that’s the way the COOKIE crumbled……

It was a sunny beach, cool breeze on my face, a fruity drink in my hand, golden sand everywhere and a beautiful voluptuous girl lying on the next bench. She had the most beautiful eyes and was looking at me. ‘Why in the name of hell is she looking at ME?’ was my first thought, but then she smiled and said “Dude! Conference room in 5”. I woke up and found my self back in the same old place, workstation 14, stale air from the central air conditioner, a cup of coffee gone cold sitting in front of me and a picture of a beautiful news anchor pinned next to my monitor. It was 25 minutes past nine and time for the conference with folks sitting half way across the world in San Diego. The repeated “BING!” from the meeting reminder on my monitor made me standup, I rubbed my eyes , sipped the old coffee, made a weird face from the taste and walked through the zigzag corridors towards the conference room. It wasn’t a walk of glory, it wasn’t a walk of fame, it was more like a walk the janitor takes towards the washroom to clean someone else’s crap.

This was the last day of the first week of my very first job. After 4 years of wonderful college spent learning nothing but how to have fun and two months of worthless training from amazing trainers who practically spent the entire class playing table tennis with the trainees, the actual office was nothing close to what all of us had imagined. Extinct models of Pcs, weirdly uncomfortable chairs, low false ceiling and a cube shared by three other people weren’t the best of luxury we newbies had hoped for. It wasn’t the best of working conditions but working in an MNC, which is looking for cost-cuttings by employing low-salaried Indians, has its own drawbacks. However, the biggest disappointment wasn’t the quality of the environment but the quality of work. There were my training batch-mates working hard to develop tools and firmware that would help their team as well as off-shore partners, and then there was me, fixing issues in code (which neither did we understand nor did anyone tried to train us to understand) developed by off-shore partners, clearing up someone else’s mess and trying to make it look like a job that had the potential to save the world.

I sat there in the conference room thinking “This has got to be the most disgraceful job anyone has ever done……”. My manager on the other hand was busy smiling and trying to pickup everyone’s moral by sharing the appreciation mails sent by the partners to inform that I was doing a wonderful job and so they had decided to give me an award. “Well that’s great!”, I thought “I am so efficient at this that they have named me the best janitor of the team, the award could as well have been titled HALL OF FAME OF JANITORS – in appreciation of your extraordinary efforts to cleanup the crap not just in the pot but that sprayed across the walls too….”. I had always been told that one should not bitch about their work; work is worship and that everyone should carry it out with honor and dignity and so I suppressed my disgust and accepted the award with an over-the-moon-with-joy look on my face. I took my seat feeling depressed and disappointed; little did I know that the next three years in the same company would change my life completely, I would start understanding the fact that you could never have an ideal atmosphere for work, not everyone at work is a friend and smart work even the most worthless type can be more rewarding than any kind of hard work. But back in the past, I sat in that conference room completely unaware of what the coming years had in-store for me, wondering how long I would last here and thinking “Well, I guess that’s the way the cookie crumbles…….”