On Bench at work

Thanks to all the local Malayalam news papers “being on a bench” in an IT company has become a common term even to small town flocks. Although I suspect how well they understand the concept.

At home in Kerala for a vacation I got trapped in a local road side meeting of who’s-who of our town. An elderly gentleman who’s kid happened to be working for a reputed IT company in Bangalore, commenting on why his kid did not want to relocate to a branch of his company nearer to home town said “Avanu bench-il irikan vaiyya atha natileku sthalam maatam medikathathu (he does not want to sit on the bench, so he does not want to get transferred to home town”. Following this comment was a discussion on how miserable the working conditions of workers in IT field was and how important it was to have a CPI-CPIM lead workers union for the IT field.
Another gentleman who had the information that I was one among the exploited IT engineers and also an NRK (Non Resident Keralite, courtesy my dad’s central government job that kept me traveling around India) with limited proficiency in writing Malayalam had worse opinion about my state of affairs. According to him unfortunate souls like me had life worst. We could not even write a PSC (Public Service Commission) test and get a clerical job as Malayalam was mandatory for that. Of-course the status of a man who does an honest days job to live is much below anyone who has a job that can get him bribe.
And now we at IT companies had to sit on benches. My parents were visibly worried by this information. Back home my parents were of the opinion that I should buy my own chair with good backrest and not sit on bench as that was bad for my back. Grandmother was overheard giving free career advice for her friends grandchildren “Engineers are not like they used to be in our days. It is no more a respectable job. They sit on benches and are worked like slaves”. Her friend too seemed to agree. She knew a boy who learned electronics in far away places for long years and now makes chips for a living. Her son-in-law had never gone to college and could still make the best banana chips in town. They concluded the discussion with a pinch of sympathy for the young “Pillerude kariyam kashtam thanne”.

Also read this from yahoo.news. A very popular forward now-a-days about marriage prospects of IT engineers.

pic: From some forwarded mail

Mails, Friends and Friend's Mails

For a long time now personal mails in my inbox are alarmingly low. Even the forwarded nonsense mails are hard to come by. The enthusiasm that friends had to forward mails as fresher in the IT industry (mostly 100% entertainment 0% brain) has dropped significantly. Numerous funny and trying to be funny forwards, the Good Morning mails, and in some extreme cases even good afternoon and good night mails were an after effect of sudden uninterrupted access to mail and mail clients like Outlook.

Now these forwards are a trickle, to make things worse the amount of official mails received and even worse official mails needing replies has gone higher. Probably this increase in official mails has lead to the decline in forwards.

The set of mails that I get now-a-days can be easily classified

Span: We really don’t know why we are getting this.

Official Junk: We know why we are getting this, but have no use of it. But cannot stop it because we fear some day it might bring us some news.

Sleeping pills: These boring mails come regularly. And we are paid to read this. These are mails we know are on their way to us. They mostly say what we already know, but still we read it carefully and try to find some news. All status updates/reports/etc are a part of this.

PIMA: Pain in my A**. These include all escalations, customer queries, bugs reported, explanations requested etc. These generally come from managers or are copied to managers. These require instant replies.

CC’ed mails: These are important mails we can ignore after a quick drill. Drill involves browsing for any remote mention of our name. If these mails have greater than 5 lines, we use the search option to look for any mention. Safely ignore the mail if our name is absent.

Tsunami: Now these are mails that we pray to god every night that we should not get. In fact there is a group of people in our life who are unpopular for sending these. You see a mail from this group and you know it can’t be good news. These are also examples of “Murphy’s Law”. “You are fired” mail in un-challenged entry to this list.

Payroll: Well this is a different category altogether (I wait 30 days for it. But not read it when I get it. Unless some unexpected number shows up in my bank statement) and yes we get understandably worried if this fails to come.

Marriage invitations: No comments!!!!!

But the ones that I would like to get more often are

Breezers: These give essential breaks from hectic work. These are extremely funny, entertaining, and informative but also brief. They come mostly from friends and occasionally from the HR or Admin department.

Time-Pass: Entertaining but long and tiring. But can be of great help when we have no work.

SuryaTV Hollywood special: These are like Hollywood movies shown in SuryaTV (English movie dubbed in Malayalam). The contents are interesting often. But reading Malayalam written in English can be pain (but at times funny too).

It was among all this “personal mail recession” that a gang of my college friends started planning a weekend tour. With this I thankfully noticed that there is an increased personal mail flow to and from my inbox. In the end not only did I enjoy the trip but also enjoyed the planning phase and all the related mails in my inbox.

I value all friend's mails so stand by the thought “One can never be too busy to not reply to a friend’s mail"