ExpertDabbler

One of my colleague, a married man, was leaving from work at around 8.30 PM when this other guy was just entering the office.

“Enna indha nerathula office, edhavadhu meeting irukka?”

Guess the answer?

“Illai, veetla current illai!!”

Staying late in office may or may not translate to getting work done, but it definitely means free uninterrupted power with A/C. Here are some of the other freedoms enjoyed by the folks, atleast in my office:
- free internet with WiFi,
- free unlimited coffee/tea,
- free unlimited packaged drinks (Tropicana and the likes),
- free DTH television in state of the art gadgets so that people can watch TV anytime (my company provides one on every floor),- - free recreational facilities like foose ball, table tennis, pool, and very recently Nintendo Wii,
- free visits from doctors from corporate hospitals,
- free cab facilities from various points in the city – either catch the bus near home early morning, or come to select points in the city and avail cabs every hour till 11 AM, house drop late in the night, flexible working hours, free concierge services, etc.

I am not the one to grudge anything here. Facilities are there to be used. But are we using it responsibly and judiciously? Not everybody at least.

For e.g one of my other colleague will come to office every morning with a To-Do list.
If you are in a hurry to say ’Maintaining To-Do list is good’, hold on.

His typical schedule is like this

11 – Come to office
11.15 – Finish checking mails – gmail, yahoo etc. Official mails can wait.
11.15 to 11.45 – Tea time.
11.45- he will start his first call - nothing official here as well. Sitting in Chennai, he is the undisputed Naataamai for his sister’s family back in his native. That Naataamai cum counseling session will go till lunch.
1 to 3 – a good lunch in Amaravathy, an Andhra restaurant nearby.
3 to 4 – Another call, this time to his parents back home.
4 to 5 – Tea break.
5 to 5.30 – call to his fiancée.

This is not to suggest that I eavesdrop. The only way I can stop listening to that guy’s outbursts over phone is to become deaf.

Usually something mysterious happens at 6. Maybe the power of his romantic love spurs him or whatever. He opens his daily tasks around this time and will wrap it all by around 2-3 AM, with due breaks for ‘Dhum’, ‘Sandwich’, ‘Orkut’. Since it is obviously late night, he will book a house drop and go back in company cab for free. One can imagine if some other team mate has a dependency on this guy’s work, chaos reign supreme. I am sure the guy would never go home if only the company provided him a dorm and a laundry. I am sure he is secretly praying for a ration card and voter ID in company address as well. I suspect he would even take a salary cut. Bachelor guys who stay away from home are the prime culprits in matters like this.

Recently, I came to know a good percentage of folks download movies for their viewing pleasure using RapidShare while in corporate network. When I gently asked them, pat comes the reply

“Prabu, adhu thappu na inneram block pannirupaanga la?”

I got reminded of some tamil proverbs which may not be appropriate to be quoted here.

If the administration provides for free pen and scribble, how to deal with people who take scribble pads and free Reynolds every day?

Result: they made pens and scribbles available on request.
Response - Some people request almost every day.

Of course not everybody is like this. But I fail to understand why even some percentage should be like this. There are some who simply do not have the maturity to work in a corporate environment where you are kinda free but expected to be responsible. The incidents I am observing in the last few months have made me conclude that a good percentage of people always find a thrill in abusing the freedom given to them.

In our previous facility in MEPZ, four people had to share a desk phone. All external calls were routed to an operator who would manually connect to calls once we tell the number. All downloads were prohibited, irrespective of whether it is for official purposes or not. How long does it take to go from the present freedom to the one in MEPZ? In my view, it’s only a matter of time.

I think IT companies can cut down their expenses by a substantial percentage by doing the following

- ask a percentage of their employees to work from home,
- ensures most of the folks do not stay back except office hours,
- and make an announcement that the top ten percentage of people who do the most number of outside calls from their work phone, and those who use company bandwidth to download non work related content will find their names exposed with data and a specified amount will be deducted from their salary. If they are non-productive resource, they should just be sent home.

I honestly do not think such people deserve any privacy or anonymity or even their job.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at 11:06 am and is filed under Daily Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.