@ Work

Two weeks back a new Marketing Manager joined us. She is an IIMite. That makes it two girls in our department including me. However her opening sentence to me after introductions caught me off guard. She asked me rather severely if I was in charge of the rather ‘badly’ done collaterals in the company. Luckily my Boss had gone back to his cabin or Madam would have got a mild reprimand right in front of me. I looked at her squarely in the eye and told her that I was indeed incharge of the ‘tastefully’ done collaterals. That was it; she declared a sort of unofficial war from that day. Over the next week she went out of her way to harass my team mates prompting me to send her a mail that all work sheets has to routed through me and she cannot approach my team on her own. So she would wait for me to leave my cabin and then go and disturb them at work. Boss was traveling and I really didn’t want to call him over such a petty issue. Finally the proverbial straw broke my patience when she went and loaded the graphic designers with some work disrupting a long queue of work from other departments. I put a halt to all her work and called my Boss. He chuckled and sent her a mail telling her to read the departmental procedures before she formally took over the reins of her marketing zone. The mail did the trick, she came and apologized and guess what??? Beneath all that haughtiness and arrogance she is actually a nice person!!!! This incident taught me a valuable lesson and that was not to lose to my cool and stick to my guns. I have to give credit for this to my team lead from whom I took over. Wherever you are, Madhusudan I owe you a lot.

On a lighter note, we are trying for a Solutions Architecture Award that has been implemented using XYZ. I filled up the necessary details in the form from the marketing and sales side and sent it to the technical head for his input on the solutions architecture. He sent me a written document with lots of apologies for his poor language skills etc. I told him not to worry and that I would polish the language before submitting the Project Report. I opened the document to see that he had written about the architecture in six sentences and there was not a single English word that I could understand. The only readable English words were the ‘articles’ that held the sentences together. I looked at it for some time and then started giggling and finally collapsed with laughter. Our Chief Sysadmin who was uncharacteristically wandering on the ‘dreaded’ marketing floor came to enquire what the joke was all about. All I could do was point to the document while I clutched my aching tummy. He read the document with a growing smile and then called the technical team who came rushing laptop and all. Soon my cabin was looking like a battle station with five laptops and five techies gravely explaining the whole architecture in ‘simple’ language that would fox even Bill Gates !!! I kept on laughing and the techies grew more worried. Finally my Chief Sysadmin took a spiral pad and drew the whole thing and explained it to me in ‘actual’ simple terms. I was finally able to edit the Project Report but refrained from whetting it with the technical head because I knew he would never understand the ‘englisized’ document. After submission, the coordinator of the award committee from US called and told me a couple of hilarious jokes from the Project Reports submitted by various companies. The poor girl was as foxed as me with the Technical people. All in all it was a laugh riot :))

I missed the car pool and called home to send the car to pick me up. While waiting to cross the road a transformer burst sending sparks all over me and a huge power cable came crashing down and fell within inches of where I was standing. What a day !!!!