During my stay in NIIT I had the chance of meeting many a character. In this post, I’ll try and sketch a few that are etched in my mind. All excellent people and good friends too, but perhaps a few transactions went a bit hither thither.
When I started my career, I had made friends with this girl with whom I worked closely with on many projects. She had the kind of good looks that sent many a guy running frantically to the gym to pump iron in an emergency. A very good-looking angelic sweet girl one would say. But as you got to know her, the only thing you could say she lacked was a bunch of gorgeous blonde hair! Not that she didn’t have a bunch of gorgeous black hair but just to be politically incorrect and for the sake of consistency perhaps blonde would have gone better with her intellectual prowess and maturity levels. There were many a lunch and coffee break spent in patience while the eternal whiney whined about her meek weak constitution, her ever-aching head, back, stomach, neck, knee, elbow, ear, nose, finger, toe, toenail, hair follicle, and many other cellular aches that I didn’t catch. Her tireless and persistent fusses over every mouthful of food at the lunch table would leave many with no appetite for their otherwise scrumptious home cooked meals. We longed for her to be married with a few wailing kids of her own to tell her what endless wailing and whinnying can do to people but I think we should have thought again. For soon, she added to the list not just whines about her pains and aches but also the baby’s pains and aches and in-law-out-law woes as well. One neat metamorphosis from a person in pain to a person who is a pain and a very big pain at that. Amidst all the wailing, no one can ever get in a syllable much less a word about anything at all. One pain that I think I can say I conquered with my analgesic dose of caustic sarcasm. Rags on the other hand has yet to find the medicine that might do the trick for her!!
Among the many that I met, there were many that drove me up the wall through the roof screaming across the stratosphere. The others I just observed from a safe distance. From the suave sarcastic golf gods to the dandiya-crazed laughing hyena (as Rags once put it) there are so many people I can write reams about. But I do suspect there were times when I made substantial contributions to the general bonhomie. For example, this guy I noticed walking up the staircase ahead of me one day appeared to be a tall, broad shouldered fellow with slow measured steps leading me to believe that he was probably good looking and polished as well. But when he turned around at the coffee corner and said Hi to me, he removed all doubt. The extra movement and the extra shake added up to make a contradiction on two legs. But what added to the horror and entertainment was a casual greeting blurted to my fellow teamie in vernacular. My teamie being a strong well-built booming voiced girl herself greeted this guy at the coffee machine while he was on his way to the restrooms in F-90. He didn’t reply immediately but paused later on the stairs leading downwards and onwards to the loos, turned around to return the hi as, “Vannakum”. Myself being totally oblivious to greetings in alien languages made short work of it and mapped it instead to a very American “Wanna come?” invitation. I hate to tell you this but I think on this count my red-faced choke had my team in splits for days on end. Especially since my manager at that time was a southie herself!
But let me return to others now. A few years and many projects later, I had the chance of working with this one grating presence that went “qhhweee-ing” all over the place. Made you feel you’re coming on with serious nasal congestion with an unfriendly repercussion on the voice box. A pretty windy nose I’d say he had! Actually, I could possibly extend the windy weather to his head as well. A number of transactions led me to believe that. Especially when he missed taking one screen shot that was required in the middle of an installation sequence. Since I was merely a borrowed ‘construction’ resource, as per agreement, I was not expected to take these screen shots myself making me at once a queen and a beggar. When I halted work on account of missing screen shots, this nice guy (whose course it was) stayed back overnight to retake the same for me. Next day I was given about two dozen screen shots with a proud proclamation, “I have taken ALL the screen shots!! (beaming smile) You can replace any screen shot you like.” All screen shots?? What the heck – now I scan each one of them once, twice, then a coffee break and thrice. But sure enough in the two dozen screen shots, the very one I need is missing yet again. I fetch the fellow have him scan the two dozen screen shots, once, twice and then I get a weak admission, “Qhhwee are missing a screen shot. It should be here… hmmm… let’s see… oh… I think… I was working on the other machine also you see… this screen came when I was on the other machine… qhwee will need to install it again!”
“You mean…” I say on my fast evaporating patience, “you stayed back all night installing and painstakingly taking each and every screen shot that I didn’t need and when the installation reached the dialog box whose shot I did need, you turned to work on the other machine while it did a teasing song and dance, stuck it’s tongue out at you, and then disappeared without a mouse-click or key press the moment you looked back at it again???”
I think I must have ended that with a shout because no one asked me about the unfinished module all day that day.
People in the support groups used add their fair share to the good times especially the graphics people one got to work with. Nice people really but maybe missing a tech orientation at times. This would be evident when they would struggle hard try to grapple with some technical nuance that escaped them big time resulting in some very literal depictions. I’ll attempt to describe two of my all time favorite literal graphics I came across that lent to the madness of the times. One was a recurrent element denoting an oft-used word and liberally used in almost every other frame in that course. When complete it was probably a picture of I guess a guy running for his life! In the graphic element, the top half of the poor guy’s body was cut-off waist-up leaving two trousered legs in the running posture. Now what one would wonder could running legs denote in a tech course? Well a ‘running application’ of course! And sure enough, each time the user was required to check if the server or the application was running; these two legs would appear superimposed on a rectangular box which passed as the server or a scrap of paper which passed as the application! The other all time favorite was a result of a creative use of imagination. While denoting the computing environment the graphic area of the ill-fated course was completely dominated by a healthy happy lush green banyan looking tree! A tree no less depicting our clean-green computing environment to a hapless learner! Another iteration of the same idea had tiny computers dangling from its innumerable robust branches! Well it may not have adventitious roots but sure boasted of dangling computers, CPU, monitor et all!!
But before I end this post let me also talk a bit about a certain Movement Manager here. Here’s how our first interaction with him went.
We were busy in a serious meeting when a tall lanky form stuck his head into the interrupted meeting and queried, “Who is Rags?”
After Rags boldly claimed to be Rags, while others looked suspiciously at her, he demanded, “Why aren’t you moving?” I am afraid that took all of us by surprise cause we all felt sure that Rags was really quite alive and there was absolutely no reason for her to prove to anyone and that too in the middle of a meeting that she is indeed alive and moving if not kicking. So we transferred our suspicious glares back to the interrupter for explanation. His next try was a trifle better when he demanded, “Why aren’t you moving your workstation?”
Because maybe it is too heavy but Rags came back quicker with an equally forceful, “Why?”
“Because if you don’t move people from F-90 cannot move.”
At least I, at this moment, imagined lots of unfortunate folks in F-90 struck with a debilitating paralysis of sorts because of Rag’s new found unmoving tendency was bringing the collective movement of a dynamic task force to a grinding halt thereby causing this grave situation. We were barely controlling our laughter when Rags shoved all our restraint down the drain when in a serious I-mean-it style she did a little jig in her chair and emphatically announced, “I am moving!”
It was not until then did we realize what a potent effect our movements or the lack of it was having on the release of a building because the lease had expired and NIIT didn’t want to re lease it! I could go on and on describing the hilarity generated by the move vs movement vs managing movement trip but might need the aid of avi’s to capture some of it. But all in all the Movement Manager, went on from managing movement to managing moves in the HP project only to move to greener pastures later. Somewhere in the meantime we came to call him Happy.
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