Sunday, December 21, 2008

Home, thats where I am

So I am finally at home after six months. The good news is that the project I was working on, got over withh all targets being met. Infact the customer actualy appreciated our efforts. The funny thing is whenever we failed to meet weekly targets we(the state team, ME in my case) got the blasted the next day for sure but when we got apprciated ,the appreciation took a week to reach us. We were in the midst of another meeting where we were being blasted by the manager and the team lead, "Why did you not meet yesterdays target??, this is high risk project ,etc Why do some of you leave by eleven(gosh you leave after 13 hours and they are still glum)", when the manager suddenly goes like,"Last week you met the test pass percentage and the client was genuinely happy with us and appreciated your efforts". And we are all like "Gosh, is it true?". So I wonder why does this appreciation news take so long to filter down to us while al the acidic mails are immediately shown to us.

Maybe they reallly put efforts to ensure our morale is low and we are always feeling sorry about ourselves. SAD EMPLOYEE'S a study found made less mistakes.

Anyway the project is now over and for the time-being I have the bench status but its unlikely to last long. I am expecting to be put on another project soon.

The reason I took leave now is tha it is christmas time and normally its a lean period in the IT industry especially the services sector as all the contracts are being renewed etc, so there is less of work. Also with the present economic situation, its very unsure where I will end up some time down the line.

Thus I decided to club two days of holidays during christmas with the meagre(its actually very less) amount of earned leave I have managed to save( imagine showing up for work for six months each day and ending up with just 7-8 days od earned leave). Anyway I initially planned to be save some of the earned leave for later and take only about a week or max 10 days off. But then my hopes got raised that I would be given compensatory leaves as promised for two saturdays that I had worked beyond the fourteen hours I had put on week-days.

My manager or my ex manager(he ceased to be my manager when the project got over on tuesday) agreed to grant me compensatory leave by using a lacuna in the rules to sort of give me on duty leave. FOr a day I was on cloud nine. But alas some things are not meant. In comes my bench manager who refuses to let me use the facility saying there is no policy of compensatory offs.

But now my imagination had been aroused and the one week that earlier seemed sufficient suddenly seemed so less. So I decided to empty all my earned leaves quota and simply party at home.

So I am now at Allahabad after a twenty four hour plus journey which included two bus journeys, a flight from Bangalore to Delhi and a train journey to add to it.

I sometimes wish that I was closer to home, that it was not so difficult to get home. But then I console my heart and say that some things are probably not meant to be.
"We alwys wonder about the tales that are never written"

4 comments:

SD said...

What Ashraf..some things are sweeter when they come in after all the labour!
I guess u learnt that the hard way!

Ashraf's Pen said...

Yes maybe.

But its not so fun travelling 24 hours to reach home despite a flight when ur cubicle partner is like 2-3 hours from home only.

;(

heenad said...

you get shouted at for leaving at 11! Thats just wrong! Praise is always far and little in between. I get what you mean by living closer to home, but at least you live in India. It does takes me only a 14 hour flight from here to dxb compared to your 24 . But its so much more costlier.

Ashraf's Pen said...

Yup thats true. I actually put in like 14-15 hours a day for nearly two weeks.

Nearly died of all the damm stress.

The grass is always greener on the other side.

I am not sure who is at a disadvantage. My 24 hours includes one bus journey, a flight topped off by a train journey.

I am so far away from home that I could just as well be in another country.

It hardly makes a difference.

And the pittance that they pay me along with the meagre number of leaves makes the trip rather expensive