Fuck fucking fuckety batshit-fuck fuck fucking fuck.

I’ve been ranting about my work and how things go wrong in many senses, but this is personal.

Some half-assed donkeyfucker has stolen a small rubber dinosaur my wife gave me when I left. It was innocently sitting next to my monitor when this scurvy lubber decided to snatch it.

What in the world possessed some shit-faced douchebag to steal a used kid’s toy worth two rupees? What the hell is wrong with everyone?

Well, at least the people here are extraordinarily brilliant in making the office repulsive to the maximum. As if lousy ergonomics, missing coffee rooms and dismal infrastructure weren’t enough, someone has to add injury to insult by stealing my stuff.

Fuck this job.

Tags: oh bugger, people in india, surprises, what?, why I wanted a change, work

It’s funny how the role of money is different in here. Rupees feel like Monopoly money and it almost never feels like I’m spending a lot of money on anything. On top of that, I have almost zero capital expenditure, leaving me with too much to spare on living.

And still I feel like I might run out of cash any minute now.

This controversial effect comes from the combination of low-value currency (1000 rupees is 15 euros) and generally low prices (lunch buffets less than 300 rupees). While I can easily afford stuff here, there’s always the feeling that I wouldn’t have enough money for this and that back at home. I can spend 45000 on home decoration without realising that it’s actually more than 700 euros, and still feel hopelessly broke when my account balance drops below 300000 or so. Five years ago I got through a whole year with a similar amount of money – in Finland! I never had such amounts of money roaming free when I lived in Finland, but here – with cheaper prices and all – the world is not enough. Somehow no amount of rupees associates with Real Money, no matter how hard I try.

Maybe it will get a bit easier next month when I have the chance to convert part of the balance to euros.

Or not.

Tags: bank, luxuries, money, prices, what is different

Did you know that Indian week numbers don’t match the ones in Finland? Well, now you do.

The difference is that in Finland week numero uno doesn’t have to be a full week, while in India it has to. So most of the times there is a mismatch between week numbers in India and Finland (last year seems to have been an exception).

Today our team got a task to make a plan on deadlines and milestones for our current projects. So the Team Leader did, and of course he had to use week numbers as estimates. I pointed out that we’ve had previous problems with this (we almost missed a couple of deadlines), hoping that he would use dates instead.

Well, no. The Process, though unwritten and unspoken, states that we must use week numbers for their “generality”. In other words, it’s easier to let the deadline slide a bit when no accurate date has to be given. And because no Indian wants to stick their head out by being different from others, the Team Leader still fills in week numbers for milestones. When I repeatedly point out that there will be a problem with it, he finally agrees to “qualify the week numbers with dates”. So if a Finn opens up the plan, he sees two contradicting deadlines for each milestone – a week number with a date that is one week late from the week number. So which one should the poor sauna engineer believe?

Not that the response was any better in the other end: people in Finland responded with the equivalent of “we’ve always done it like this, we’re not going to change it, and the Indians better learn to explain what they mean by their weeks”. So we have two competing views confusing people all over the planet, a mode of communication where no one can be sure if their counterpart in other country is saying the same thing that the receiver thinks he is. Not that I would let this kind of stupidity make me stay up at night, but my original point still stays.

Why is it that using dates is so bloody difficult?

Tags: colleagues from India, processes, ways of working, why I wanted a change

I got a firm reminder of being in India some hours ago at work.

One of my local colleagues had a problem he couldn’t solve by himself, so he came to me for help. I didn’t know the answer either, so he told me that he knows a technical expert who knows about these things. The expert works in Oulu, so the Indian wants to know if he can send e-mail directly or if he has to go through some process with it. Mind you, my colleague and the expert he’s talking about are on the same level in Corporation hierarchy, with similar tasks and responsibilities.

Finally the simple e-mail gets sent (with me in CC, though I don’t have anything to do with this) and a reply is received some moments later. Our primary contact doesn’t know the answer, but he gives us the names of people who do. And again the Indian dude comes to me, asking if he should e-mail these persons to ask the same question. I again try to assure him that he doesn’t have to get my permission to do his job, and he can take responsibility by sending out the e-mail without asking anyone. So why do the locals think a foreigner will EAT YOUR FUCKING HEAD every time he is bothered with questions?

Yes, yes, thousands of years in hierarchical culture and blahblahblah. But these guys aren’t stupid or anything. They can learn and communicate effectively when they want to, but something in the back of their heads still makes them afraid of us foreigners. The exact same thing happens when they communicate with their superiors, and maybe for some reason they consider every Finn and German as one. Or maybe we are scary just because they don’t know who we are? The bottom line is that I don’t know what causes this behaviour, I just know it slows down our work.

I’m trying to figure out an incentive to my teammates so that they could communicate more easily, without the unnecessary burden of asking for permissions every time they need to contact someone. Apart from saving their efforts, it would leave me and their managers more time to concentrate on something relev- no, wait: that could leave one level of managers completely useless. What would happen to them?

Tags: colleagues from India, culture, time, ways of working, what is different, work

Today I took a day off from the office, went almost out of town (55 minutes by car) to pay some custom fees and did a million small things to make this place more me. My furniture from Finland arrived today and I’ve been busy arranging things and setting up the equipment. I’m already writing this on my desktop PC, but there’s still work to do with my home cinema and Xbox setup. More on those tomorrow.

As I didn’t send my office chair here from Finland, I had to get a new one:

One of the buttons has come off already, but I don’t think I want to go through the trouble of hauling the chair back to the shop for that. See, I’m getting more Indian every day?

For the guests I got something in the upstairs:

And of course there has to be a bar with such setup:

The glasses are still missing, but that only gives me one more chance to post a pic of this awesome piece of handicraft. I just think it kicks ass.

And finally it feels like I live here!

Tags: accommodation, it's good to be me, luxuries, moving, my pimped-up interior design, photos, shopping

I just got the last Abu out of the house after a full day of cleaning, packing, installation of aircons and organising schedules of ten or so people. The gentlemen from the removal company came to pack up and take away all the stuff that didn’t belong to the House (or me), and at the same time a couple of guys came to install air conditioning to the two remaining bedrooms. On top of that I received the first lot of my rental furniture, but more on those in a moment.

At first I have to say how positively surprised I was with the guys who worked here with us today. They arrived on time, listened to our instructions and did their job with astonishing quality. They even suggested calling a real electrician to check out the wirings before connecting any of the equipment, which was something really unexpected. Of course that’s the safe way of doing things, but I never expected to see that in here. Still, two thumbs up and mad props to the guys for these:

The official ladder is actually next to the guy on the right, just against the wall.

Would you climb up there on a ledge less than half a meter wide?

I also got quite a bunch of furniture today, so let there be more photographs:

Some nice paintings in there…

…some missing bottles in here…

…and a missing queen witch here. If this one doesn’t tell who’s the fairest of them all, it can’t be done.

This one is placed in the master bedroom right now, but I’ll have to see if there’s more use for it in some other place. Who knows, maybe I’ll run out of storage space (not).

And there’s more to come, but  not yet – first I need a good night’s sleep on my new king-size bed.

Tags: moving, my pimped-up interior design, people in india, photos, time, ways of working

I am waiting for my furniture lot to arrive any minute now, but there have been small problems with the directions to the house. I finally worked it out how to tell local people where I live.

The answer is obvious: I don’t try to explain anything to the person who speaks English as his/her third or fourth language, but go to the guards and let them give directions. They know the place, they know the language, and they know the culture. What good can I bring to it, knowing none of those very well?

Tags: people in india, ways of working

Yesterday’s Midsummer Eve party was a blast: we had tons of beer, a huge amount of meat in the grill (3.5 kg of beef fillet cost less than 2000 rupees or 30 euros), small potatoes with Finnish butter sauce and just the right amount of brilliant people to share the fun. What I really like about India is that I can throw a party at approximately the same cost as in Finland, but the end result is an order of magnitude fancier: apart from the obviously cheaper food (beer is roughly the same nowadays), the best thing is that I have the staff to do things that take time, leaving me free to plan and organise. It seems like I’ll have to practise a bit with it since I’m used to doing everything by myself so far. I hope the maid doesn’t quit after clearing the mess we made.

Today is the moving date for the previous residents, so I will have this place all to myself before sundown.

My furniture should be here in a couple of days, so quite soon there’s only one hugely important thing missing.

My loved ones.

Tags: accommodation, friends and family, my pimped-up interior design, parties

Oh bugger.

The goddamn shit-faced communist ass-munchers in the office have shown their gratitude for my souvenirs by eating 90 per cent of the hugely expensive 3kg chocolate box I brought with me. Without my consent, implied or otherwise.

Okay, I admit I didn’t lock it up, but still: what the fuck? What the hell is wrong with these wankers?

I swear the next box I bring with me will have liquid laxative and Viagra injected in them.

Edit: Just to emphasise, the chocolates weren’t even showing. Someone has gone through my drawers in order to find them.

Tags: oh bugger, people in india, surprises, what is different, what?