My ex-associates.....

A fortnight ago, a very eventful journey in my life came to an end. Though all good things are supposed to come to an end, this journey was particulary not very enjoyable one. The reason why I say this is coz, as in common with any phase,it was indeed a bumpy ride. Though I was pretty glad that it ended finally. Without further verbalizing it too much, let me tell what exactly happened that pleased me - I finally managed to take a release from the age-old project, I had been associated with it for the past 2.5 years. For all the time I had spent in the project, having faced the ire of some of the team members owing to the nature of my job profile,earned the abuses of some more members for the simple reason of being able to walk scot free inspite of damaging their reputation as a techy guys, sparringly pronounced by a few "incompetent managers" to be absolutely dispensible in the team et al. I had no reason to take any of these comments on my stride - as I had devil-I-care attitude within the team. Let me seggregate our team and let you know of the few of the popular characters and their category(albeit I would not name them,it would be very much implied for those who know my team).

The foremost group, in which I had little friends belongs to the,allow me to call them 'PIT's' - Pain in the Team fellows. This group had a remarkable ability to complain and crib about every damn happening in the team,project,account,company,industry,city,state,country,world and yes of course the galaxy!!! I have worked with such PITs for about an year. Their troop leader was God of cribbers,founder member and promoter of the perennially disgruntled...It seemed so hard to work with this person that I had this growing feeling that breathing in front of him too might be taken as a slight and he might come up with still a worse statement expressing displeasure on the organic activity. His levels of discontent were so high that I was sure that, had Lincon met him by chance during the course of his innumerable failures, he would have long long ago given up any hopes of rising in life. A small narration is in order for highlighting his "quality" behaviour!!! One fine morning, as usual in my carefree demeanour, I had approached him for a technical query resolution on one of our projects. Being in a cheerful mode, I picked up his pen and notebook to jot down a few points without requesting him. This cheeky act angered him boundless and he decided to "teach" me a lesson to not to be cheeky when it comes to project work. Though communicatively impoverished, he was no match for me, his constant references to dislike for the frivolous behaviour of certain team members towards the seniors in the team(yes FYI, he was called the daadu of our project, he has been in this project when Jesus was sermoning the jews!!!) was clearly making perfect sense for me indicating his direction towards me. After a few minutes of discussions on the project, he was back into his true colours - indefatigable pessimism!! He started lecturing about the absolute lack of morality in the managers,who instead of promoting him to onsite chose others;the lack of professionalism in his PeM(yes mine is a matrix organization with multiple managers to report to, i can not divulge further details) by awarding him meagre ratings YoY;the repulsive and obsolete technology which the project was working on;the ever-so-irritating-pain-in-the-Ahem Ahem testers, who had no better work than to challenge his authority over the project;the lacklustre performance bonuses;the chilling AC;the un-bendable chairs;the thankless account executive,who instead of heaping multiple Nobel prizes on him, for writing out the oh-so-novel 'System.out.println' statements, chose to give a simple smile everytime;the HR department who has failed to recognize the wonderful contribution he makes to the company by mere stepping inside the office regularly;the payroll department, who have been foolishly failing to add a few billions to his account;the floor boys who never care to recognize his 'sulken' face day-in-day-out,but manage to carry out their tasks in a purely mechanical fashion;the company tag which has to be 'latkaaoed' daily,wherein the biometric recognition system for employees could have been installed;the RKHS cafeteria team, who has nothing better to do than to server the mundane n repeated full thali to eat;the telephone;the dustbins;the mysteriously houseful meeting rooms;the lighting;the printer room;the pantry area.....the list went on and on and on and on....Amidst all these pestering troubles, I was sitting and wasting his precious 'cribbing time'. I being an extremely patient audience, kept listening to this saga-of-sobs(No pun intended here!!) for about an hour or so. My only rescuer was a smart lady from another team who too could not help overhear the interminably weeping story. She had quickly chipped in to purportedly clarify a doubt on one of the tools used in the project. Till this day, I keep thanking the lady for her much-needed intervention in saving me from the torture and bringing me back from the dead!!!

The second catergory of creatures in the team was "FIT's' - Foolishly Insane Team members. This was another lot of lost team members who had little to boast about. Their technical brilliance was restricted to changing the network ports - client port and company port. Though this act required us to stand out and pluck the cable from one port and insert it into the jack fitted on the desk and hit a few 'ipconfig /release/renew commands' , this too was a major achievment of these fellows. Though I should not be ridiculing any one so much,however, the fact remains that, the simplistic technical issues befuddled them and challenged their intellect to its limit. The 'media disconnected' message on the screen had to be mentioned in their native languages I guess to make them understand that the physical cable connecting to the ports was indeed visibly disconnected. The decision on printing of 'landscape'/'potrait' took just over a dozen print-outs to realize the differences. The torturous task of archiving mails on the local/server was so intriguing that a technichian had to drop by the desk to make them understand the concept of archiving. Remote Desktop connections was too much an ask. The last of these mentioned tasks was a personal experience of mine with a exceptionally fair faced lady in the team. It took me an hour to make her understand that the RDC required unique ID's of each person and of course the password protection policy mandated it to contain a combo of numeric,alphanumeric,special characters. The last thing I remember was creating her the password and writing it down on her notebook for her future reference. It was not for another 3 months before she had remembered her password,when at each instance I had to strain my brain!!!

LOT's was the third category. Lost Out of the world Team members. We had such a group of individuals in our very own team that had this meticulous attention to detail each time a task was performed,however a week later, it turned out that not even the overview of the task could be recollected on time.Yet another subset of this group comprised those members, who had continued to live in the utopian islands forever dreaming about fairy tales and exotic waterfalls. These people had the amazing capacity to have thoughtfully escaped the real-time current state of affairs and continued to live in those figments of foolish imaginative landscapes. One of the members of this group was a fellow with whom I had worked closely till the very last day of my tenure in the team. He used to speak so little,so slow and so surreally imaginative that I had to request him to wake me up once he was done talking. A few of the times, I had indeed asked him to call me on my desk phone,though he sat in the same cubicle very much adjacent to me for quite sometime to just to be able to hear what he was trying to blurt out of his mouth. The superset members of this category were so encapsulated ,enamoured and engrossed with their own thoughts way way above this materialistic world that neither work,managers taunts,onsite lead comments nothing,absolutely nothing in this world could bring them back to the planet earth and its realities. I chanced upon an einstein from this group, to ask about her career ambitions -and what a reply I got. Seems she had developed this fascination for supernatural and occult sciences through one of her ex-classmate that she had decided to give those freaky ideas of 'call-the-ghosts-for-a-round-table-discussion' a sincere trial. I wished her luck and never returned to her for discussing anything out of the project.

We now come to the SIT's - Seriously Insane Team members. I could have never learnt that the level of insanity in this world is Infinite++. Insanity was born after these guys. Music,fags,sex,booze interest us all. But the level of addiction to any of these reaches zeniths - i was made aware by this group. One fellow had this incessant and almost maniacal attachement to music n fags that, had it been allowed, there would have been a DISCO and a chimney beside his seat. I was, and still remain in shock of this guy, about the level of madness he had. The other point on which I used to wonder was, with the peanuts as salary in the company how could he manage to smoke so many cigarettes a day!!! Well then, may be,his grandpa must have left a fortune to his name.

RAT's was yet another group. Regionally Attached Team members. This was a sad lot of overlapping sets which had people grouping and owing their allegiance to that particular group. The characteristic of this was, team members,each being from a different region within the state and country, had formed groups based upon their belonging regions and mysteriously remain attached to that group. I was, and am still proud of myself for never having got attached to any one region,neither in college nor currenly. Hence, I was definetly not one of these!!! Andhra fellows had personal discussions and get togethers,Bongs had a seperate table,in-state people were indeed a majority they too had a chunk of their own. I did not like such groupism so I would rather skip any further description lest I come out with some despicable content.

The most interesting lot was the FATs. This has no acronyms or anything of that sort,but simply meant the word. We were a happy lot with a lot of 'weight' in the team - NOT to mean that we were obese or anything,its just that we were from a 'khaate-peete ghar ke'. Our baggages would lead or trail our presence in any gathering. A lot many times, we had to cover our bulging assets by putting an additional overcoat!! We were the talk of the team, at team lunches. Our share of cake and samosas and pizaas was always kept aside. We had a reserved chair in most parties to be in the middle of all actions and discussions! Occasionally, we were greeted by quite a few pretty ladies in the other teams on account of our extremely contagious smiles and laughs.

The last and the least interesting group is called the M-TPITA's - Managers-The Pain In The ...

They had nothing cheerful about them. Never liked by any majority or far that fact minority too. They acted as high priests of professionalism,paragons of perfection et al,however in reality nothing was further. They always had the killer instinct to hunt down and shoot a few jokes about them in the team. The eternal grin and subsuming sarcasm seemed to have got hardwired in their body. The scheming against certain members of the team, the threats issued, the intonation implied and the below the belt references would have put to shame the most powerful man on earth currently - The US president!!!

With all such characters - PIT's,FIT's,LOT's, SIT's RAT's , FATs and M-TPITA's, I would like to submit myself that, of all these shades I often used to find myself as a part of each group for sometime. So in no bad taste. I have summarized a few of our team characters,whereas a few of them have been left out for the obvious reason being, either they were dear to me or I did not care to write about them. Dear to me ones are pretty few, the latter point holds right for most time.

This was my team for you....I have moved into another assignment though I wanted to caricature a few highlights of the members for a small fee - please put in your comments on the post!!!