I’ve been keeping radio silence for a couple of days on purpose. The situation in the office is solving itself, and I don’t want to comment it right now in any way. Suffices to say that my views weren’t just hot air, and people are working to solve the problems.

In other news, I’m flying again in a couple of days. No more lonely nights after next Tuesday!

Oh, the post title? My favourite whisky, nicknamed “Almost there”.

Tags: friends and family, travel, work

There is something mystical about jigsaw puzzles. There they sit, harmlessly in their boxes, waiting to be assembled by someone with a little time to spare. Some day you start doing it, just to realise later that it has saved your marriage. And some other day you just put together some pieces in order to kill time.

My session today with a 3000-piece Ravensburger was of the former kind.

Just a couple of hours ago I tried to clarify my problematic situation at work, but at that time I wasn’t able to pinpoint either the exact problem nor the solution. I spent a couple of hours thinking about it – in front of the jigsaw puzzle of course – and I think I found them both.

The problem itself can be divided in two parts, the personal and the professional. They are quite closely intertwined, but still somewhat separable. The solution is the kind of one I usually prefer anyway, I just had to take some time to get it organised in my head. In any case, I feel like I’ve really accomplished something here.

The personal part of the problem is a piece of cake: I am not compatible with the Team Leader’s passive-aggressive bullshit. To be exact, I’m not compatible with any kind of bullshit, so this part was easy to identify.

The professional part took me some time, but here it is: the TL’s motives for assigning tasks are not what they should be.

We agreed about five weeks ago that I should do a spec that was assigned to our team, not knowing that my sick leave would get extended this far. I also missed most of the trainings regarding the task because I had to run around the city arranging my housing, banking and such matters in the start of the assignment. At this point I can safely say that there’s no chance whatsoever for me to complete the spec in time, especially since there’s a wedding party to be arranged among other things.

The TL’s decision to push me to do it anyway is a prime example of his lack of professionality. The spec would take until the end of year to complete, and by then I would have wasted two thirds of my assignment on everything else but building up a functioning team in Bangalore. If the TL himself thinks I won’t have time for a honeymoon trip due to this spec, how in hell could I have time to teach people what to do here?

By looking at the situation rationally, there is no possible reason to assign this spec to me. After all, it could be more efficiently done by local workers, with about 20% of the cost and with way better end results than what I can pull out of my hat in this timeframe. On top of that, I would be available to help others and could use my valuable time with the tasks I was hired to do.

I’m not going to analyse what the TL’s motives for this idiotic decision are, but I’m surely going to take action to prevent him from damaging the whole team this way. As much as I would love to take this to a higher level, I think I first have to tell him what he is doing wrong.

Not that I am complaining for having to call his bullshit.

Tags: colleagues from India, oh bugger, ways of working, what?, work

Today I finally got the spectacles I’ve been waiting for, and they seem to work according to the first couple of hours. I went to the office to sort out the heaps of mail that had accumulated during the past seven weeks, just to find the minutes of the meeting I wrote about last week.

The TL had seen necessary to list every single absence of mine since I came here, just to “sum them up”. After the list there was an “input from TL” section, mostly like so:

We got a lot of comments for our work and it seems that not all the necessary elements have been there. We haven’t had enough support from you.

You have had a lot of absences and haven’t been in Bangalore enough.

…and so on.

Needless to say, the TL didn’t have the balls to admit what he was after with these comments. According to him, it’s only “stating what has happened”, but anyone with half a brain can see what he’s trying to achieve with his bullshit. I wasn’t going to feel guilty earlier, and I’m not going to start now. It’s just a bit difficult to stand my ground when accusations come from the person who assigns my tasks and evaluates my work performance. I am tempted to bring the issue up with upper management, but I’m not sure if I have enough grounds to raise a proper complaint.

So tell me: what the hell should i do with this situation?

Tags: let me know, morale, oh bugger, stress, what?, why I wanted a change, work

I’ve always tried hard to make everyday living work smoothly and in a timely manner. My number one option so far has been staying in Finland where the infrastructure is good and things are well out-of-the-box. Everything is bloody expensive, but for that money you get a reliable road network, tolerable bureaucracy and very low corruption rates. Things just… work.

I’m sure you already know what India is like in this regard. I may be rich here, but it doesn’t make everyday life as easy as in the civilised world. I could spend my whole salary on domestic help, bribes and everything, and still be a long way from the quality of living Finland provides. So this is not the place I want to settle down in.

The problem with both Finland and India is that I’m heavily dependent on the infrastructure and other people. A lot of stuff I do requires electricity, special skills, buying something or travelling somewhere. Things are really complicated, and on top of that I have to sacrifice more than half of my daily time in a job that doesn’t give me much more than money. While it’s nice to have a good salary and a “good” job, I don’t find satisfaction in the lifestyle anymore.

The following two paragraphs may seem irrelevant to the ones above, but bear with me for a while. I’ll try to explain in a moment.

The nature of the problem is the same as in video game industry today. In the 1980s anyone could buy a C64, learn how to write code and put up a semi-decent gaming experience in a couple of weeks. Twenty years later, it takes a team of n+1 professionals, expensive development tools and at least a year (or something?) to put together even the tiniest Xbox Live Arcade game, not even mentioning “real” games. One man creations are really few and far between, and in a bigger project you can easily find yourself doing something completely meaningless just because you were told to do so.

And this is the exact problem I have with the Corporation. I worked on a project for two years, saw a prototype of the end product once (not in action), and the whole project was shot down shortly after that. Two years well spent, thank you and here’s the next one. Motivation, anyone?

The common denominator of these topics is the lack of personality and individuality. Being just a faceless part of a huge group – be it a company or a nation – just doesn’t cut it for me. I know I’m an individual person with my friends and relatives, but being a greedy bastard, I want to be one in other contexts too. This includes the ability to create something meaningful by myself and keeping my work in touch with the real world, not just fiddling with bits & pieces that are useless without hundreds of other people.

And that’s why I intend to change careers after this assignment, even if it means that my income will be cut by 90 per cent or so. I know there are endless possibilities out there, and life is too short to be spent on something I don’t like doing. IT might have been fun once, but it’s time to move on already.

Tags: friends and family, luxuries, money, planning, prices, ways of working, why I wanted a change, work

I just spent the best 800 rupees anyone can ever spend in a gravestone shop. It took some time, but I would say it was worth it:

Tags: it's good to be me, photos

I had an interesting discussion with the Team Leader on Thursday.  It was supposed to be a review of what has been done in the past three months (has it already been 12 weeks?), but it turned out to be something completely different.

First of all, there wasn’t much to review. All the hussle in the beginning of the assignment plus a six-week sick leave left me with about two weeks to work on something useful to do, which obviously gives me almost zero performance. Tough luck, shit happens and so on. Being young and naive, I of course assumed that project management knows what is happening and has alreay had a couple of weeks to react to this situation with sick leaves and all.

Well, no.

The TL, in all his wisdom, had decided not to inform our project manager about my six weeks of absence. He thought it made him look bad if he had to bring such negative news to anyone, so instead he decided to try to pressure me to take corrective actions. Mistake number one.

I’ve never worked with anyone so passive-aggressive in my life, and this person is no less than my manager. He “tabled” (his way of saying “bring up”) my absences, my performance figures, my future plans (wedding in Finland, honeymoon trip) and tried to make me feel guilty for being unable to work. He never said it directly, but he wanted me to cancel my honeymoon plans in order to catch up with things. Mistake number two.

It’s hard to express the body language and tone of voice he used, but these should give an idea:

“I want you to see where I’m coming from, and you have been absent a lot. Now this honeymoon leave…” (silently waits for an answer)

and

“I went on a honeymoon on the second anniversary so I knew my wife better when it happened.”

Needless to say, I wasn’t going to budge. Had he taken proper action (informed the project manager, searched for substitutes and so on) and given me a direct proposal for a schedule, I could have considered giving in a bit. Right now he is shooting himself in the leg by trying to make me guilty and pressuring me without actually saying it. He is also damaging the whole company by giving false information about the situation, but that’s nothing I should care about.

Immediately after the meeting I called up the project manager and gave him an update on what the situation really is. He thought it was best to find someone else to do the job (since I now lack some required knowledge) and promised to find a solution. I clearly have to call him more often to keep things running.

All in all: the TL fucked up, tried to make me feel guilty about being ill and passive-aggressively pressurised me to save his ass. Which I didn’t and won’t do.

On the other hand, we have a week-long reservation to Komandoo.

Tags: colleagues from India, culture, holiday, oh bugger, people in india, practical stuff, time, ways of working, what is different, why I wanted a change, work

Being out of office has left me with plenty of time to do stuff, and it has gotten to the point where I am having problems with too much time to spare. The whole thing is even worse considering that reading and long sessions on the computer are off the menu, leaving me few options that my eyes can handle. That’s why I’ve been playing Rock Band, building Legos, listening to podcasts and riding the bike a lot. An eye patch allows me to work on the computer for some time, but it’s still a strain and I would rather not do it a lot. Unfortunately the lack of entertainment keeps me coming back to the desk to read some blogs or whatever.

I like to say that there are no boring environments, only boring people, but this time it’s shooting back at me.

Or maybe it’s just lack of company and good conversation that makes me feel this way.  No matter how I try to be open, positive and all that, I just don’t find myself on the same wavelength with the locals. I especially have to supress my twisted sense of humour to avoid trouble – people have gotten fired and mobbed for a lot less than what I usually like to say and do in the free world.

And I’m not even going to start about sarcasm, a form of art all India seems to be oblivious about.

Having to watch my language and behaviour this much all the time has also given me a reason to stay at home more than before. Here I can still be fully me, but without my friends it feels… futile.

Like, what’s the point of being a clown in an empty circus tent?

Tags: culture, friends and family, oh bugger, people in india, religion, time, what is different

Yes, I’m still alive. Just.

I haven’t been updating the blog because my right eye decided that it wants to look to the right rather than straight ahead. If I try to focus my sight too close, the muscles around the eyeball have to stretch more to the left, which in turn causes a headache of gargantuan proportions in less than fifteen minutes. It takes around a week for the glasses to be ready, so right now I’m using an eye patch to check my mailbox and read what I have to, but mostly I’ve been spending time doing everything else. Especially today’s bike ride in the countryside was refreshing and got my mind away from mundane worries.

Unfortunately it seems that the problems don’t stop there.

I wrote earlier about air pollution in the city, but lately it’s been worse than that. I woke up today (but not for the first time) tired, coughing and out of breath, just to see all the symptoms go away when I got out of the house to the fresh countryside air. After coming back it didn’t take long before the whole thing started again, only to cease once more when I left out for dinner. I’m beginning to suspect that this house is infected by mould, especially since the cupboards below the stairs smell like a century-old earth cellar.

Oh bloody hell, what next?

Tags: accommodation, motorbikes, oh bugger, work