Just another day?

Whew!! What a way to start a new week? Nothing like your boss bawling at you to make an interesting start of the day....except maybe the customer doing the same to you. But thankfully the chances of the latter happening are remote in view of my ability to distance myself from any customer interfacing roles. I successfully pass them onto to more deserving candidates...or so I convince them. Though I must say that carrying a tag of manager does need occasional contact with the customer.

I expected today to be just like any other Monday..you know the kind of day that feels it shouldn't exist, a day when you are carrying the lethargy of Sunday..a day that you can do nothing more than just read the mails that have accumulated over the weekend sent by people who seem to enjoy working on weekends(a wicked part of me says that these people only work on weekends)....a day that.. okay you got the point..right?

So here was I expecting a routine Monday when I get a call from my manager who without beating around the bush asked me what did I think I was doing? I am sure that everybody would agree that bosses the world over aren't logical when they are angry. Though some ungrateful souls claim that bosses are never logical, I for one never make that claim. So when I was faced with this question, I tried to play safe and asked was something the matter. I should have stayed quiet. That set him off and he went ahead to give me a beating that eventually made me forget what it was meant for in the first place. I suppose it was something to do with forgetting to do something important. The likelihood of me forgetting something important is very remote as I don't do anything important in the first place..he..he..he

Anyway, the point is that the start of the first day of the week left much to be desired. So I returned to the apparent safety of reading and responding to mails. After sometime I made some headway in tackling the mails, when my day was again shaken for second time. I was reading a mail with the title "Resignation Letter". I groaned and started reading through it. Nothing very unique, just the usual thanks and request to be relieved from the services at the earliest. Only the person happened to be a senior team member on whom we had a lot of dependency on for a short but very critical period time. I know that nobody is irreplaceable, but we managers find a perverse joy in placing ourselves in a position that makes a reasonably successful attempt in proving this adage incorrect. We simply don't learn from our mistakes. We do a root cause analysis of why the situation happened and then setup a process and then...then forget about it. So sometime down the line the cycle repeats itself. So in the current case I followed what the tradition dictated and that is discuss with the resource, try to find his reasons for resignation and reason with him not to take such an extreme case. The discussion went on for nearly 3 hours with various issues being discussed. In end I succeeded...only in convincing myself that he had the right reasons for resigning. I was now faced with the question of what was I to do next? Finally, I gave up and sent the mail onwards to my boss with my comments.

By now I had started wondering which side of the bed did I get out of. I tried to get on with my work which is depressive enough on any given Monday, but today the depression assumed mammoth proportions. Things were quiet for the next few hours and the day was drawing to a close. Suddenly the phone rang. I prayed that it should not be my boss out to ruin of what remains of the day. It was not...infact it was my customer. And my cup of woes was now full. In his typically understated way he proceeded to tell me of things not going as per his expectation. He went on to ask what was I going to do about it. He threatened that if the issues were not sorted out soon he will have to escalate to my seniors. I started wondering whether this was a dream after all and I will wake up to a routine Monday morning. Guess that was too much to wish for...

To round of such a exciting day my laptop decided to quit. I supposed it was indignant that I was continuing to work after such a inglorious day. So I just gave up and closed shop for the day. What do I say...it was one of those days. Just another day...

My first blog

I always wondered how in the world do all the people who post blogs come up with all these things to write. I always thought that blogging requires one to be a born writer. And here am I with one big writers block..attempting to blog. I now have a new found respect for all the bloggers around the world for their blogging abilities. I have realised that blogging is less to do with being a writer and more of expressing your thoughts. And expressing is not altogether an easy thing to do, especially when you may or may not have any audience to give a feedback..I mean an instant feedback.

I am normally a very reserved person, not given to expressing freely. And that is perhaps why the idea of blogs seemed very alien to me. Blogging seemed akin to writing a diary. I am referring to the times when blog was not even a figment of somebody's imagination. People used to put down their thoughts in...well a diary (isn't that why it was called a diary). For that matter some dinosaurs might still be doing it...but what the heck...every man for himself.

Coming back to point, mention a diary and I always recall an incident from my school days. I had just picked up on the diary concept (dinosaurian of course) and ensured that I poured my heart out to it which of course did its job of recording everything I felt in all its juicy or I should say gory details. Now a funny thing about a diary is that however best that you try to keep the contents private, it makes itself conspicuous to others. It exudes an aura of forgetfulness when the owner is around and screams "Pick me up" when the wrong persons(from the owners perspective of course!!) are around. Now how could an exception be made in my case. So destiny followed its path and I forgot my diary at a place that was accessed by my family. My mother happened on to it and like all good mothers the world over who have the best interests of their child at heart..she read it. The rest is as they say history.

From then on I developed a paranoia that included not expressing feelings anywhere or to anybody..at least not very easily. But as days went by the juicy (or gory) experiences seem to have passed me by and that helped lessened the paranoia to some extent. Now writing this first blog, I am slowly realising that writing a blog is becoming easier as the sentences come forth. I don't have to torture myself to write something. The good thing about writing a blog is you can do it for the heck of writing a blog as long as it holds some meaning for you. That is the fuel that keeps you going or I should say blogging.

I must say that I have enjoyed my first blog very much. I have now promised myself that I will keep writing blogs frequently. I don't know what I will write about next time but write I surely will, even if it is a sentence or two.

So bye for now.