Yesterday was the Sunday that was really a Monday. People have been celebrating Diwali all India wide, and yesterday was yet another national holiday. I must say that for three nights it has occasionally felt like we’re living in a war zone with the fireworks, minor bombs and firecrackers going off non-stop after sunset until midnight. Gracefully though, the people stop bombing pretty much after 12 am, which is nice.

We decided to make the best out of our sunday-that’s-not-a-sunday by taking a look at the Bannerghatta National Park to see what was there.

First of all, there were animals. Lots of them, and mostly in too small enclosures, especially the birds. 3 x 3 x 3 metres cage just is not roomy enough for over 30 birds, even if they’re budgies. But then again, I suppose PETA does not fare overly well in India anyway. At least they didn’t have any big primates which always make me sad (who me, anthropomorphising? nooo…) as they seem a bit too human to me. On the other hand, some of the enclosures were not only roomy, but could also be described as almost cosy for the animals with lots of shade and places to hide in, the panthers for example.

We also had an encounter with an elephant, who was being ridden apparently by its keeper. It was absolutely enormous, especially up close and personal:

We got to touch its trunk, and it got to give a 10 rupee bill to its keeper afterwards.

I later on caught the same elephant on video, eating hay or whatever it was. The elephant took a bunch of munch, waved it about so that excess would fall off, then jam the bunch between its trunk and tusk and rip the bunch in two, so that the straws would be shorter and fit better in its mouth. Quite clever, I think. We toured the hippos as well, there were a whole bunch of them, at least two calves and many grown-ups.

To top it all up, we did the “grand safari”. The safari started by us queueing behind about 60 other people. One of the first buses became full quite quickly, but we somehow got jumped in the queue, got to climb some fences and then sit next to the bus driver. And what a bus it was! Unfortunately I didn’t get a photo to prove my words, but it was close to that poisonous green also known as “British racing green”, with (mostly rusty) grilles over all of the windows. Most of the floor was the not-originally-see-through kind, which made the trip all the more exciting. Needless to say the bus was jam-packed when we set off:

First on the list there were the herbivores as shown below:

Then were the sloth bears. There were a lot of them, so we got many pictures too. Some of these were taken by the bus driver, so cheers for the pics.

Finally after much shaking and rolling (no, the ride wasn’t the smoothest one, and neither was the path the bus was taking) we hit lion and tiger country. The lions quite unsurprisingly were sleeping in the shade:

Also the white tigers chose the shade:

This one was especially cute:

When the safari was all done we set off looking for our vehicle. Happily some people had parked it into a pocket and we had to haul some ten motorbikes and scooters out of the way:

As long as we were on the south side of the city, we thought to get some food first and then find the Big Banyan Tree on Mysore road. So we hit a country club our driver was happily a member of, had lunch with very good value for money, and hit the road again.

The Banyan tree was not so much one tree in itself as a grove of trees. This is a specific kind of a tree, which first grows branches and then some more roots down from the branches creating an interesting sight:

Lots of local families had come there to have picnic and just to hang out in the shade. At times it seemed we were more interesting as photo targets than the tree in itself, which is starting to be a bit annoying. I really don’t get what is it that compels people to shout and wave at us. Strange times in a strange country. Anyhoo, the rest of the pics can be seen here, enjoy!

Still four days until Maldives, more reports coming up then.

Tags: culture, holiday, sightseeing, what?

I finally got the call.

We’re travelling back to Finland next month.

Next destination: the sea.

Tags: it's good to be me, moving, planning, surprises, time, what?

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

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 haven’t been updating the blog for a couple of days due to health problems. I haven’t had the usual Indian diet or anything, it’s again all about office ergonomics – or, more accurately, lack of it (them? is it a plural?). I’ll have to keep this short to avoid further problems, but here goes:

The first doctor I went to on Tuesday seemed helpful, but after deciphering the prescriptions I wasn’t very convinced. I’m not exactly sure how anti-reflux drugs (in English: stomach medicine) are going to cure computer vision syndrome, so I decided to get a second opinion.

I found a very good spec shop on Commercial street (my recommendation:Vision Express), had my vision checked and got a prescription for anti-glare glasses. On top of that I wanted some treatment for my sore shoulders, so I went to another doctor just to get a new set of painkillers along with antidepressants to ease tension.

Yesterday was already quite ok with the new treatments, but most of it must have been because I didn’t spend much time at the office. I figured this out when I came home this afternoon and found my shoulders biblically tense again. The nausea seems to be out of the picture this time, so maybe the specs do some magic after all.

I still don’t get it how all the employees here maintain their health in these working conditions. My guess is that I’m the only one to complain about it, but who knows. Maybe Indian body structure has evolved to withstand more punishment than my silky butt?

Tags: doctors, oh bugger, what is different, what?, 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

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

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?