Being a high-flying international businessman is all about taking risks, like eating strawberry jam on your toast while wearing a cream shirt, 10 minutes before you have to leave for work (sidebar: strawberry jam at the hotel, and therefore across all of India (extrapolating) = literally the gelatin topping from Sara Lee strawberry cheesecakes. I swear it had biscuit crumb residue in it). It’s also, apparently, about being really bored and frustrated, which I guess I should have known (I’ve read American Psycho twice). It’s almost offensive that I’m expected to be locked inside an office, doing essentially exactly the same thing as I did in Auckland, when just outside the window is INDIA, with all it’s mayhem and culture and street urination, taunting me through the glass.
I was told to expect that the office here would be “very different”, and I guess it is. I’ve never been to prison in America (it feels necessary to state this), but I have a reasonable picture of what it might look like in my mind (I’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption twice). There’s probably a locked iron gate to the exercise area, which gets opened for “rec” time:
Sweet freedom
The food probably comes from giant vats, and is served on metal trays:
“Tray food”
And the general vibe is probably a bit grimy and concrete-y:
A meeting room
Now, a revelation: those are not screencaps from The Shawshank Redemption. They are photos I took at work. But no, I kid, it’s not that bad. Yes, the “rubbish corner” does exist. And the modern, glass-intense exterior of the building is just a facade, tacked onto the outside of the concrete main structure to make it look like there’s heaps of windows. You can tell this by observing the part where they ran out of glass/couldn’t be bothered finishing:
Didn’t buy enough glass
But the “tray food”, despite the unappetising appearance and possible (probable?) link to someone’s recent bout of illness, was actually really nice (and only 30 rupees – 60 cents NZ). The people, similarly, are all really nice, though maybe a bit chewy (#dadjoke). They work haaaard, like 10-hour days as a matter of course hard, but apparently some of them really enjoy what they do which is kind of bizarre but nice. Maybe they have just said that because they are under the mistaken impression that I’m in some sort of position of power and they don’t want me to get them fired. But realistically, any ill feelings towards work can be instantly eradicated just by looking at the packaging for these pens:
Amazingly, not a shampoo ad
There are also occasional fun adventures, like being driven to a Vodafone shop to get a sim card, which I obtained by standing around while the guy from work who had driven me and the Vodafone shop guy talked furiously back and forth in Hindi, and pointing to how much data I wanted on a piece of paper. Even the forms were snatched out of my hands and filled out on my behalf, which means I didn’t get the opportunity to jokingly fill out the “husband’s/father’s name” line. Small talk during the drive included “what is your philosophy on life?” and “our offices would be very nice target for terrorists, with the big towers. They check under bonnet and in the boot but this means nothing, I could have a bomb under your seat.”
Then there are the “trainer meetings” which have already, in my short time working here, become a comedic high point. On my first day we were told that one of the “servers” had “crashed” over the weekend (quotation marks used to disguise a critical lack of understanding on my part), and that the past two weeks of data on one of the shared drives had been lost. This was also considered a convenient time to inform everyone that there are no backups of any of the data on the shared drives. Friday’s meeting contained an exchange along the lines of:
Pénélope: “I have some concerns about François [fake names used to protect anonymity when this blog becomes a global phenomenon] and how his training is going.”
Clara: “Yes, I think we really need to work with him a lot over the next few weeks, give him a lot of attention, really make sure that we can bring him up to standard and get him doing live work within a couple of weeks.”
P: “Ok. I think it will take a lot of work.”
C: “Mmm. And the other thing I need to tell you is that he has resigned.”
Never change, India!
Pune Tang 