Now Madhur Bhandarkar would like us to believe that the corporate world is one big bad world where you have to sell your soul, send escorts to rival company workers to get trade secrets, kill colleagues, finish off their families and what not, but end of the day, and quite disappointingly so, it is simply a bunch of people working together. Simple routine boring work and nothing else.
But that said, it doesn’t mean it does not have its share of spices, ironies, absurdities and outright irrationalities. Here’s a brief view on all that’s stupid and silly in those superb coveted organizations mostly based in glorious glass buildings in Gurgaon.
For starters, I would want to throw some light on this beautiful job title called the ‘Analyst’. It’s rather ironic that how twenty years before there was indeed no such job title whatsoever, none of us ever grew up thinking we would grow up to be a world-renowned ANALYST, and now every second guy is working as one. Who exactly is this analyst, what the hell does he analyse and how come there is suddenly a need of so much analysis, are questions that a curious mind is bound to have.
Well, in crude terms an analyst is to a service organization what a base level factory labourer is to a manufacturing organization. He (and forgive me for being a sexist here, but it’s just too much pain writing ‘he/she’ everywhere just to be socially correct) is the one actually making those colourful ppts, excessively large excel sheets, incomprehensible PDFs or whatever it is that analysts make.
Just as a factory labourer is for a manufacturing unit, he is the one actually involved in making the product that generates revenue. Likewise to a labourer, he is subject to insanely long working hours, is sometimes working on weekends, is putting his body on line for the manufacturing process *and has to listen to ten different morons on how he could do his job better. Again, just as is the case with factory labourers of manufacturing units, the higher one is from the analyst role and farther away he is from doing actual revenue generating work, the more money he will be making in his monthly pay-cheque.
Then why do organizations need B Tech/ MBA degrees and all that jazz for this labourer role? Well cuz this is Services baby, and that’s how they roll.
Having that cleared up, let’s look at the other amusing things of this ‘corporatelife’.
The ‘one’
Now every organization has a ‘one’. This one is quite simply a person who pretty much has ‘management’ tattooed on his forehead (not literally, but if suggested he would readily do that as well). He is somebody who would have an extremely complicated way of saying the same things you would do. For ex, in a great strategic highly important team meeting focussing on finding solutions to do more work, you would say ‘I guess all of us should just work more’ and he would say ‘Every associate needs to synchronize his individualistic competencies with organizational objectives and push the achievable milestones so as to increase the returns our corporation(mild applause). He is someone who would spend one hour every morning on each of the higher-up on discussing matter like career path and streamlining goals, while you would be working your bu** off on those darned reports that never seem to get over.
The ‘one’ is usually as uptight as Mayawati herself and makes a curious horse like sound even when he walks. He prefers to wear RayBan all the time, which really is a rather curious sight particularly in the loo, and chews gum so vigorously while working that it reminds you of a cow. The one is loved by everyone in the office except you and your lousy mediocre un-studlike group, who are the only people to see what a douchebag that person is. The one is the only person who is able to maintain the coveted ‘work-life’ balance, which brings me to the next point.
Work-life balance
It’s a bullshit meaningless laughable term invented by management to fool you. Period. Let’s move on.
Buddy Concept aka Forced Friend
Your HR-assigned buddy is one who’s supposed to like you and help you settle in office, but in reality looks at you with as much disdain and contempt as you look at a Vivek Oberoi movie. Curiously, it seems an HR policy to make buddies of opposite gender, which seems a bit like how in class II your teacher made you sit in boy-girl boy-girl pattern. Of course if you are an engineering student, then you simply take it as good fortune or in rather crude terms office ki setting.
For the buddy, it’s pretty much like how your parents forced an adolescent you to share your room with your cousin when he was coming to your city for few days. The happy cousin arrives thinking he’s welcome and has no idea how you’ve been pleading for last two weeks to not have to play this stupid and irritating role. So it’s not really her fault that she hates you. And god save you if you’ve been in an organization for too long and are yourself made someone’s buddy. For starters, a new-joinee exposes the fact that the buddy indeed doesn’t know anything about the organization or doesn’t have a jack of a clue on how to setup the system, use the office tools, etc. Secondly, during lunch-time the buddy and the new-joinee enter into a sweet little hide-and-seek game, where the new-joinee is intently looking for the buddy for a nice cosy lunch, and the buddy is doing everything short of hiding under the table to dodge the joinee so that she could go out lunching with her group. Enough on the subject, let’s move on.
STILL TO COVER in Next write-up….team lunches, engagement activities, performance review, office lifts, HR=the art of using 5000 words where 5 would do
*body parts put on line=read ‘eyes’ for staring at computer for 14 hrs a day, and ‘lungs’ from smoking, which is a habit eventually all analysts take up, and ‘liver’ from drinking incessantly, which is a habit an analyst takes up on Fridays to make his life feel less miserable.
