Life from the other side...

In our software services industry be it whatever company we are working in, we are so busy with our day-to-day activities and engrossed with our work, I wondered if we ever bothered to think about life from the point of view of the people whom we encounter daily – the bus drivers, the pantry operators, the house-keeping staff, the security folks, the dhaba servers and even our own co-employees! The following post is an attempt (in jest) to highlight some of the grievances that these people may have (more often than not against us!). In the process, there would be a tendency to obviously go over-board! So bear with that please!!

First let us talk about life from our side…

A Leaf out of a typical S/W professional’s diary…
Yo Man! What a hectic day it has been! I almost missed the damn bus – the driver was as usual early by a couple of minutes! He was as slow as a tortoise to the office – thanks to him I reached office just in time for a detailed meeting with my grumpy boss and my team. Oh God - what all the man wants in a single day. Impossible to deliver! After the meeting, I went to my seat and found that there were tons of extremely critical mails to look at. By the time I had responded to those and started working on the day’s tasks, it was around 11:00 am. Then it was lunch time and treat time too since it was my boss’ birthday. Stingy guy – he only took us to the nearly dhaba but food was anyways good! They had everything that crawls, flies, swims or walks on this earth! That was the best part of the day. I then came back and had a strong coffee to stimulate the creative elements in myself! I worked again till around 5:00 pm when we had an important conference call with onsite. Long call it was with lots of discussions. Finally the call ended and we had to finish off the pending work. I was just in time for the 7:30 bus. I am now back home and writing this diary…

Now let us look at life from the other side…

Snapshots from diaries of the other people*
*1 – If they had maintained diaries at all
*2 – In many cases may be translated to English for the sake of the reader

Bus Driver: What a painful day! To add to my traffic woes, the company security has put some new rule that all buses should reach office by 8:30 am. And people take their own sweet team in each stop - “Wait for 2 more mins please”- Oh my God, how many people give me this dialogue everyday. And today to top it all - one idiot who can’t ever get into bus on time, stopped the bus right at the signal. If I had not stopped, this guy will create a big ruckus with the transport department. Painful…

Housekeeping Staff: What gluttons we have in this company! In the morning, this team in my wing met up for a long time. Everyone had a coffee in one hand and a packet of Lays or something in the other. And they act like kids with their food and drink. Chips were strewn all around on the table and coffee cups were lying all around the trash can. Conference rooms have become munching havens nowadays! Next day they do this in a team meeting, I am going to kick them all.

Trainee sitting next seat: Man, I thought only I keep getting forwards from my batch-mates but these experienced guys also get so much forwards. This guy sitting next to my seat spent probably one hour in the morning just going through all his forwards. The fool even takes time out to forward those chain mails asking you to forward the mail to 50 people so that they can see God that night!

Server at the nearby dhaba: It’s a big enough pain to manage the shouting lady and her loud son. On top of that, we have extremely loud customers whose decibel levels keep increasing for every 1 second the poor chicken waits before it gets into their mouth! Since they come as groups, they all want to take a crack at the chicken and start pouncing on the plate even before I keep it on the table. Hungry (real) pigs would behave better!

Pantry Guy: How much thought these people put into one small cup of coffee! Like the guy today afternoon who asked for a super-strong coffee with less sugar. Even after two or three attempts, the coffee didn’t seem strong enough for him. Why can’t he have black coffee directly instead of paining me?

Employees from surrounding seats: What all these people discuss in conference calls – that too putting the loud-speaker at full volume. 90% of the time goes in talking about the weather in Pittsburgh, the cricket match in Malaysia, the waistline increase of the person who just returned from onsite, the latest Rajinikanth movie etc. Oh I wish I could be part of these productive calls!

Security at the gate: They have the time to see so many cricket and bollywood sites, don’t they have the time to see our own intranet to look at the buses that go near their house? Asking me which bus out of 100 buses goes to Abithakuchalambal Nagar. As if I am some manual Google for them…

Any more leaflets from diaries you can think of, please do post them as comments!!!