Memory Leak
My literary flair seems to be titillated only when I am acutely poignant or heavily in monetary debt!
Now, having been ensconced in relative ordinariness and narrowing the gap between the negative and the positive in my unkempt balance book, I seem to have totally lost it to express myself on anything.
I am your unfriendly neighborhood IT guy; physically disproportionate, emotionally challenged and economically endowed with more than I deserve or can handle.
I seldom talk to anybody other than my laptop. I keep myself passive with a 9-9 job; dealing with clients across the globe, churning out colorful reports in impossible formats and spending time “fire-fighting” (as software folks say with brooding eyebrows) issues in my projects and the ever-increasing attrition in my teams (am I the reason for it?!).
I have a miniscule domestic life and spend weekends in hibernation when I try – and fail – to pull my overweight ass to the neighborhood gym.
Just the other day – actually it was a year and a half back – I wrote this piece for the Mumbai University – which they never published – titled “The Great Indian Revolution” on how the IT industry has turned around the perception of the world about India and of India about itself. Even when I was penning it, I shuddered to think of the day this was all going to come to an end and how neurotic the ride down the trough was going to be. Somehow, fighting another part of myself, I wanted it to happen and break the reverie and the boredom borne out of skyrocketing salaries and ever-increasing growth rates.
An “IT industry expert” whose name I forget emphatically stated in a TV channel whose name I forget (more) that the IT boom was irreversible and neither America nor Al Qaeda can stop or mar this “glorious ride”.
That is good news for me. I can earn my six-figure salary and continue to fuss about how tough work is sitting on my rapidly expanding back-side, in an air-conditioned, ergonomically designed office of the multi-national software services company that I work for. I could continue talking to Americans and Europeans and leverage off my “rich international experience” to solve “problems” and “integrate systems, people and processes”. I could send detailed reports on weekly status and utilization and observe complex metrics on cost and schedule performance, defect injection and resource productivity. I earn my salary to do just this.
That is bad news as well. Because, I am a machine now. I am so obsessed with my laptop that I am typing into now and the scrumptious statistics that I collate and disburse that nothing else can pip into my mindshare, till the weekend, when I need to catch up on sleep.
I am a misfit at home. My wife thinks so too but tolerates me because of the money. My daughter finds me irritating as I hardly listen to her. It used to be so much better when dad was jobless a couple of years ago. Those days I would take her out for a walk, talk to her when she understood very little of what I said and spent time at home chatting and joking with the folks.
Now I cannot do that. My client needs a “sourcing strategy” for his requirements for the next six months by “COB today” and my boss needs a presentation “yesterday” (every boss worth his salt has to use that annoying cliché) for an impending client visit.
Not that it really helps if I reach home early. I don’t like to communicate with anybody at home. I often shout at my kid or am impervious to my wives call to help her out. At work, on days when the pressure gets insuperable, I throw tantrums at my team and shout four-letter words at customer service associates of banks and mobile phone service providers over the phone (the latter, maybe is richly deserved!).
Some intelligent being suggested, during a leadership course, to arouse some personal passions for social service, sports or arts to divert the mind from the stress at work and also to maintain the ever-elusive “work-life balance”.
So I prodded with myself and struck with the ingenious idea of giving back to society. I went to a fund-raiser where the strategy seemed to be to spend all the funds raised during the event on excessive drinking and dancing. My wife also didn’t exactly relish the idea of me hanging around with “Page 3” Mumbai’ites when she was slogging it out with two kids pulling the house down. On another, more genuine, attempt at social service that involved planting a hundred saplings in a mangrove, I broke my back trying to burrow a hole with a 5-kg gouge.
Between the extremities of nauseating debauchery and back-breaking verisimilitude, there seemed to be no activity that could bring back the vitality of yester-years (was there any, really?) and drive away the malaise I was suffering from.
I thought I might as well do things I am good at – that I am used to, rather. So, I stopped the soul-searching, opened my laptop, slouched on the chair (with difficulty as the asymptotes of my pot-belly challenged the width of the chair) and wrote out reports in four colors and sent it to my bosses. I received a reply back saying “Great Work!” within minutes. I knew I was not alone fighting the depression of an over-paid, sedentary job.
Now, having been ensconced in relative ordinariness and narrowing the gap between the negative and the positive in my unkempt balance book, I seem to have totally lost it to express myself on anything.
I am your unfriendly neighborhood IT guy; physically disproportionate, emotionally challenged and economically endowed with more than I deserve or can handle.
I seldom talk to anybody other than my laptop. I keep myself passive with a 9-9 job; dealing with clients across the globe, churning out colorful reports in impossible formats and spending time “fire-fighting” (as software folks say with brooding eyebrows) issues in my projects and the ever-increasing attrition in my teams (am I the reason for it?!).
I have a miniscule domestic life and spend weekends in hibernation when I try – and fail – to pull my overweight ass to the neighborhood gym.
Just the other day – actually it was a year and a half back – I wrote this piece for the Mumbai University – which they never published – titled “The Great Indian Revolution” on how the IT industry has turned around the perception of the world about India and of India about itself. Even when I was penning it, I shuddered to think of the day this was all going to come to an end and how neurotic the ride down the trough was going to be. Somehow, fighting another part of myself, I wanted it to happen and break the reverie and the boredom borne out of skyrocketing salaries and ever-increasing growth rates.
An “IT industry expert” whose name I forget emphatically stated in a TV channel whose name I forget (more) that the IT boom was irreversible and neither America nor Al Qaeda can stop or mar this “glorious ride”.
That is good news for me. I can earn my six-figure salary and continue to fuss about how tough work is sitting on my rapidly expanding back-side, in an air-conditioned, ergonomically designed office of the multi-national software services company that I work for. I could continue talking to Americans and Europeans and leverage off my “rich international experience” to solve “problems” and “integrate systems, people and processes”. I could send detailed reports on weekly status and utilization and observe complex metrics on cost and schedule performance, defect injection and resource productivity. I earn my salary to do just this.
That is bad news as well. Because, I am a machine now. I am so obsessed with my laptop that I am typing into now and the scrumptious statistics that I collate and disburse that nothing else can pip into my mindshare, till the weekend, when I need to catch up on sleep.
I am a misfit at home. My wife thinks so too but tolerates me because of the money. My daughter finds me irritating as I hardly listen to her. It used to be so much better when dad was jobless a couple of years ago. Those days I would take her out for a walk, talk to her when she understood very little of what I said and spent time at home chatting and joking with the folks.
Now I cannot do that. My client needs a “sourcing strategy” for his requirements for the next six months by “COB today” and my boss needs a presentation “yesterday” (every boss worth his salt has to use that annoying cliché) for an impending client visit.
Not that it really helps if I reach home early. I don’t like to communicate with anybody at home. I often shout at my kid or am impervious to my wives call to help her out. At work, on days when the pressure gets insuperable, I throw tantrums at my team and shout four-letter words at customer service associates of banks and mobile phone service providers over the phone (the latter, maybe is richly deserved!).
Some intelligent being suggested, during a leadership course, to arouse some personal passions for social service, sports or arts to divert the mind from the stress at work and also to maintain the ever-elusive “work-life balance”.
So I prodded with myself and struck with the ingenious idea of giving back to society. I went to a fund-raiser where the strategy seemed to be to spend all the funds raised during the event on excessive drinking and dancing. My wife also didn’t exactly relish the idea of me hanging around with “Page 3” Mumbai’ites when she was slogging it out with two kids pulling the house down. On another, more genuine, attempt at social service that involved planting a hundred saplings in a mangrove, I broke my back trying to burrow a hole with a 5-kg gouge.
Between the extremities of nauseating debauchery and back-breaking verisimilitude, there seemed to be no activity that could bring back the vitality of yester-years (was there any, really?) and drive away the malaise I was suffering from.
I thought I might as well do things I am good at – that I am used to, rather. So, I stopped the soul-searching, opened my laptop, slouched on the chair (with difficulty as the asymptotes of my pot-belly challenged the width of the chair) and wrote out reports in four colors and sent it to my bosses. I received a reply back saying “Great Work!” within minutes. I knew I was not alone fighting the depression of an over-paid, sedentary job.
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