did whilst I was in the Pespi account (I’ll get to the “why is such a simple thing a blunder” in a bit).

6.00 pm approaches, and I lock my machine, inform Srikanth that all the courses that he had asked us to uptake were completed successfully. My colleagues also gave similar reports to him and we all headed home.

My verdict – First day at “work” …. Not so bad after all …