Email chains

Whenever my manager or anyone sends me an email that effectively asks me to forward it to someone else to ask a question, I usually remove any reference to that part of the chain mail before sending the email forward. Apparently, not everyone does.

So here's what happened to C, a friend:

X needed some data from C, so she sent Y to ask C for said data.
C needed more information on why this data was needed, so she sent X an email asking for said information before she could provide the data.
X forwarded this email to her manager, Z, with the comment "OMG this is so frustrating why can't we get anything done?"
How do I know this? Because Z forwarded the email from X, without bothering to remove the comment above, back to C, asking for the same data, without adding any new information.

If you can make sense of this, good on you.

I don't understand people.

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.

Where I take stock, a year into the job

When I started this job, one week short of a year ago, I came into a role that had just been created, because a need was felt for a focus on the area I would be responsible for. In the year since, I've felt extremely frustrated at how little progress I feel I've made, simply because this role is like that - there's very little data available, the key stakeholders who need to do stuff to start providing data aren't willing to do anything, and a variety of reasons that I can only be vague about, and therefore will not talk about.

The manager who hired me tells me I've contributed a fair amount, even if I don't feel that way, because there was literally nothing when I came on board, and I've managed to create some dashboards and build some visibility for my area. I'm not sure the manager I'm now under sees things the same way, since he wasn't around when there really was nothing, and so I'm not sure he sees the value of my role the way the previous manager does.

I'm moving into a new role in the next couple of weeks. I knew I wasn't going to grow much in this role, and I wanted to try other things, and so I went and networked and interviewed and got another job. Same company, entirely different group and role. So I'm in that weird transition phase where I'm doing my old job, but also beginning to have meetings for the new job; learning what my new job will be, and also put together transition documents for whoever replaces me.

I was chatting with my current manager this morning, and among other things, we talked about the transition. My current team has someone new joining in a couple of weeks, so I asked if she would be taking over my role. Her response left me more than a little stunned.

I'm not sure, to be honest. Your role is so vague and ambiguous, and there's so little to work with - I'm not sure I want that to be the first impression a new employee gets. 

Given that things are actually much better now than they were when I joined, wtf do you think I went through? And is this actually something to be taken into consideration when you assign roles and responsibilities?

And if this becomes the reason this current role ends up vanishing again, it's going be a great pity, as far as I'm concerned.

My badge and I

I'm working again. God, it feels good to say that. Granted, this is only for the next couple of months (because I'm almost done with the first - w00t!), and then it's back to the stress of studying and recruiting, but I'm working again. There is actually a tiny sum of money in my bank account right now that never has to be paid back to anyone. EVER.

However, I wouldn't be me if I didn't find something to whine about. So indulge me for a while.

Having worked in a tiny boutique/start-up/mom 'n' pop set-up for three years, getting used to all these processes in a huge global organization can be... bewildering. I mean, I may have rolled my eyes and torn my hair a gazillion times in those three years because people didn't seem to comprehend the point of any processes at all, but these many? Really?

For instance, there is the matter of this employee badge they gave me. Which hangs around my neck all the time. And I have to use it to open every door I go through. Which would be fine, except not being used to having mundane things such as employee badges, I keep forgetting what I'm supposed to do with it. So I do intelligent things like banging into glass doors because I forgot to wave the badge first, and then waving it over the elevator button and wondering why it's not lighting up. And then, when I went to my hotel's front desk to ask for a replacement key to my room (because y'know, I'd managed to demagnetize mine for the gazillionth time) and they asked me to show some ID, I spent five minutes rummaging through my handbag till the dude cleared his throat and pointed to my employee badge. Which was around my neck. Which has my name and photo on it. And is therefore perfectly acceptable as ID.

Sigh.

Now all this happened in the first two weeks of my internship. Since then, we seem to have got used to each other, and learned to work together.

And then for some reason, yesterday, it started acting like it has a mind of its own. It won't let me into the building. Sure, it'd turn the light green, but then the door wouldn't open. Security fixed it for me yesterday afternoon, but then this morning again, bam! same problem.

It's almost like the damn thing doesn't want me to work.

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.
    

So. many. mails.

There's a client who loves to call at 6 PM in the evening with an urgent requirement that needs to go live as of yesterday. He'll chase you night and day till you close stuff and send it for him to take a look. And then he goes silent.

His subordinate tells you that if he hasn't responded, he must be okay with it, so go ahead and put it live. So you do, and feel very proud of your awesome TAT. But then the client calls, and says that you need to make changes. And you ask him, "but didn't you see it when we sent it to you for your approval?"

And he replies, "I get so many mails from you. I don't read all of them."

Really.

And in continuation...

I also need to let go of my habit of saying it like it is... turns out people don't appreciate it all that much. Huh. Who'd've thunk?

It strikes me...

It occurred to me the other day that I can no longer afford to be as flippant and contemptuous on my blogs as I have tended to be ever since I began blogging. A certain amount of political correctness seems to be the order of the day, especially since sundry colleagues and clients have mentioned going through my other blog. Which is an interesting proposition, seeing as I don't think I've been diplomatic or politically correct in my life.

Take that

One of my main cribbing points for India is that its customer service orientation, well, sorta sucks. You call any customer care helpline number, and I can guarantee that you'll be ready to tear your hair out within minutes.

In the last few days, I've had two interesting experiences; one which proved this opinion completely wrong, and then one that proved me completely right.

I'm supposed to coordinate all IT requirements for the firm I work in; we recently needed to order two desktops, so I was coordinating with the company we usually buy our machines from. The desktops were delivered last Saturday, and by Thursday, no one had showed up to configure them. When I emailed the contact person in Chennai, he replied someone would be in touch asap, and sure enough, someone called that afternoon. This guy, on hearing that I wanted someone to show up at the soonest, asked me to hang on, and turned to his colleague and said something fairly rude about me. When he came back on the line, I let him know that I had heard what he had said. Forget apologizing, he coolly informed me that all the engineers had visits already scheduled, and we couldn't have one visit us till the next evening. Which was the point when I lost it.

Not only did I give it off to him, but once I got off the phone, I emailed our contact person telling him what had happened. Within minutes, I received a call from him asking about what had happened, and apologizing profusely. Half an hour later, I got a call from a fairly senior guy from the company apologizing again, and assuring me that he would schedule an engineer visit at the soonest, and that he would call me as soon as he could confirm a time for me. Not only did he call me back later (twice, actually), he also had me talk to another senior guy who apologized yet again, and even thanked me for being so patient and hearing them every time. By evening, I had actually been apologized to so many times that I was heartily wishing I had never shot off that email. Plus, I'm pretty sure the guy who had spoken to me so rudely would've been sacked by then, and I was beginning to feel quite guilty about it.

On the other hand, Friday evening I hit the malls in Gurgaon and went to two-three departmental stores. The last one I visited, I paid with my debit card. The guy at the counter swiped my card and returned it to me; however, a minute or two later, he asked for my card again saying that there was some problem and that he needed to swipe it again. As I was giving him my card, I received an SMS notification saying that the bill amount had been debited from my account. When I told him this, he said that wasn't possible because the machine hadn't processed my card, and went ahead and swiped my card a second time. Immediately, I got a second SMS notification that the same amount had been debited again. When I showed this to him, he called his manager who told him this wasn't possible, and he therefore told me that I must be mistaken.

I immediately called my bank's customer care who informed me that yes, the same amount had been debited twice. Fortunately, I was able to block payment on the second transaction.

On telling the guy at the counter what the bank had said, he called his manager down. The manager came down and asked me what had happened. He heard me out with a smirk on his face, and informed me that that wasn't possible because their machines were just fine.

I can understand a machine giving problems, I can understand the guy at the counter making a mistake, and it wasn't a particularly big amount that had got debited. What annoyed me was that I was told, repeatedly, despite me showing them my SMS notifications as well as what the bank customer care officer told me, that I must be mistaken and that they have not charged me twice.

Simply making the sale to a customer very often isn't enough. We have six-seven different products of one particular electronics giant at home; we are planning to replace all of them sooner or later because their customer care is lousy. Almost everyone I know agrees that while the cars of a certain company are excellent, they wouldn't buy those cars because their service centre in Gurgaon is completely inefficient.

When companies talk about increasing sales, there are two ways they can do this, as far as my understanding is. They can either get new customers, or they can get existing customers to buy more of their products. If they want the latter to happen, their customer care needs to be, at the very least, customer friendly!

As a customer, I've seen that most companies in India either don't care about this aspect or aren't able to handle it. The company I dealt with for our desktops did excellent damage control, if not a little over the top. Whether it was because they know my firm has given them quite a bit of business in the past or whether they genuinely want to ensure that their customers are satisfied, I wouldn't know. What I do know is that I would go to them if I need more computers or laptops.

The departmental store which charged me twice and where those idiots refused to even accept that they had charged me twice? Not for a long, long time.