Where it Started !!!!!!

Introducing myself in the training room, I realized the fact that I was the only non engineer, non graduate, selected for Dell technical support.Dell was supposedly tough, were people resign, kind of Guantanamo bay was drawn in the minds of everyone, before even we started. I had nothing to loose, cause getting kicked out from Dell would mean moving into a non tech, customer support job, even that's not a bad deal, all that mattered is 200 dollars a month.

Sitting next to me was Mr. Kiran, whose engineering degree came along with a Doctorate, cause the university thought Seven years, is a long time. I had a lot of women, around me, no one dare call them chicks. They always had this "why am I here" look on their face, a look which is a mixture of desperation, jealousy and disappointment. Most of them had long hair, wore spectacles, smelled of some oil and most importantly never looked as if they lived. I thought, that the only thing that would get them to an orgasm would be a block of code getting executed without errors. Most of them solved puzzles about trains running into each other, problems which always spoke about the age of Ramu and Shyamu (some stupid ids I thought), their relationship with each other etc. Infosys another giant hired people who could solve them, so they prayed at the Shakuntala Devi temple all day. TCS, Infosys and CTS seemed to be the only places they wanted to go to, they wouldn't even want to go back home.

Anyways, sitting there in a corner, I knew that headphones is the only way and I had to focus.Without a Graduation, without a family, 200 dollars a month seemed to be huge and I respected it by all means. Being an employee in Tidal park made you one among the elite(Tidal park was kind of Chennai's wall street ), but inside the Tidal park, I felt our employees were just above the Janitors. Yeah, we came when people left, we brushed our teeth and hit the toilet when everyone watched soaps on television and gulped down their dinner. Everything was upside down.

One good thing about India or the society here is the fact that anywhere you go there are classes. In IT we have the Brahman's ( The Priests, closest one to the gods), Kshatriya's ( The warlords), Vysya ( Businessmen, money lenders) and the Shudras ( Janitors, Scavengers etc.), I cracked it within a week. I knew that I would be a part of the lowest stack, cause BPO's figured out to be there. Because working in a call center is marginally above being an actual call girl or a Gigolo.(Apply for a Credit card, you would get where am coming from). The Vysyas were the IT support guys, yeah the ones who fixed desktop's, ran around with Lan cables and also don't forget the System/ Exchange admins. The warlords were Project Managers,Testers,Quality guys etc. The top brass obviously were the developers, R&D team, they would punch in their cards @ the smoking zone and pee @ the desk.

So the first workplace turned out to be an office were everything other than me and the furniture changed once in six weeks.Where everyone thought that they are made for salvation through writing codes or administering databases. I was the deaf frog, just had to go on, cause I liked the company, for them all that mattered was the guy, and the only question asked was, are you capable or not.Picking my first call, was an experience, I would compare to my first kiss, that feel is still there, fixing some ones desktop over the phone was the coolest thing I ever thought I would do. At least, I had a desk to sit, was in an air conditioned office, was picked up an dropped back, was respected for my contributions, looking at it from a retrospective stand point I was the happiest man on earth!!!!!

Am I adding Value !!!!

Hey, That's a question that must have haunted some of us, or at least a question we thought is worth asking at the initial phase of the career.A question which always hanged out from the beard of a yogi, a question always passed around as philosophical one. A question that pinched some of us while walking to the bus stop, with that I pod plugged in, deep into the ears, ear's that's stopped listening to our inner self. The question has a problem, quite a genuine one though, like all the questions we had, it loses it's value as we mature, mature in the sense when we get in sync with our colleagues, who have home loans and troublesome kids to take care, when we are in sync with the presentations that would depict everything on the earth in three colors, Green - Happiness, Orange -- I am Living it out and Red -- Death is coming :). Who has time to add value @ work when your wife is pregnant, petrol is touching sixty and Ohio is banning labor coming to India!!!!.

But I am sure the question rings up a lot of minds and that's why the world is moving on, being in a 1000 dollar a month support job, talking about value is as ironical as President Bush preaching peace, while Iraq was getting blown into smithereens.Adding value need not be inventing something new, it could be a simple change in the way we do the job, might be by making a field in a CRM tool mandatory, which never gets filled and thus delays the processing of customer orders. By removing a bit of waste on a daily basis, we could add value. Am I talking Lean, quality philosophy, no, no ways, Lean is after a certain level of understanding of our own job, after we know to do it right and then we search for smarter ways to do it. Not before that, cause before that Quality methodologies will be as cold as the conference rooms where we took a nap, while these were getting pushed on us.

Thinking about value, one question that would make the term "value" a much more lay man friendly term is when we think about the end customer, he could be internal, external, nocturnal or what not. If we could talk to him on what he think will make life better, that will add a lot of value, assumption is the mother of all "Ups ". In this short span, I would have seen projects worth hundreds of thousands of dollars going into the drains , cause they were built around an imaginary customer, wearing a Gucci, smoking Cuban cigars, with blonds around him, where in the actual customer was an accountant sitting on a pile of files covered with dust and dirt.

I am a mazdoor myself, I do not deny it by any chance, I am paid to dance and so will I, if it's salsa I need to learn it, might be Bharathanatyam is all I know. But then adding value is no choice, you can't compromise on that, cause We spend two hours traveling to work, an hour getting ready for it, half an hour to an hour undressing and getting out of it and those nine long hours that keeps the digestive and the economic system alive, we spend those @ work. In short close to 75% of the time we are awake, we are doing something related to work, could we let it go under the carpet, when we insist that life has to give you a sense of achievement, could we actually remove these long hours and then look at life, what do we have left in that case. Might be it's not the way everyone looks at it, but then it's a good way to look at it, cause out of 10 things we do at work today only two or three must be existing down the lane a year, otherwise you are not just screwing your life, you are adding a lot of crap for someone filling in your shoes !!!!!!