It’s been quite a while since I’ve last written anything, so here’s a summary:

I travelled back to Finland in early September, found out that the glasses weren’t according to the prescription I got, and once again I had to extend the sick leave. While there was supposed to be a prism of 2 prd in front of the right eye and a zero lens in front of the left, the opticians in India had put 2 prd prisms on both. Needless to say, my symptoms didn’t go away with those.

At this point I might have felt a a tiny bit frustrated.

Fast forward two weeks and we’re back in Bangalore. I left the glasses to the optician shop for fixing and started the wait once more. Of course, there were again some delays, but I finally received the glasses I needed last Friday. I hoped to have at least a couple of days to try them out and adjust to using them, but the TL didn’t exactly agree. On top of demanding immediate 100 per cent work effort, he told me all my annual leave would be nullified because of the sick leave.

You see, the local policy is six days of sick leave a year, after which the employee has to use his or her annual leave days as sick leave. When annual leaves have been consumed, additional days are deducted directly from the employee’s salary. (And there’s no social security. Someone still willing to call India “civilised”?)

In my case, however, the civilised world has had its say: our global policy for expatriates grants me three months of paid sick leave, so my annual leaves should still be there. Being in India is already quite a challenge, and being here for seven months without leave would be too much to bear.

I presented the policy to the TL, who saw it best to dispute both the policy and applicable legislation, demanding a reduction to my annual leaves. This was the last straw to me.

I have stood up against his passive-aggressive bullshit for five months now, and in my opinion that’s five months more than the maximum tolerable abuse time from your manager. As I’ve written before, I have tried to talk about it with the TL and with local HR, but his attitude is still exactly the same as before. Of course I understand that he’s pissed about a bloody expensive employee being on long sick leave, but that just doesn’t justify his accusations and hostility towards me. What the hell am I supposed to do about being incapacitated to work?

I can’t do miracle cures yet, but at least I have a huge Corporation full of Big Bosses to help me do something. During last weekend I and Eve spent several hours composing a summary about what has happened since I came to India last May, along with a cover letter addressed to half a dozen managers, second level managers, department heads and so on. On Monday morning I checked my intended recipient list with one of the expat bosses in our office and sent the whole thing out.

Two and half days later there is quite a lot of debris flying around. I have had talks with local HR, European HR managers, my old line manager and a couple of other chaps. The consensus seems to be that I have a case and something needs to be done, but [your preferred higher entity here] only knows what and isn’t going to tell yet. I may get a new manager, I may carry on with the current one, or I may even get sent back home early. I expect it to take at least a week or two before there’s anything to report.

So how’s your life?

Tags: colleagues from India, oh bugger, travel, ways of working, what is different, what?, why I wanted a change, 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

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

I already touched this subject in the comment section, but there are some more things I want to say about it. The cases of mysteriously disappearing personal property (here and here) brought up some irritating aspects of the Indian culture quite well and I think those aspects deserve some closer attention.

The first point I don’t like about this country is that people are corrupted to the bone. Nobody seems to think thievery in the office as a problem since everyone has locks in their drawers. Every single Indian I talked with about these incidents was asking the same question: “Why didn’t you lock it up?”

Here’s why: the bloody building has at least one guard in each floor 24/7, no one is let in without a badge, and there’s an access card system in the doors (granted, it’s out of order right now, but still). Even I can’t get through without my badge, and I’m positive that every single guard recognises me. And after all these security measures I should keep my stuff behind locks? Am I the only one to see a problem here? What good is a squad of guards if I can’t trust them to keep thieves from stealing a plastic child’s toy? What the hell do they pay those slackers for?

The second thing I don’t like in the office is the attitude of our Team Leader. Every time I tell him there’s a problem, he tries to wriggle his way out of facing it. It’s biblically frustrating to defend my position against the person who should be my closest advocate on all matters, the single point of contact for my queries about day-to-day work. I guess he’s trying to suppress my enthusiasm to report everything that’s wrong, but that’s where he makes a grave mistake – I’ll be sure to report every problem I find. He will think me as an irritating asshole, but that’s what I am when someone tries to push me around.

Tags: colleagues from India, oh bugger, surprises, what is different, what?, why I wanted a change, work

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

A courier from Citibank seems to have popped by on Friday with a letter addressed to me. I received the letter today and it carries some details of the recipient on top. To be exact, it has my name, the Corporation’s name, the name of our office building, the floor I’m in, office address, the nearest well-known landmark, postal code, city and my phone number. So you would expect that the courier arrives at the office, takes the elevator to the correct floor and calls me that he’s there. Or maybe he leaves the envelope to the security who is there 24/7, who would then deliver it to me.

Well, no. Remember, this is India.

What happened instead was that the courier went to the floor below and left the letter to the reception there. The receptionist, in his infinite wisdom, decided not to inform anyone on Friday, but to wait until today – and then called one of my new teammates. He in turn decided not to call me, but informed the Engineer to do it, and so I received a phone call telling me that I should visit the reception. The logbook I had to sign showed that the letter had arrived on Friday, but luckily it wasn’t anything urgent.

I guess I’m too intimidating for people to contact directly and they always have to find someone bold enough to encounter the white devil.

Which is actually a good thing: while I might get my letters with a delay, I also get to do a lot of stuff without anyone interfering. And that’s the way I like it.

Tags: bank, colleagues from India, hierarchies, post, ways of working

I am really running out of patience with this horse excrement.

I ordered a debit card for my bank account almost a month ago and was told it will reach me in a week or so. Obviously it’s still “on its way”.

There have been two separate delivery attempts to the Corporation’s other office, but both of them have bounced because “the consignee is not in the office”. If we present these pieces of information to a life form capable of thought process, it would quite soon conclude that the problem isn’t, for example, in the delivery address. A more advanced species might even speculate that the office was right on place, but the courier was unable to find the correct person from there. So what the hell is going wrong, then?

Well, luckily we have agents to deal with these kinds of problems. And unfortunately he is just as Indian as anybody else here. Instead of having my deliveries brought directly to me, he still insists on circulating everything around the other office “because its reception is open on work hours to receive deliveries”. Bloody hell, I’m at my office every day on work hours, ready to pick up anything if needed, and much more of a correct person to receive my deliveries instead of some random chick I should call every half an hour to find out if there’s something waiting for me.

I’m very much inclined to commit a ritual murder with a dull cheese grader, but maybe I’ll just laugh at their faces and enjoy the money I withdrew from the bank today:

Tags: bank, colleagues from India, money, oh bugger, time, ways of working, what is different

Why do I feel slight discomfort around people who use photos of themselves as desktop backgrounds?

Tags: colleagues from India