Form 16 - version 3.0
My wife works in a private college as a senior lecturer. The way these colleges are administered will make all those in the ‘code eludhara coolie’ junta feel like being part of heaven.
Form 16 - in all these years in the IT industry, I had them delivered via e-mail. Even smaller organizations would appoint some one to hand deliver/distribute Form 16. The distribution usually happens in the month of May to facilitate filing of returns by the 31st of July.
Cut back to the private college, my wife basically was behind the administration for more than a week, just to get her Form - 16. One fine day, she finally got it only to find that she had been given a form with 2009-10 details in a 2008-9 form. Now, don’t ask me how that can happen. Any type of somersault is possible in places like that.
She goes back to the accounts department, points out the mistake, and Voilà! we get Form 16 version 2.0. This time we find there is no mention of the taxes collected and paid to the Central Govt. Account. When asked, the administrative folks explain that no tax was deducted from her salary - absolutely untrue.
We do one more round of auditing to find the month(s) in which taxes were deducted from the bank statements. And now we have the version 3.0 just few days before the July 31st deadline. Of course, in all the versions, the guy had basically declared ‘all the contents in the form are true and nothing but the truth’.
Compare this with the fuss some of my colleagues make with the company transport desk, when there is a few minutes delay in their cabs to key junction points, which till date is free for all employees. I realized we take so many things for granted in the IT industry.
Some other complaints I keep hearing in my office:
Fridge la butter milk illai,
Pantry la nalla biscuit illai,
Youtube block pannitaan, etc.
One visit on a weekend will reveal the kind of housekeeping machinery at work to present an office environment that we are so used to.
Youtube, I know so many of my colleagues who were basically watching full length movies in office bandwidth.
On the other hand there are so many IT companies where even a personal mail check is rationed for one hour a day, and people still work there. I am sure there will be nitpickers even in Facebook/Google kinda offices in India.
Most of the IT folks at least in my office suffer from what Charlie Munger calls ‘Excessive self regard’ tendency.
And I keep saying this to my friends in tea breaks, ‘Count your blessings, for things can and eventually get a lot worse than this’.
July 28th, 2010 at 11:53 pm
‘Count your blessings, for things can and eventually get a lot worse than this’. I hope you are wrong since I believe what you say is true. Our national hobby seems to be honking & complaining. For the past year and a half I’m working in a govt of India office and I know how much better lives of IT offices are. But we can’t stop complaining.
BTW: what plugin are you using for comment spam?