Overtime

Back in the days when I used to be a consultant, I used to run assessment centers for a client that was the BPO for an American company, and so most of their employees worked evening or night shifts. So my centers would be scheduled to run till 10 or 11 PM, but of course would more often than not end up going on till 1 or 2 AM. Because when has an assessment center ever run exactly as scheduled?

The cab agency my firm used to use had a couple of drivers we trusted more than others, so when it came to these super late nights, we'd ask them to come pick us up, especially I was going home by myself. One night, while driving me home, Kishan Bhaiya suddenly asked me if I was paid overtime for these long days, and was utterly outraged when I said I wasn't.

"Aap toh subah subah office aa jaate ho, aur phir puri raat yaha pe hote ho. Humein toh raat ko gaadi chalane ke liye overtime milta hain, app logo ko milta hai ki nahi? Milna chahiye."

Last night, I told my mother I'm wouldn't be home before 10 PM all of this week, because there were work events I had to attend - this time as a client. Her second question - the first, of course, being about what I would be doing for dinner - was if I would be paid overtime.

Wut.

Learnings and Take-aways

This blog never really took off, did it? And now it's become even more redundant. Because you see, as of 6 PM last Friday evening, I am officially jobless. That's right, I left the job. The job that was my life for nearly three years, the job that drove me crazy, the job which made me collapse to the point of illness, the job where the people irritated the hell out of me with their pettiness, the job I slowly began to get fairly detached from, the job I loved doing till my very last day.

To celebrate my joblessness, I am going to share with you what I learnt in three years of HR consulting:

1. Clients are either smart, nice or sensible. Rarely two of these together. Almost never all three. Usually none of the above.
   
2. Human resources, to the world at large, is where the world's most incompetent people work. I have gathered this from both employees of various client organizations, as well as the HR bashing that crops up on my twitter timeline from time to time. The only reason I have never bothered to defend HR much is because as a consultant, I tend to agree that most line HR folks are idiots. Most.
3. The best clients/ HR people are those who either moved from a operational role to HR or those who moved from consulting to line HR. The former have a better sense of what is needed and what will work in the organizational context, and the latter have slightly more brains.
4. Colleagues, by and large, suck. They're petty, and political, and often very frustrating if you're the type for whom commitment to the job comes first. I was that type.
5. On the other hand, the odd colleague who feels the same way about work can be an absolute delight to work.
6. Having two bosses can be both exhilarating and exasperating. Exhilarating because both had very different styles, working with both was extremely exciting and useful, and I got to do different kinds of projects as a result. Exasperating because you how when the mother and the father both ask you to do something, and you don't know which way to turn? Imagine going through that in the office too, almost daily? Yeah.
7. Almost nothing of what you learn in grad school gets applied in the workplace. Statistics, sure. A bit of jargon about psychometrics, okay. But all those boring theories of motivation? Zilch use.
8. Men are creeps. I got hit on by an ancient one-foot-in-the-grave type HR head, who happens to be one of the big wigs in HR circles. Sundry colleagues have got weird texts and compliments from men they met in BD meetings. Utterly grossing out.
9. Certain meetings, you need to take a male colleague along. Certain clients, you have wear saris. Certain cities, stick to Indian wear. You have to decide how to dress depending on who you're meeting that day.
10. Most HR Heads - male ones, that is - tend to have a PYT as an assistant or an HR Executive. I don't mean this to be denigrating in any way, but it's true. Occassionally, they'll be bright and doing good work, but more often than not, you kinda wonder what they're there for.
11. Even if your office lets you wear jeans to work on Fridays, keep a change of clothes with you. You never known when that painful client will call and say a meeting got fixed up.
12. If it's been an easy day, with not much happening, all hell is certain to break loose at precisely 5.56 PM, just when you're thinking you can go home early-ish for a change.
13. Some clients are just never going to trust you. They will call you only if your boss is not taking their calls, and as soon as is possible, they will call your boss to update them on exactly what they told you. Even though you've already updated your boss because you know, she sits in the next room.
14. The number of people who have no idea how to use MS Word and MS Excel properly is astounding.
15. The world would be a much happier place if people just stopped using Power Point for everything.
16. The two words in the title of this post are the most overused and abused words in HR consulting. And they're not even real words.