Oh, bloody hell. And oh yeah!

For one, the Corporation payroll withheld 70% of my salary in taxes this month. Those masala-eating surrendermonkeys have been paying too little taxes so far, so they decided to compensate a bit now that I am leaving soon. Of course, it must be bloody difficult to get the percentage right when there are so many choices (four), and the highest one is chosen when annual income exceeds 7500 euros.

And of course I have a hugely expensive honeymoon trip to pay on top of usual living expenses this month.

On the other hand, we’re off for the said honeymoon in 12 hours. I can’t wait!

Tags: colleagues from India, holiday, it's good to be me, money, oh bugger, surprises, travel, ways of working, what is different, why I wanted a change, work

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

Check this out. The only modifications are a few changed nouns, otherwise the whole sentence is in its original form:

As discussed for the below said mail, changes in the project as per Pertti requirement the quotation PDF file been attached requesting to view and approve and please provide the billing address to do the needful.”

Oh, how I miss Finnish rally champion English sometimes.

Tags: language, people in india, ways of working

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’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 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

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

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