The Deviant Cynic

Email Travails - The problems with email

2012-01-22T01:14:00.000-08:00

Let me get on thing straight. Just because you have sent me an email, and you received the insecure read receipt request you stick on every meaningless piece of drivel that leaves your outbox, don't think I actually downloaded the contents of your note straight into my fucking brain, OK?
So don't walk up to me in the hallway and say "What do you mean you don't know why the new product is taking so long?" when the only information you provided me was embedded in the 6th email in a 823468723 long series on the purchasing of toilet seats where Raghavendra Rao said he needed more time because he had fucking tulsi pooja in his grandmothers house.

If you want somebody to know something, send out a specific note and request a response. That way you know that your desired information found it's drowsy mark and didn't get drowned out in a sea of meretricious blather.

And while we're on the topic of email, just because you have received an email, it does not mean you have to reply. A response is required only if you are adding value to the conversation at hand. And you can add value in the following ways:
An approval or rejection per your company's authority level procedures
Providing a requested response: For example, if you receive an email that says "Please confirm your attendance at the free lunch mindfuck that is going to be our quarterly project status update". You are required to respond if you intend to attend. Don't ignore and then show up only to find that there is not enough samosa chat and/or oil-onion-rice-masquearding-as-biryani for you.
A disagreement with a proposed follow up action: For example, if you receive an email that explains a proposed prop for an upcoming presentation, and you disagree with the choice, you should reply and say "I dont think you should use a moose with irritable bowel syndrome to the company premises, even if that is a prop for your presentation on the output of the committee on employee benefits. Can we meet tomorrow to see if I can explain myself better?"
And most difficult - if you have some insight not apparent to the distribution, but relevant to the discussion: For example in an email chain regarding how to handle an upcoming audit, you might have a flash of insight and so you contribute: "While we discuss how to painfully castrate the certifying auditor, I think we should also consider extending this action to our quality consultant - HE'S the one who actually tells our bosses we need this dude coming in here every six months and peeking up our rectums!
And continuing with the suggestions to maximize pain during castration, what about using a baseball bat?"

As you will note, in all examples I gave above, I followed my own advice about requesting a response by adding a question. So I know - if I don ot get a response from my desired mark, that the message has not been sufficiently imbibed.
So on a related note, just because you have a reason to respond, does not mean you copy the entire original distribution.
While responding to confirm your attendance at the aforementioned free lunch status update mindfuck, you don't need to copy everybody when you tell the sender that you're going to be 15 minutes late. Unless you want our VP of product development to know that you're too cheap to hire a decent man, so you hired a lecherous prick for a driver, as a consequence of which you have to go pick up your daughter from school yourself, and are perennially late to office. So chose your distribution wisely.

And finally on email signatures. Don't add your sign-off remark (warmest regards, heartfelt thanks, greatest day and other such superlatives that you put in above your name) in the standard signature. It looks really weird if you get an email from somebody that says, "Sorry to hear about the incident with the lecherous driver and your daughter, THANKS A LOT!!!, Fuck Nut."
Or,
"I am deeply disappointed with your performance over the last 3 months. This email is to put you on official notice. Warmest Regards, Thanking you, yours Sincerely, Always affectionate, Dumb Fuck"

So make your sign off specific to the email at hand, and only put your name and contact info in the signature.

The State of Indian Cricket

2012-01-17T04:28:00.000-08:00

"We have earned the criticism", said Gambhir. No shit, Sherlock. Thanks for clearing that up. Thanks also for pointing out that not just VVSL but the entire top order should be blamed for the current state of our batting. Again. thank you for admitting the obvious.

(VVSL, by the way stands for Very Very Superb Laxman or Very Very Soporific Laxman depending on the running average of his last three innings. He must be Very Very Startled Laxman given the speed at which the affection for him changes in some quarters of the Indian press)

Both of Gambhir's statement are obviously true. But they're not the whole truth.

The biggest contributor to the current infirmity of our team is hiding somewhere behind the surface of media coverage. The broken condition of cricketing in India is not due to the current performance of one or a set of players. It is the due to the baleful callousness of critical institutions in our country.

Not being a cricketer at any level, I wouldn’t know the bastards that caused the current ineptitude of our otherwise (and worryingly recently) much vaunted team, if they walked up and spat in my face. But I have to assume that they’re powerful enough that even the brave capitulate and cower ingloriously when faced with the prospect of pointing a finger at them.

All that said, let’s see if you can play a little game with me. Identify what comes next in the following series:

World Cup; 5 day rest; IPL; 5 day rest; England; 5 day rest; Australia; ......

(a) Sore and bleeding ass

(b) Ridicule

(d) Death

You don't have to be a mensa candidate to figure out the answer is (e) all of the above, in that order.

Even Alexander wasn’t able to keep on going at some point, right? So how do you think Dhoni and his beatific half smile can motivate the weary?

Now if anyone of you can tell me who may be responsible for bursting the calendar full of cricket, instantly I will have a clue as to who is responsible.

Any guesses?

I'm NOT Available

2011-12-27T03:39:00.000-08:00

I was at this dinner yesterday. One of my friends that I had not seen for a while invited me. He had also invited another one of our mutual friends. So that’s 3 of us, and then there were 3 acquaintances of the original inviter who also showed up. I say acquaintances because I don’t think my friend would BE friends with people like them, and I say showed up because I like to think that my friend would not invite acquaintances like them

The three of us who were friends from our engineering college days displayed a startling number of common and, I hope you agree here, likeable behaviours.

One, we all came (arrived, you dirty minded troll) on time. We did not have to message the others 7 times or call for directions from across the street. Is it that fucking hard to find your way to a popular restaurant in an upscale hotel? I don’t think so. What is more likely is that they neither thought it important enough to look up the venue, nor leave on time.

Second, we did not look at our cellphones during dinner or drinks. I say cellphones because I think smartphones is a misnomer : the phones are not smart, and neither are most of their owners.

This is a pet peeve for me here, but I think if you are out to talk to somebody in person, that person should be more important that some piece of news that was sent passively for you. Are your real friends more important than the ones you have on facebook? Are those people connected to you on facebook really your friends? Do you know what these so called friends will do if you die? Send out a fucking message for somebody’s wall and add a frikkin bunch of screwy punctuation marks to symbolize the emotion they feel for a fraction of a second. Fuck the friend who won’t lend you money and to hell with the wall you can’t piss on, I always say.

And I don’t care what Rehman says, har ek friend zaroori nahin hota hae.
In fact, har ek friend, friend bhi nahin hota hae chootiye!

And replying to email? Really? Do you really have to answer your email as soon as it comes? You know who needs to do that? Insecure people. I’m sorry. I wish I could make up a joke here or something, but this is just not funny. Chill out on the email replies people. Unless you’re on the shitter, constipated, waiting for the turd to drop, and you just pissed on whatever crap newspaper it is you carried into the loo with you, that email reply can wait.

And not just replies. People just look at their phones and READ email while there is a conversation going on. If the conversation at this table is so fucking boring, why don’t you take your interesting self to wherever it is the email message came from?

UNLESS you are expecting an email from a VC informing you of whether or not he is going to give you half a million bucks for your social media startup, checking for email every few minutes with the fervor of a monkey checking for lice on his brother's head is disrespectful and annoying.

And like I said, these are passive messages. These are messages that are sent out without an expectation of when you will read them. Unlike say a phone call, which could actually be a real living and breathing friend calling to ask you for money. Even with those, we have sunk into such a culture of availability (especially those of us who have had a cell phone from before college days), that people take your availability for granted.

Save yourselves before it is too late. Train your family and friends to respect the minimum time to response they should expect for every mode of communication. I’m not saying this is the minimum time that you will take. You will respond to all of them asap. But if you tell everybody that they should not expect a response - or at the very least that they should not get mad if they do not get a response by – the following times, then you will be free of the shackles of this availability expectation that we face…

Personal Invitation: On time (inside 10 minutes of stipulated time). Cancellations well in time with appropriate groveling attached

Email: 1 day turnaround. I'm writing a post on just email, so more details there
Text Message/Phone Call: Call back inside of 4 hours
Second Txt/Phone: Immediate, but if you ONCE try me a second time for a stupid reason, all responses default back to 4 hours.
Facebook/Twitter/Myspace/Friendster/Orkut: Middle finger

PowerPointless

2011-12-27T00:42:00.000-08:00

As I walked out from a pitch so soporific that I thought I had died and gone to hell prematurely with a dissatisfying lack of flames, I realized that though much has already been said about the impact of powerpoint, I was just going to HAVE to add to the blather.

I feel for PowerPoint. I really do. It was not meant to be a tool for destruction, but in the hands of the inept and mind-numbingly unimaginative, it turns into a device for brain cell death. They don't call them bullets for nothing, I guess.

“Just because the spawn of Gates and Lucifer CAN rotate your text boxes on the way in doesn't mean you should ya fucking moron!!”, I wanted to yell. And I probably would have, if I hadn't been put to sleep with such astounding swiftness.

The guy spent 30 minutes telling a room full of managers and employees absolutely nothing. And for having no content, there was a startlingly humungous amount of text on his slides. And that’s where the rub is. All these people spewing mildly humorous venom at PowerPoint and Bill Gates need to realize that’s it’s not the PowerPoint to blame. It’s the idiot with the clicker in front of the screen.

If that moron who preparing to take your eye out with the laser pointer had something of import to say, you could have given him a thin stick and a pile of horse manure, and he would have made his point.

If that no good hack had any talent at communication, you could have given him a crayon and a coloring book and he would have shown you the world in Eastman Colour.

PowerPoint is just a magnifying glass that can make a passionate speaker look better, and a going-through-the-motions manager look worse than either of them really are.
So don't blame PowerPoint. Just walk out.

Here. We. Go. (Again)

2011-11-25T23:47:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since I last posted anything... 3 months and then some actually

As you know I was working on a project that didnt seem pointless, with a team that had an IQ, in a city that didn't close it's bars at an arbitrarily appointed hour. I didn't have any reason to blog.

Job done, I am back in Bangalore now, and was immediately seized by a burining desire to bitch about the fantastic parking lots masquerading as the highways of Bangalore. I barely managed to keep that down and that by quaffing large quantities of Mallya's finest (which, by the bay, is not ultra) at a dangerous speed egged on by an annoying maitre d' wanting to shut sop and go home at an early time. The traffic and the fuck-off-at-11-pm rule aren't going to change any time soon, so I'm sure that will keep my bile levels steadily on the rise.
And now my responsibilities now are significantly higher, and I will be making a bunch of changes. This should also pit me against the banalities of corporate procedures and the stupidities of individuals in powerful offices. That should give me adequate levels of indigestion as well.

So I think some blogging will follow.
BUT.....
I have to watch what I blog about and when, so I do not know if I'm going to be able to vent with the fervour of yore. It will behove me to stop calling colleagues bitches, whores, dumbfucks, and the like, even if they verily might be the same, and I fear that I do not have the talent to spew vitriol and make it entertaining without using scathing insults and expletives as a crutch.

I will try. Lets see how it goes.
This post is just so a note goes out to the people following this blog saying I'm back.
Thanks for following and I will be happy to get your emails denouncing my lack of regularity, my insistence on not using spell/grammar checks and other sundry faults.

It's good to be back. Again.

Leadership Behavior

2011-08-01T06:52:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama presented a last minute deal that - as I understand it - gives up on the balanced approach that the whole country had wanted. The tax breaks to the super rich are going to continue. The social programs are going to get screwed. The most powerful man in the world was held hostage by his own parliament, and he was forced to give up on something he promised. How refreshing would it have been if he was able to dare the demagogues and the frikkin deadbeats who want to put off paying their bills to actually come out into the public domain and state their reluctance in plain English. But he didn't dare dare the con men.

Closer to home, the chief minister BSY, in a city I still think fondly off, refused to leave office after being asked to. The leadership of his party was made to look like distressed heroines from 70's bollywood flicks, while he calmly kept extending his stay in office by hours and days and simultaneously put conditions on his resignation being sent. How interesting would it have been if Advani flew down, made a public statement saying we do not tolerate this nonsense, smacked him in the face with a dismissal and dared him and his cronies to walk out of their party. But they didn't dare dare the allegedly corrupt.

I'm sure both Obama and Advani thought about doing so though. I'm sure they did. They just couldn't act it out.
Elected people become wusses in powerful positions.
On the other hand selected people become tyrants.
Maybe it's time to think of a third way of appointing these people.

Bombay se aaya mera post

2011-07-25T02:08:00.000-07:00

As some of you already know, I'm in Bombay setting up some offices for a new product division of my company.
This is exciting stuff.
The primary fun factor is that the products we will be working on here are going to be developed in India and are in an area that my company does not participate in right now.
The next yay factor is we have some tremendously smart people over here and everybody is really pumped about this move. Its terribly enriching to have motivated intelligent people focused on how to solve some problems that will have an exciting impact on the future of many people inside the company and outside.
And last but not the least, this city is pretty awesome. It smells like ass in some places, but it's pretty awesome nonetheless.
That probably explains why I have not been ranting for so long. I was actually happy-busy instead of being stupid-busy.
I should've known this was all too good to be true.

Have you seen what happens when a giant well-fed heifer wants to take a steaming dump? The bull continues to walk nonchalantly down the path it is going, merely twitches it's tail and a warm pile of shit exits the dark hole at its rear and sploshes on to the floor. The bull keeps on going as if nothing as happened, and if you're an ant caught under this green glob of goo your world has changed for ever. And if you're an ant actually trying to help the bull in some way (I know the analogy is breaking down here, but bear with me...), then your soul has probably taken a severe beating as well.

Well yesterday I was the ant, my company was the bull, the corporate real estate team was the tail, and corporate finance was the dark hole.

The mistake we are making is taking a fledging operation and applying the full might of corporate standards to it. We can (should) not burden a startup organization with rigid rules. Growing a startup requires freedom. It almost requires a bit of anarchy (although that may be too strong of a word). I really can not think of a major startup that was successful in spite of being watched over by corporate hawks to ensure that they bought the right color chairs, had the right sized cubicles and used company standard desktops and corporate approved courier services. I can think of startups that succeeded despite having very little money, but not under the watchful scrutiny of spreadsheet mongers and fucking trolls who only know how to read something written in a corporate policy document and enforce it without any consideration of context.

This may be different for hardware products, but in software, one more thing I have learnt by working for a major company is that if you have a new product idea, select the right people, put one clear leader at the top, give them 20% less than the money they asked for, ask for 20% more market share than you think is reasonable for your business, and let them learn how to fly.
And as they're getting ready to leap off the precipice without killing themselves, dont put a lead cylinder of corporate standards and unnecessary nonsense like executive reviews on their backs.

Cricket World Cup Update - March 31st

2011-03-31T11:02:00.000-07:00

This is breathtaking.
So much so that I am breathless.
Some of you know that I have been on a world cup cricket watching spree.
Although I have yet to watch a single match in Bangladesh, I have watched more live cricket in this past month than I have in years.

Mohali is a beautiful ground. Any of you that gets a chance to go watch a game in Mohali should go. Especially if Pakistan is playing.
By far the most enjoyable game for me. And for those who were following my 5 over emails, I apologize. After I saw Dhoni turn his back, I just couldn't keep my nerves calm enough to let my fingers do the typing.

And after that - I was too engrossed in the situation to get back to typing.
The game itself was interesting but the stadium was infinitely more so.
The energy in that place was absolutely killer. Everybody was just turned ON. It was a great experience. The closest a cricket game has ever come to a music concert where you and the crowd around you get in the same zone.
I highly recommend this.
I know a lot of people can not watch a 5 day match. That is because it takes a love for playing the game to follow a 5 day match. A test match is not a spectator sport for spectators. It's a spectator sport for players.
And I know a lot of you prefer the 4 hour version. That is because you are morons.
And for the many of you who like to watch a 1 day match. Get yourself tickets to a day nighter in Mohali. I recommend it highly.

And yes, I'm going to the final. I am in Mumbai already, writing this from Jazz by the Bay on my phone.
I do not think I will be sending updates on the final. I'm not going to mar my experience of being at the cricket world cup final by sending out cynical short bursts of angry pancreatic fluid disguised as reports.

You guys enjoy the game.
And as a parting note - if you belong to the group of people who believe the match yesterday was fixed, then while I applaud your cynicism - after all it is a trait I base many of my own judgments on - I also pity how much of your soul you have lost to this most dangerous of traits.
Regardless of your cynicism, you should retain the ability to enjoy a good emotional ride. Keep your cynicism in check my buddies. If you do, it will guide you. If you don't, you'll become a cold, mistrusting, shifty eyed, soulless, paranoid freak.

Catch you after the game.
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UPDATE - March 31, Midnight
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Sorry just now got through a bunch of mail.
1. Which matches did you watch?
Leagues
Sun Feb 20 - Kenya v New Zealand, Chepauk, Chennai
Thu Feb 24 - South Africa v West Indies, FSK Delhi
Sun Feb 27 - India v England, Chinnaswamy, Bangalore
Wed Mar 2 - England v Ireland, Chinnaswamy, Bangalore
Sat Mar 5 - Sri Lanka v Australia, Premadasa, Colombo
Sat Mar 12 - India v South Africa, VCA, Nagpur
Thu Mar 17 - England v West Indies, Chepauk, Chennai
Sat Mar 19 - Australia v Pakistan, Premadasa Colombo
Quarters
Sun Mar 20 - India v West Indies, Chepauk, Chennai
Thu Mar 24 - India v Australia, Sardar Patel, Ahmedabad
Sat Mar 26 - Sri Lanka v England, Premadasa, Colombo
Semis
Wed Mar 30 - India v Pakistan, Mohali, Chandigarh
Finals
Sat Apr 2 - India v Sri Lanka, Wankhede, Mumbai

2. How did you get tickets to all the matches?
League matches were easy as you will imagine. I just bought them as soon as I could, and I bought the nicer seats so I didnt really have problems with the ticket issuances in the early matches.
I had decided early that I would not go to Bangladesh, so I didnt buy any tickets for that country knowing that I would miss the India quarter final if we were going to play in Mirpur. Thankfully that didnt happen
Here's the crazy part. Semi's I bought tickets to both. I couldn't possibly make both (Colombo to Mohali in one early morning ain't happening.) So I thought I'd buy both and pick the one that promised to be a better game. No brainer there.
And the tickets to the finals is a gift from a close friend who is a senior executive at one of the major sponsors.

3. How did you manage time off from work?
I don't understand this question. I told them I will be taking the following days off as soon as I had the tickets.

4. Why didn't you report out on all the games?
I'm not a reporter. I'm not good at it, and it takes away from my own enjoyment. And frankly I didn't spend my hard earned money so that I could get YOUR nuts off.

5. Please Report on the Final.
No.

6. Get on Facebook/Twitter/Orkut/Friendster/MySpace
I dont see the point. I'm open to convincing arguments, but I doubt there is one.

7. You're a lucky Sonovabitch for getting all those tix.
Not to be condescending, but you could have done the same. There is a small percentage of you who would probably say you can not afford the expense, and you may be right but I doubt it. If you really wanted to do it, you could. Work, Money, Travel and Time are excuse. So no. I'm not lucky. You're a dumass.

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Cricket World Cup Rant - March 4th

2011-03-04T06:01:00.000-08:00

After my last post where I expressed sympathy for the bottom four teams, Ireland took it upon themselves to outdo what we did against England. On the backs of the world cups fastest ever century, they made the English look kinda silly. Immediately I thought of how if my blog was more popular, tons of people would write in saying "A-ha! See! Moron!" or some such unintelligent, badly constructed attempts at witticism pointing out how I was wrong and too quick to judge.

And then Pakistan almost capitulated against Canada.
I still stick by my stand though. The poor sons of bitches in the bottom four are just the whipping boys of the tournament that are making the watching of it longer and boring-er than should be legally allowed. (And yes I am aware of all the things that are legally not allowed but yet commonplace in our country, and that is an aside I do not want to get into right now, sorry.)
My point is, those freak games prove nothing other than the fact that on a good day a strong man can make inept bowling and fielding pay. And that if you play your high school team enough times, you will eventually lose one.
And Pakistan versus Canada? Please. Pakistan is Pakistan. This kinda shit happens to them all the time. They are sometimes exude effervescent brilliance and sometimes terrifying dumb.

New Zealand relaxed around a woeful Zimbabwe, and Bangladesh were insulted by West Indies in full public view in a match that failed to last 32 overs in all, and barely put a 100 runs on the board
Speaking on Pakistan and West Indies though. Here's a headline from Cricinfo:

The first thing that ran across my mind, was a picture of a bus riding slowly with a lazy smile and half closed eyes going "this is some good shit mate.. toke it up!!" And that disturbing thought later I was wondering why the Bangladeshi's throwing shit at their own players? They're the ones that sucked..
On closer inspection, I found out that some upstanding citizens had indeed mistaken the bus for the Bangladeshi ones and had taken it upon themselves to hand out justice.
Fucking idiots.
Isn't humanity amazing?

Cricket World Cup Report

2011-03-02T03:30:00.000-08:00

In other news, dont you just love how everybody is enjoying beating up on the poor hapless souls who have been flown in from near and far to act as punching bags of the top 6 teams in word cricket.
As I type this England is cruising along against Ireland and Cricinfo is telling me that the Brit middle order is laying a solid foundation. 200 is 35 over is more than a solid foundation.
It's a fucking thumping.
When I last heard "beat under 10" that meant losing before you reached 10 points in Table Tennins. Now it means your opponents overhauled your total in less than 10 overs.

And TV has promo shots where commentators (which actually comes from the French and Latin roots "comme" meaning like, "entat" meaning intestinal and "ors" meaning outpourings) are telling me how Sri Lanka are taking on Kenya
Huh?
If anything it should be Kenya taking on Sri Lanka you babbling fools.
David took on Goliath not the other way around, ya fuckin moron.

Maybe if you had said Sri Lanka pick on Kenya tonight, it would make a bit more sense, but then if you had sense, then you wouldn't be spouting shit in between deliveries and filling in space between commercials.
Look, I feel bad for you. The TV guys put gel on your head and force you into suits and make you talk in English and on top of that some people in the audience actually want you to think for your money. Fuck 'em, right? I get it.
My question is, how do I get in on the action?

You gotta love the Times of India

2011-03-02T03:14:00.000-08:00

Some of you know this already, but I love the Times of India. I especially love how their campaigns such as Lead India and such have led to everlasting change and imbued the cynical population of our country with renewed hope and vigor.
I also love how they will not tolerate corruption by our elected representatives regardless of how minor the errors of their ways might be.
Just look at how they went after Mr Raja

If you read through this scan from the front page top half article from today's Times, you will notice that even though Mr Raja only took in the pitiable sum of Rs 3000, and went through the trouble of hiding it in his wife's accounts in island nations, the Times got to the bottom of it.

Thank you Times of India. Now that you have found out where they stashed the 3000 rupees, maybe we can find out what happened to the other 2999.9997 FUCKING CRORES you lazy proof-reader-less tabloid monkeys!!!

The Tie

2011-02-28T06:50:00.000-08:00

What a scary fuckin match, huh?
I thought matches were tied when both teams deserved to win. In yesterday's case, it was because neither did. They both played some terrible basic cricket. Admittedly they both displayed flashes of greatness, but overall I think they both threw away the win. .

And I heard today that Dhoni was pissed off with the UDRS decision. I don't understand what for.
Here's what happened.
Bell got rapped on his pads; Bowden said not out; Yuvi convinced his Mahi to appeal; Fourth umpire said looks like it would have hit middle, boys, but the dude was 2.5metres out in front;Bowden said - Not out.

Everything here happened according to the rule book. The rule book says that if the batsman is that much out in front, then the fourth umpire passes that info to the on field umpire and the umpire is allowed to factor in whatever uncertainty he sees when the dude is that much out in front. Bowden was uncertain. Bell stayed in, bashed another 52 and played an important part is scaring the shit out of screaming India fans in the stadium.

Now Dhoni goes about saying he's upset, and there's some adulteration of human and technological judgement. Bah humbug, I say.
He says either use technology or humans. Look, if there was no UDRS, we would have still got Bowden's original decision. Not Fucking Out. So there,I know it sucks, swallow your rage, and regurgitate it back up against your lazy ass fielders, who let the English milk them for singles. And you know when they say "milked for singles"?? When fielders move like fucking COWS!!

And here's a couple more messages I would send out if I was friendly enough with these - "players" - to call them and express my consternation:
Munaf Patel: You gave out 12 runs to tailenders. Shame on you.
Yuvraj: Don't gloat about that 50 - you ain't outta the woods yet bro. More than half of your runs were streaky and I'm not so convinced you've hit form
Piyush Chawla: What the fuck? What was that celebration for the wicket off your last ball? Relief? You gave away 3 fucking 6-ers, you shmuck! Did you forget that part? No really, what the fuck is the celebration FOR??

Sachin: Field dude Field. And Bowl. You wanna win this one? You better not just bat, you hear me?

Eating Crow

2011-02-20T07:40:00.000-08:00

I do not know where that phrase orginates. It sounds like quite an unpleasant thing to do - munch on a scavenging ugly looking and ugly sounding little critter... But I know what it means. To accept that you were wrong and admit to your foolishness.
I was wrong about Virat Kohli.
The way he played against bangladesh was a revelation. His cover driving was Dravid-esque and I found myself almost wishing him to throw away his wicket like he has done in the past just so I would be vindicated.
He didn't.
Damn him.
But if he can continue in this vein, he's quite an asset in the middle order.

And talking about changing application: Sehwag, that rambunctious swiper outside the offstump, played an innings so good, I shuddered. Can you imagin what will happen if he could curb his malevolence when the spinner is brought on, and saved his disdain till the batting powerplays?

Granted, both these guys showed glimpses of surmounting what I despised in them against minnows. But Bagladesh is the biggest of the minnows. And I am (as always) cynical about whether they will show the same combination of thought and gumption against more accomplished bowling.
But if they do, we're in for a treat of a world cup boys.

So Kohli, here's to you. Good job. I eat my words. Keep it going. Even though I still think you're ugly, you're now a key player in our side in my reckoning. You can't do anything about that hirsute face and short forehead of yours, but you can win us the world cup. And for that, I'm sure many (more) women would be forgiving....

Hello Ladies!

2011-02-17T22:56:00.000-08:00

I spent the last four months in Brazil. Awesome beaches, beautiful women, good food.. just all around great experience
Even at the office everybody was nice and accommodating; forever pointing out good bars and taking me places.
But I'm back now. And while there's not enough hatred in me yet to spew over this wasteland of blather also known as the internet, I'm sure I'll be pissed off at something soon enough.

I went in to the India office office yesterday after this long gap, and I had a great time catching up with people till I saw this guy walk toward me. He's one of the senior managers who has the amazing knack of simultaneously doing nothing and appearing busy. Lots of people think he's doing a great job carrying an entire department on his shoulders while there's some of us in the know who realize he's just a guy with a furrowed brow and a file.
People like him bring the company down. And worse, they make my stomach acids churn.

I had to take immediate evasive maneuvers to avoid him walking up to me, ask me some question, and then even before I begin to answer, walk away claimng to be going to do something of tremendous importance and diarrheal urgency. Thankfully, I succeeded that time. But this isn't going to last...

Truisms that aint - Part II

2010-11-01T01:14:00.001-07:00

Since so many of y'all loved the original Truisms post, here's a couple more.

Exec: The customer is always right
Me: No he's not. Nobody is always anything. My customer just told me that he wants to buy a purple shirt with silver embroidered stars, to wear to a church wedding. Notwithstanding the fact that he's Gujju, he's wrong!!! You're just spouting this mantra because you are a testicle-less wonder of a man who doesn't have the spinal rigidity required to tell a customer he's wrong. Either that or you're selling a product like crack cocaine that is inherently dangerous to your customers. And you know this. And you tell yourself that the customer asked for it, and he's always right, so it must be OK to sell it to them. 'Coz that LIE is the dampener that prevents the already feeble voice of your conscience from echoing around the vacuum that is your soul, you mother fucker.

Exec: You can't make decisions without data. Lets get the data.
Me: Ok. I've got some data here on the GDP of Fuckerabad. That help? You make decisions without data every day when you have the opinion of a senior executive to swing on, you peanut brained monkey. Now when you're caught in a tough situation you want more data? You want more TIME you weak brained twit, so you can wait till somebody makes the decision for you or the damned storm just passes. So just admit it instead of spewing meaningless drivel to make yourself look rational.

Exec: It is corporate policy
Me: While this just sounds like a declaration of a fact, what you are actually implying is that you are loath to change anything that has "corporate" next to it. What is corporate? Who is this corporate? Just a bunch of humans who puked out a policy that troubles the employees. This is either because those humans are unfit and incompetent, or because those employees were Munaf Patel (which is probably the same thing, but anyway), both of which are great reasons to change the fucking policy!!

Exec: Lets be more aggressive
Me: (Running toward him with hand raised!) YAAAAA!!!! MADERCHOOOOOT!!!! (SLAP!!!!!)

Death by Committee.

2010-10-21T00:15:00.000-07:00

Yeah I know. Not an original title. You've probably heard that phrase/fragment many times before, I was actually going to call it:
"Death by aneurysm caused by high blood pressure levels brought on by the frustration with the inaction, gutlessness and general pointlessness of a Committee." But that would have made the permalink too long....

There is only one good reason to form a committee - When you do not want to put too much dependence on the opinion of one man. In that case, you get a group of people with varied experiences and expertise to advise - and monitor the actions of - that one dude. For example boards of companies. But even then you will see that the dude (CEO in this case) is ultimately responsible.
But unfortunately, the real reason most committees are brought into existence are one of the below:
a). There IS A NEED for a person of influence and authority, but you have NOT APPOINTED one
b). There is NO NEED for a person of influence and authority, but you HAVE APPOINTED one.
c). A case of special disaster, where there IS A NEED, but instead of appointing a person and giving him authority, you have appointed a titular, incompetent, apathetic INVERTEBRATE.

The only case from the above three that has a chance of succeeding is case b. And that too if the person that you appointed is an exceedingly capable, dynamic and astute leader. And we all know there are very few of those types of people.

If you dont have an explicitly appointed owner for a set of decisions that do need to be made then what will happen is a set of reptiles with lower authority levels will get together and form a committee. Such committees are generally called councils. If the members are truly arrogant pricks, those committees will be called boards.
And what happens at these boards? Posturing, Grandstanding and Backstabbing - that's what. Nothing will ever get done by a bunch of airheads who are flailing like flagella to prove that they are better, and more important and their businesses more successful than the next one.
While there may not be much benefit to the company from such committees, YOU may be able to benefit. If you're capable of swimming with the sharks and playing their politics, you may benefit from the visibility to different businesses and the weaknesses of your competition. And you MAY get opportunities to prove that you're not the petty insecure manager that the others are by taking on something that you can herd the cats toward.

IN the case of special disaster, you're truly fucked. You get a committee of epic failure. It will do nothing, and will disrupt the functioning of various divisions in the company.
When you hire a incompetent apathetic invertebrate and put him in a position that has explicit organizational power, that's bad enough. But generally you will find out quickly he's bad and you can get him out.
But when you put such bastards in a position where there is low organizational authority but where he has to rely on inferential authority or generating influence then he WILL form a committee. Possibly many. And none of them will do anything.
Such insects never give as much as a fly's asshole about what is done or how fast it is done, or whether it is done, but the WILL care about giving out the impression that THEY tried. IF anything didn't happen it's because of the environment, external factors, and other people.
These are committees you should never ever be a part of. Ever.

(Oh and Virat Kohli's century doesn't change the fact he still has miles to go before he proves himself to be worthy. If it were left to me, I would drop him from the team on the basis that he looks like a retard and is overrated. The only thing Virat about him are his eyebrows.)

Truisms That Aint

2010-10-06T05:40:00.000-07:00

Last time I posted something about evil dudes in the organizations that use truisms to win or otherwise end arguments. They just spout these statements that for some reason nobody argues with, then they walk away with a smug look on their face that I would very much like to wipe out with a piece of genuine Kashmir Willow.

I always feel like responding to these bitches with spit spraying from my mouth as I berate their use of these truisms, but I am unfortunately often forced to calm the fuck down because of office decorum. So what better place to act out my fantasy responses to those evil bitches in my very own blog. Here goes

Truism: There is no right or wrong answer
Me: Wrong motherfucker. There is. There is ALWAYS a right or wrong answer. It may not be clear to YOU that one of the available options is better than the others, but it IS. Maybe you'll know now or later, but that doesn't mean you just walk off and put the decision making on somebody else you piece of shit.

Truism: There is no such thing as a stupid question.
Me: Yea you're right, dipshit. Questions are not sentient beings. So you can take offense to characterising questions themselves as stupid. But not the people who ask them, right? YOU are stupid. There. Happy?

Truism: We can't get anywhere if we dont work together. Listen, there is no I in Team
Me: No there isn't, but there's U in FUCKER. What does that even mean? The guy in engineering is a no good work shirking dick, and you're just too pussy to do anything about it, so you just ask people to get along? And did you notice there's U in pussy?

Truism: You have to be a leader. You have to BE the change you want to see.
Me: What? Fuck!! So if I want to change that IT database, then I have to BE a database that works? What the fuck? OK here's me being an ugly idiot jumping into a well. Does that now mean you will too?

Truism: An employee's career is his own responsibility
Me: Really? But he doesn't have the authority does he? Otherwise he could have just promoted himself! You scheming bitch. You want him to have the responsibility without having the authority? What kind of delegation is that, motherfucker?

Truism: Quality is number 1
Me: Make up your mind, you idiot, it's billowing in the wind like the blade of grass that passes for your spine. WHICH is number 1? Quality? I thought it was safety? Or is it the customer? You're just making this shit up as you go along aren't you?
Response: There is no right or wrong answer.
Me: Aaaargh

Employee: People are leaving my team because the pay is too low
Evil Supremo: People leave managers. Not the company
Me: Yup. People do leave managers. See ya.

The four types of people

2010-09-28T03:08:00.000-07:00

There are four types of guys in every company. If I was a consultant, I would put it as a two by two chart with two axes, like the one shown below.

Malevolence is just another word for evil, but it sounds so much better, doesn't it? And if you're thinking that there are people that have NO evil in them, fuck, bring those people to me.
Remember, I'm talking about corporations here. If you're thinking about bringin up people like Mothers and Mahatmas, while I would enjoy that discussion, note that those people would never be in corporations.

Now,

High intelligence low Malevolence people are just great to have around. Lets call them The Good Dudes coz frankly that's what they are. They have it together. They are focused on their personal benefits and careers, but have good lines that they wouldnt cross, and they demonstrate that they generally want to do the right thing and keep the company going in the right direction.

Low intelligence low Malevolence people - lets call them The Commons just because of how startlingly common they are - are ok to have around, if they take direction. Most of the people in a company are doers. You need people who are competent at what they do, and if they have enough intelligence to turn their share of the screws on the line everyday, fucking super. Otherwise Sayonara,

Low Intelligence, High Malevolence people - I call them Satan's Stupids - are the fucking biggest pains around. I say get rid of every single one of them as soon as you can identify them. These guys are not only dumb, but their self serving and evil behavior makes them incompetent, and all they're trying to do every single day is to shirk work, pander to the boss, and give the hardworking less malevolent types high blood pressure.

High Intelligence, High Malevolence people - lets call them The Iagos, first because mother-fucking-self-serving-devil-spawn is kinda long and second because no character represents the evil of this box more than Iago (Iago who? Aw come on!!! Othello? From this moment on I will speak no word? No? fuck he was a hard core villian dudes... fine - Saif Ali Khan's character in Omkara was modelled after Iago). Anyways... Iagos are the most dangerous people in your organization. Because they're hard to find out and are generally good actors. They come off to most people as one of the good dudes and are often able to keep themselves in sheep's clothing for long enough that they either quit and go to another company at a higher position, or get promoted and get so much exposure that one of real Good Dudes sees through his evil cloak.

NOw, you know which one you are. You don't have to tell me. You know.
I'm going to give you a few hints about how to identify others around you.

The Good Dudes: These guys, like I said, generally have it together. They know who their customers are are, and if you are one of their customers, you probably love them. They usually seem happy just because if they aren't they will either change the situation or leave. Very rarely, they're unhappy and bitching about their company. Mostly that prefaces their departure for greener pastures elsewhere.

The Commons: They're all around you. If you're one of their customers, you're probably not delighted, but marginally satisfied. They need clear and specific direction for relatively simple tasks, and tend to take a long time to learn how to do things. They're also mostly willing to help people around them, but if there is ambiguity involved, they may run to their trusted friends - or you - for direction.

Satans Stupids: These guys think they're hotter than they actually are. They're almost never willing to help out people around them, and are generally incapable of keeping most of their customers happy. They publicly make stupid statements, and generally have a very low awareness of the actual work going on around them.

And finally The Iagos: This is the toughest of them all. They keep most of their customers happy by mooching of the capabilities of others, or coming up with fantastic reasons for their failures, or by blaming somebody else foe a job poorly done. They hide behind truisms like "There is no right or wrong answer" or "Quality is number one" when they dont really have anything of purport to say. They schmooze and generally have a great rapport with many people in positions higher than their own, but their employees and peers are generally unhappy with them. They hire, raise and convert people to Satan's Stupids over time, and then use THEM to do their evil bidding.

Look around your organization or team. If you have The Good Dudes, you should take care of them. The Commons who can take direction, take care of them too. They will be your loyal soldiers. Satan's stupids are easy to identify and you should fire them immediately. And finally The Iagos, do not deal with them directly - they're capable of taking you down. Stay away from them, and make sure if possible that they do not get into a position of authority over you.

This is broken

2010-09-14T08:54:00.000-07:00

The title of this post used to be a blog run by Seth Godin - a fascinating chap with an even more fasinating head. The blog has since been assimilated into another one of Mr Godin's blogs and has ceased to be much fun. The entire idea was to spot things that make you scream "THIS IS BROKEN", and bring it up to the rest of the world to see. Godin put them in seven categories based on why he thought they may have gotten that way.

It was all good fun, and when I had first heard about it, the idea of screaming out 'THIS IS BROKEN" whenever I see somthing that is just done so wrong connected with me quite a bit. (Out of my mouth the scream would be more like "This is fucking broken!! Which moron is responsible for this piece of shit? Bring him to me so I may roast him in his own spittle and condemn him to a life of pain and penury", since as you readers know, I am given to profanity, verbosity uncontrolled anger, and parenthetical digressions like this one. But coming back to the post at hand....)

You'll see Godin's talk and his aforementioned head below, and I promise I'm not stealing his thunder, but the reason I find this talk (and his now swallowed up blog) endearing and lasting in my memory is that he's not only pointing out things that are broken, but also pointing out reasons why they may be, and four of them are also reasons why so many people in so many corporations around the world are unhappy with their colleagues and are enduring bouts of hyperventilation every day at work.

Not my job: Where if it is not directly your responsibility, you just stand by and watch
Selfish Jerks: Where you do something that will benefit you in some twisted way (as in less paperwork), but will be more work for me
The world changed: Where you keep doing something because it was done that way when Tipu Sultan still ruled over Mysore
I'm not a fish: Where you dont think about the experience I will have using your shitty service or product.

See the talk. I hope you get what I'm talking about above.

Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

Bonus Plans

2010-08-28T07:45:00.001-07:00

Its that time of the year again, when the powers that be get together in their hollowed corridors, smoke cigars, sip on scotch and every once in a while let out a devilish laugh as they pen down the annual bonuses for those who are not their cronies.For all the talk of incentivizing performance through stock grants and variable compensation, I think most of the amounts given away are based on relationships with those doing the doling out of funds and not based on solid performance.

It is also that time of the quarter (can you tell I work for an American company?) where we have the obligatory managers night out. Some of my colleagues I enjoy hanging out with. The conversation is always engaging the opinions are always scathing and the topics are always controversial. Some others I don't mind. They're like the cockroaches you hear got into the food in a restaurant you would never go to. I would have hated them if I had to deal with them, but I don't and so that's that.
And then there are those whose intelligence levels are the only reason that evolution is still considered a theory. I mean we all have these guys don't we? Retards that surprise us with the levels they are in the organization - people who can't understand an argument, can't state a position but probably can either suck the chrome of a exhaust pipe or kiss more ass than toilet paper in a public shithouse.
Whatever their skill, it doesn't bother me except for those days that I have to go drown my friday nights in local beer at a cheap hovel surrounded by these idiots.

And this time I was wondering what my bonus number would be this year. So as I was engaging the pathetic morons monosyllabic repetitive responses, I was thinking about how we could make the bonus system better.
Here's my answers:

Make bonus numbers public inside the managers group. If you have to explain to your staff why you gave Mr A 10 big ones as a bonus and Mr B only 5, you will at the very least have to come up a with an engaging story. You wont be telling them it was because Mr A has a mouth like a vacuum cleaner. And you can't keep making up stories.
Reduce bonus levels after a certain level. Most organizations give higher bonuses to people higher up in the org. For example, I qualify for a max of 40% of my annual salary as my bonus, while my boss qualifies for a max of 60% of HIS annual salary. Isn't that shitty? I mean given the amount of money that senior people in the organization are making, they should already be as incentivized as can be. Do you really need to bribe them to perform? Fuck that. I say you should give them negative bonuses. Give them a salary number and take money away from them if they don't meet their targets.
At the first two levels of management, give out bonuses regardless of company performance. If the guy met his bonus targets he should get the money. Just because the technologists had a fucked up product don't punish the little floor supervisors that built the first 100 in record time.

Of course none of the companies will actually do these things. If you have better ideas let me know I'm always willing to listen. I'm sure it will be better than whatever it is those mindless dumbfucks were droning on about yesterday.

Something nice for a change...

2010-08-14T08:17:00.000-07:00

Countries are often unfortunate byproducts of the desire of certain humans to impose order and exert control. The way their borders are drawn and the way states are made up smacks of it.

There is one problem. When we need to organize and when we face big issues, we tend to try and simplify. And how do we do that? We cut the large problem up into smaller pieces. We group people - put them in boxes and draw virtual lines on the ground - in the hope that we can better influence, organize, control the people inside those boxes. And if we can just control all those boxes, we can define where the entire country goes.
Right?
In my mind that's just a definite maybe.

When we group people and draw lines, we make assumptions about commonalities,. similarities, capabilities, and the future. And you know what that gives us?
Very often, a big fucking mess.

Our unthinking and unknowing compartmentalization based on frivolous and unenlightened assumptions of egotistical and clay footed leaders lead to internal forces that work in divergent directions, working against instead of for the country.

Look around you. Don't tell me you don't see that in India. Or in your company.
See, organizational structures are kinda similar to how country borders or states are made up.
Success or failure of these organizations is very often dependent not so much on how those boxes are drawn and who is in them, but on some quality or resource they possess, and the need of the external environment for that quality. What's inside of those boxes merely speeds up or delays the inevitable demise or growth of that which the environment wants or needs.

If you take our country, given the unfortunate pillaging we took and the sheer number of us bitches, we went through quite some tough times. But recently though, we've done good. Actually the sheer number of us bitches in this region is what is going to be our biggest strength. The largest number of producers and the largest number of consumers is in this part of the world, and unless natural destruction or war fucks it up for us, prosperity is coming our way.

We (us inside this box called India) can all argue about how we can accelerate this phenomenon, or we can bitch about the incompetence/corruption/idiocy of our fellow inmates. But I have a feeling this is where the future is. They (the ones outside this box) can all point out the lack of infrastructure and the difficulty of doing business, but despite all of that they will have to drag their sorry asses over here.
Some visionary leaders have already figured this out. They have moved themselves or their companies to India for one thing only - its size, either in market or talent pool.

Some tactical, execution hacks are here because of lower labor costs, and others sit on the sidelines and bitch - about government incentives being too little or , or airports being to far away. What they don't get about us is the fact that none of that shit matters eventually.
It doesn't matter how many idiots we have in here, or how many corrupt people still remain, or how many different directions every state wants to go in, and how slow we are at building new educational institutions, and bridges and dams and ports, and how low the labor costs are.
All of that stuff is just a facilitation of the inevitable future - This is where it's going to be.

So.....
the point of all of this is, if you had to pick one country to be in over the next 30 years, you can't get much better than this one we're in right now.

Happy Independence Day.

People are Idiots

2010-08-03T06:56:00.000-07:00

This is not a rant, but watch the video and you will know how easily it could be one about people not knowing half the time what the hell it is they are doing

This is fascinating. And this was their first research paper. Fucking brilliant.
Below is a BBC Video. Read: The Invisible Gorilla for more.
(note: title of this blog post has nothing to do with either Christopher Chabris, Daniel Simmons, Lars Hall or Peter Johansson)

CHOICE BLINDNESS

And you thought I was shittin you.

2010-07-20T09:15:00.000-07:00

You thought I was joking here weren't you?
But I wasn't kidding. I really AM going to write a book. And I'm going to call it
Rat Race Rules
An irreverent look at how you can get ahead in your corporation.

And here's the preface.

All Hands. No Brains.

2010-07-09T07:35:00.000-07:00

Today I went to an all hands meeting.
There were two executives on strutting about. The first one was so boring that I had to prop my eye open with toothpicks hurriedly grabbed from the not yet served buffet. Towards the end of his speech I just decided to give up the fight and fall asleep much to the delight of my upper eyelids. But then the second turd came on and he was so loud that I couldn't go to sleep. The CIA ain't got nothing on these fuckers in the torture department I tell you.

But they had one thing in common. They both didn't really have any message.
The first one talked about quarterly results and just kinda read the slides out in a tone reminiscent of a metronome that buzzed like a fly instead of ticking like a clock. The second one talked about some corporate strategy type shit that everybody already knew about without adding new information or clarity. I think he thought that if he just raised his volume high enough the people wouldn't really get that he was a terrible public speaker.

Don't get me wrong. I know public speaking is hard, but so what? If you're going to call 200 people into a suburban windowless hall, and expect them to pay attention to what your saying with only the promise of a cold mini samosa and a soulless cup of tea, you better put some work into it bitch.

And there's only so many reasons to subject the unsuspecting masses to an all hands: Energize them, Spread some information, Give out some rewards.
But what people mostly do is the exact opposite.
They bore the brains our of the audience to the extent that half the people are dreaming about something more fun that sitting on a chair listening to drones armed with PowerPoint. (Like say strangling that fucking drone and smashing that slide projector), and the other half is snickering about the speaker and texting other audience members snide messages about the his body parts, speaking mannerisms, or the speaking mannerisms of his body parts (Like "He's talking out his ass. Stuttering Dickhead").
The content is most often already known to everybody in the audience and also to those not in the audience. Like the bastards who made up a smarmy reason to stay at work and not come to the all hands. Even those damned waiters standing listlessly by the trays of perfunctory snacks and uninspiring beverages probably already know what they talk about on stage.
And they always get the rewards wrong don't they? Either they get the wrong person - like the guy who takes diving catches after setting up the emergency himself through his impressive lack of due diligence in the first place. Or they get the wrong award. Employee of the quarter gets what? A plastic plaque?
Really, motherfuckers?
And you got my spelling wrong bitch.
The name David doesn't have a fucking Q in it.
How did the Q show up there?
What were you doing when you sent this to the printers, man? Thinking about the line of people waiting to fuck your mama?

Is it really that hard?
Don't you feel like you should put some thought into this event? Or do you just get your nuts off on putting your employees through pain?

Screw you guys.
Here's my strategy.
Next time there is an all hands, I'm going to step out to go to the restroom. And then hang around at the bar till the meeting lets out.
And when it does, I'll be leaning against the wall with a beer in my hand laughing at the Lilliputian sandwiches and the ass-juice coffee

Organizing to win

2010-06-28T22:25:00.001-07:00

So how do you like my blog title.
Sound enough like a lame chapter in a management book?
Good. Coz that was the idea.

Organization structure has been a topic of research for so many years, that the fact that it is not more under control in the real world is something that should tell the ivory tower researchers that their ideas are not translating into the zone it matters.

I've always had that fuming discontent with management theorists. They're over there in some la la land looking into things that don't really matter, and building models out of boxes and arrows that explain the obvious.

I've had a seething resentment about management books too. So many of them are written as if they are addressing the senior management of the company, when really their readers troll corridors much lower than those of power. Like when they tell you how to handle your top talent (Straight from the Gut), and how you should develop the leaders of tomorrow (The leadership pipeline), how are you, the peon in management going to make those changes in your company?
You can't.
You don't even have the influence to get time with those people who have the influence to change something like organization structure or people management policies.

Bitches.

Why don't they write something to applies to us out here in the masses?
Why don't they talk about how to deal with management that makes stupid ass decisions, when quitting the company is not an option?

You know what? I'm going to write my own book.
Tips and tricks for people in the masses who want to grow in the organization from peon to high ranking well paid bullshit spewer.

So first, read my book, and then when you reach a decent elevation (you'll know you're there because the air will be thin, and there will be a guy stuck to your asshole), then you can read the other management books

The IPL Sucks Part Two

2010-05-28T02:45:00.001-07:00

Wow.
It's been a month since I posted the first part of this rant. And mere days later the IPL thing broke out into such a melee. How do you like DEM apples Mr Modi?
Posting about the IPL now just seems like tacking on another tiny piece of glitter in the stereotypical Rajasthani woman's blouse. You know the one I mean? With mirrors on the breast covering part of the blouse? Freaky. If you stare at them you see a million of you looking right back at you... Brrr....

But for the sake of completeness, I thought I'd just post what was originally going to say. Here goes:

----------------

So here's the thing that gets me about the IPL. It's fucking overrated in every single way.

First lets cover the easy ones.

Level of Play: One word - Sucks!!! Have you seen the way these people play? There's so little skill on display that you could actually fantasize about getting in there yourself.
Cheerleaders: Overrated as hotties. Why in blazes were they wearing so many clothes? The ones from Chennai were actually wearing trackpants!!! WHAT THE FUCK? Lets get one thing straight. They're called cheerleaders. You know why they get to lead cheers? Because they're scantily clad women with tight asses, firm breasts, luscious curves that can move their bodies in a way that keeps the eyes of hundreds of drunken testosterone carriers fixated on them during breaks, and mindlessly get them to chant whatever the fuck they want. The only owner that tried to get good cheerleaders was Mallya. Props to you my BROTHA!!!
TV Coverage: Too much advertising, too much commentary, but for the cheerleaders, entirely too little airtime
Arun Lal: WAAAAAY to much airtime.
Sunil Gavaskar: I'm just waiting for this tiring annoying know-it-all to retire. Damn.
And the last of the small irritations: Those actors doing the "sidelines" commentary: Guys, your acting careers were on the sidelines of showbiz already. Did you really have to come to the sidelines of cricket and distribute fake smiles and false enthusiasm to all and sundry in your wake?

But the two majorly overrated aspects of the IPL: Value for money

First the value for the advertisers money:
Do you know how many logos there are on screen? 5 or 6 on the players uniforms, anywhere from 3 to 6 on the ground, the hoardings around the boundary that we have been ignoring for years. Even the commentators have been turned into whores. Yelling and screaming, and calling calling out sponsor names at every chance they get! I've got a Carbon Camaal Crotch and you can have a City moment of sucking it mothafucka. And I've not even started on the TV ads and the ads on that annoying screen that they wont show replays on when you go to the stadium.

How many of those companies do you remember? Probably not enough to justify what those guys are paying. I bet that in 5 years, the rates and the number of sponsors will come down to more rational levels. Maybe we will still have the manic pricing of the ads during the Final, like the Superbowl crapola they have Stateside, but hopefully there wont be that much foaming at the mouth when Chennai Sweeper Kinks play the King's XI Nut-jobs in the season opener.

And finally here's what is even more overrated that value for the advertiser's money: The value of the fucking teams.
Did you hear how much that guy paid for the team from Pune? God Fucking Damn.
Probably more than he got for that airline of his when he sold it.
Sell your shares people. Sell your shares. That's all I have to say

-----------------------

And a final parting thought. Thanks to those who send me vicious threats over email if I didn't post soon. I was in the US on business, and I couldn't bring myself to tear away from the hot chicks in the cool bars THAT STAY OPEN TILL 2pm, for long enough to post something. I totally forgot about you guys that are waiting to hear about my latest vexation and laugh pithily at my spiking blood pressure.
But when I came back, I saw all that email and I instantly missed you. I felt wanted. (Not in a Salmonella Khan kind of way, please note.)
I have now resolved to increase my fiber intake.
(Hopefully that will make me more regular. HAR!)

The IPL Sucks

2010-04-12T10:31:00.000-07:00

Man
There has been a lot of hand-wringing lately about whether or not the IPL is good for cricket.
I dont know what the big deal about the whole thing is
IPL is a show.
It is not unlike those shows run by Bollywood stars outside India where a star and his league of extraordinary sycophants team up and grind away on a stage amidst unnecessary fireworks and garish stage props.
It's a show that Mr Modi has provided that lets the fatigued minions, browbeaten by their humdrum daily existence, scream away their worries instead of sitting inside a multiplex and watching decreasingly excellent vicarious escapes for increasingly absurd prices. I mean, have you seen the Vivek Oberoi thriller Prince? Why?)
It is not unlike the WWF where fake wrestlers jump around in a surreal atmosphere surrounded by believers and scantily clad women whipping the audience of people into a frenzy that some of my acquaintances can't avoid watching.

The IPL is not cricket. I dont watch much of it either. But if it's making so many people deliriously happy and forget their crazy existence for a few hours a day, it aint as fucking bad as these hand-wringers are making it out to be.
And you know what? Just like Kuch Saas Bahu Ma Devi Kali or whatever those Ekta Kapoor monstrosities are called.... If you dont like it, you can turn it off.

But that said, the IPL does suck in one aspect...

..... To be continued

Do the right thing part two

2010-02-28T03:42:00.001-08:00

2. Alignment of managers goals with the shareholders goals
This is a special case arising from the first point above. See the argument for the first point is often that "well the managers should do it, they're paid to do so, and they're paid to make the share price go up etc etc". Well.... No. This is another "right thing to do" that is a bitch to execute.
The commonly accepted way to align goals of managers with shareholders is to give them a large stock grant. Do you think this aligns the interests of managers and shareholders? Nah. All this does is makes them want more stock.
Look, none of these bitches will get fired if the stock price takes a dive. They will just blame it on the economy or the misguided bombers or the hurricane in some hapless coastal town. So, while they stand to benefit if the stock price goes up (or stays level), they stand to really benefit if they get more stock.
The way I look at it, most top managers are already fairly well off, cash wise. And the cash component of their salaries is still nothing to sneer at. So if you give them two options (a). Work hard, deliver bigger market share or higher margins and (b). Convince your boss you're a star so you get more stock, which one do you think they will choose?
Most of these Management Bullshit Artists are good are presenting forcefully their cases - however strong or weak the facts of the matter may be. So like their more evidently bastardish weasel brothers the lawyers - they cleverly plead their way into the top bracket. See the section above on pay for performance?

3. You're just like them
Every individual is motivated by self preservation first and self actualization last. And in the middle are so many factors that mess around with his brain - emotions, perceptions, marketing, etc. You can tell me that you're not one of them, but don't tell yourself that.
All else being equal, maybe some people would do good for others. But if that action starts influencing YOUR payout.... that's when things get messy.

So whats the point of this seemingly interminable blog post?

1). People are all looking out for themselves. You are too.
2). If you want them to do things that are good for you, you have to fool them into thinking that those things are good for them too.

Do The Right Thing My Ass.

2010-02-17T07:26:00.000-08:00

I have been speaking to a few of my friends lately who regularly lament the machinations of their top management. Apparently a lot of their actions are not "the right thing" for the employees. A lot of them (the senior management) seem to be doing things that don't seem to be in the benefit of the company as a whole.

I can understand their anguish and frustration. What I do not understand is their surprise.

See doing the right thing requires altruism. You have to want to do something that is good for others, without a regard for what benefit or cost it may bring you. Altruism is a scarce virtue among humans in general, and given the fact that the echelons of senior management are populated mainly by conniving weasels, we can safely assume that in that rarefied atmosphere it is, even more dismayingly, absent.

For all the talk of values and shareholders, the thing that drives managers is 'what's in it for me?' (And in this post when I say managers I mean the top two or three levels of the company)
Every one of them is out to further his own fief, and satiate his giant ego. There are three reasons why these people will not do the right thing. I tried to explain these three items to my deluded friend yesterday, and I will repeat the gist of them here.
One point per post coz otherwise it's too long...

And today's point is:

1. Doing the right thing is hard
A lot of what is touted as the "right thing to do" is simple to say but very difficult to execute. For example - take maddening phrase "Pay for performance". Sounds deceptively simple and seems hard to think of an argument against it. But what a bitch to execute! The devil, as usual, is in the details - residing in the weeds where these philosophies are implemented, not in the clouds where they are formulated. Consultants and their management books often talk about promoting your stars and weeding out your laggards. Great idea. But there are a few complications in implementation.
First is identifying the stars. Who is a star? Someone who did a good job this year? This past six months? Think about the Indian cricket team. Who is your star? Ask ten people to cut the Indian team into the common five performance categories. I bet you get at least 5 different answers or categorizations. Same thing in organizations. Although all the books and papers tell you that you should define the job, set objective goals and so on, all that is terribly difficult to do in a business. Situations change, goals change, and frankly if managers were to do a fair enough job, that would take about 50% of their time. And they just don't spend that much time on it. So they go by gut feel and recency effects - see one admission here.
Second problem - how to rate. Forcing a normal (Gaussian) distribution for the 5 categories is hogwash. The groups that the distribution are forced upon are neither random, nor independent, and sometimes not even large enough to justify the expected fit even in theory (see Central Limit Theorem). Even if the distribution expected is not Gaussian, How much thought do you think your organization put into your distribution? Can they explain to you why 10% of the organization should be in the bottom category while only 5 at the very top (or vice-versa?)
Third problem - How much to differentiate. Say you got 5 categories. You're giving your top category guys a 20% raise, and your bottom guys a 0. What about the guys in the middle? 10? 15? 18.6? It's not a trivial discussion. Sure you should love and nurture your top guys and weed out your bottom performers, but what should you do about the bulk in the middle? The last thing you want to do is shit on them because they provide the raw horsepower that your stars need to get their results. I think you should love them too. Maybe not as much as your top guys, but hey, share the love.
So the point is, it's all nice to say the managers should do the right thing. But given how hard it is, do you think they will do it? That brings me to the next point.

Mumbai and the Marathi Manoos

2010-02-01T00:24:00.000-08:00

I must profess ignorance about the Marathi Manoos.
Who is he?
A person with domicile in Maharashtra?
A person who can speak Marathi?
A person whose mother tongue is Marathi?
A person both of whose parent's mother tongues are Marathi?

I want to know because this person seems to be wanting a special status in Maharashtra.
Now special status in and of itself is not new - There is a special status for certain people in Kashmir, for some people in the North Eastern states, and whats more, for certain caste/community/tribe based groups there is a special status for all over the country.
But what is funny about this special status for the Marathi Manoos is what the leaders of this "movement" seem to be demanding. Sample this:

100 % reservation for them in government and private jobs
Prevention of all industrialists or sports personalities from making political comments
The same status Mumbai is the same as the status of the Chairman and Managing Director within a company
Authority to treat all migrants to their home city (and possibly even the rest of the state) as disease ridden hyenas and beat them back physically like the thieving bastards they surely are.

Some politicians came out an compared the leaders making these demands to Fascists and Hitler. I think they were meaning to insult the leaders of the Marathi Manoos movement. I think they are insulting the Fascists!
Some RSS leader came out recently and exhorted his cronies to protect the whimpering migrants, to which some Sena leader has reacted by warning the RSS guys to stay away from issues in Mumbai.

I don't know if the Marathi Manoos actually understands what their leaders are asking for:
100% reservation, Ownership of their city, Squelching opinion, and prevention of other citizens of India from coming in there.
That is another way of saying isolation.
Is that what the real Marathi Manoos wants?

The Sena leaders are braying over the airwaves that they have the unflinching support of the Marathi Manoos. But do they?
And if so - back to my first question - who the hell is this Marathi Manoos supporting these retarded views?
If you know, please enlighten me.

And another thing.
Their whole argument rests on the confidence they have that people want to move to Mumbai.

India's own city of opportunity.
That city is the city of opportunity as much BECAUSE of the migrants as before it. These leaders didn't make it the city of opportunity. They just changed the bloody name!

And you know if these Marathi Manooses really want it - Fuck it. Build a wall around them, and let them have the god damned city to themselves.
We've got other ports.
And the finance and software industry can move pretty quickly.
And Bollywood? Really? Should we even care to address THAT situation?

Let them drive their taxis and speak to each other in only Marathi and descend into a state of chewing destitution.
Lets see how they like that scenario.

I'm Back.

2010-01-23T05:17:00.000-08:00

What a year.
Started a business right before the bottom fell out of the financing market, and almost had to shut shop because we couldn't fund complete development. Found a customer with a particularly strong interest in what we were doing. This customer not only provided much needed cash by trusting us enough to buy an underdeveloped product, but also gave us credibility enough to get some financial backing. And after complete development and deployment, this customer bought us out.
I'm now part of the product development team at this customer with responsibility for the lifecycle of the product that we developed and one additional product category.
My two partners are also at this firm, although one of them - guess who - is only here temporarily. (It was part of the buyout).

It was a ride. We almost failed, but are now richer than we were a year and half ago not just in our bank accounts, but also in experience.

The only unfortunate part is that I am now back working for the man.
Though I like and respect the way the management of this company conducts itself, I know enough to realize that in a company of a decent size, the management is inefficient. I know I am going to run into villains, politicians, arseholes, and more than just 3 idiots.

A vent is necessary again.

I'm back.

Incompetence Rewarded

2009-05-11T23:56:00.000-07:00

I could barely get out of bed this morning.
Consider this:

The finance guys who screwed the world economy up the backside made off (Madoff?) with piles of taxpayer money
The CEOs who didn't time the recession or even have a plan on handling it got paid large salaries
The cricketers who were paid the largest sums of money are hacking away like fucking rank amateurs.
The guys (sorry, gals) who have the largest number of criminal elements in their candidate list are getting close to becoming the next PM
The guy who shot up innocents on live TV is pleading not guilty and being protected with taxpayer money.
The movies that made the most money this past year were Ghajini (easily AAAAmir Khan's worst movie in the last few years) and Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi
One of the top TV series is Radha ki fuckin betiyaan kuch bloody kar dikhayengi

What the fuck?
What in blazes is going on?
Something is fucked up with this world.

I usually blog about things that tick me off, and usually that happens when I see mediocrity being tolerated. But this is past that.
This is incompetence being rewarded.
Pathetic performance being celebrated
Malicious behavior being praised
And its so pervasive that it depressed me to the extent that I could barely get out of bed this morning.

Something is totally fucked up with this world.

The Top Ten Most Overrated Public Figures

2009-05-08T06:53:00.000-07:00

10. Narayan Murthy: If I hear one more story about the integrity or simplicity or inherent genius of this omnipresent figurehead, I swear I'm going to throw up all over myself, and also over the news media that can't seem to get enough of blowing this guy.
9. Barkha Dutt: This is a woman I'm totally lost about. Why she's consider a great reporter and touted as one of India's best is beyond me. She seems ordinary in every way. She's good some of the time, bad some of the time. Sometimes she's just plain atrocious (as in when she was covering the attack on the Taj at Bombay). But she's never great. So why all the fuss?
8. Sanjay Leela Bhansali: An atrocious filmmaker who people in his own industry call a master to his face, but I suspect the snicker behind his back. And as if the pseudo artistic sensibilities he vomited onto unsuspecting humanity in his previous attempts at film making were not enough, he went and made Sawariya.
7. Arundhati Roy: As if this one wasn't overrated enough as an author, now she's masquerading as an intellectual and getting overrated at that too.
6. Chetan Bhagat: Overrated in an understatement for this guy and the people following him on this list. Have you read his pathetic books? He's hit on a great model to sell some volumes, but so did Mills and Boon.
5. Lalu: So the railways turned around. Great job. But I seriously doubt that Lalu had anything to do with it other than a curious mixture of serendipity and idle tampering. I wonder if all the people flocking to hear him lecture on management at the various unsuspecting business schools would appoint him manager/CEO of their business.
4. P. Shitambaram: I seriously doubt that he is the learned scholar that his thick spectacles and the media make him out to be. Most enlightening policies came either from Manmonia or from (surprise) VP Singh. This dude just shows up in a lungi and claims brilliance. Bah. Humbug.
3. Karan Johar: SLB is overrated by the critics, and K-Jo is overrated by the public. All his films have made kaboodles of money, and have contributed to the painful longevity of our next member on this list, but all his films are uniformly uninteresting.
2. Shah Rukh Khan: As a businessman and marketing pro this dude is THE shit. And what he has achieved on his own is no mean feat. But when he acts, I always get the feeling that he's playing the same guy in every movie. This dude can't act.
1. Sunil Gavaskar: Sure he was run hungry, and sure he averaged over 50 in tests over his career, but he was so unfailingly defensive and focused on averting defeat that even attempting a run at victory seems alien to his soul. All time great? Whatever. And I'm sick and tired of listening to stories about his defiance in the Windies. His 1971 or whatever series was not against the pace quartet that made the Windies the feared team that they were. So there. And not to mention his stellar performance in the world cup that we won in spite - and not because of - his plodding presence

I'm Back, and Lets cut some costs

2009-04-30T08:01:00.000-07:00

Almost everybody that reads this blog, and their uncle and their dog have told me that my last few posts were tepid sermons. And that they would rather have me return to my obscenity spouting bitter ranting ways than spew insipid advice.
Now even though all those people total to a meager number of 2 (the reader has a dog for his uncle), it is advice I will take. When I can.
If you read my last post - I was away for starting up my business. That's done. We're off the ground. So I'll be back posting semi regularly.

All right. Back to mindless ranting.

So the economy has been in the toilet for a while.
Companies are cutting jobs all over the place.
And as you waste your time at work carousing through this blog, your manager is probably closeted in a conference room with other weasels and ferrets trying to figure out how they can cut costs. They're going to go through the silly ideas of removing the coffee from the break room and the small sandwiches from the meetings before they get down to the real business of getting rid of the structural problems that cause higher costs.

So how should anybody reduce their costs?
The cost to run your business is made up of some very basic areas. I simplify, but it boils down to:
Material: Money for material that your product is made up of (plastic, steel, bullshit, whatever)
Labor: Money for people that shape your plastic, steel, bullshit, whatever into something customers will swallow
Sales & Marketing: Money for people that will shove the shaped plastic, steel, bullshit, whatever into the customers throats
Research: Money to figure our what shape of plastic, steel, bullshit, whatever is easiest for the customer to swallow next year
G&A: The money for those clueless ego masturbating monkeys otherwise known as managers

So here's how you really reduce cost, instead of dancing around the coffee machine hoping for a reduction in paper cups.
Material: Reduce your material cost as a percentage of your revenue. Renegotiating with suppliers should be done, but not counted in the saving.
Labor: Cut it to 10% lower than the levels that your next quarters forecast requires. Don't pussyfoot around this. Pay cuts and forced vacations is the same as pussyfooting. . If your company does this, then it's being a pussy. And if your manager tells you they're doing it to save jobs or to be nice to employees, they're not just being pussies, they're liars as well.
Research: Do you even know how your research and development funds are spent? Really? Look again. It's not about cutting the spend. It's about making sure you're spending it in the right places. It's probably not a bad move to ask a new guy to take it over - or at least start managing the R&D finance portion (if your company is organized that way)
S&M: This is the touchiest. You gotta figure out which spend works and which doesn't. No point throwing parties for customers and their wives. That's not going to buy you anything. But creative pricing, packaging, etc - go for it.
Management: Knock out every overpaid management flunky you got. Every last one of them. Your management staff should be cut to the same % that the labor was cut if not more. And every CEO if a company that can not beat the market in a bad economy is a bad CEO. I've had enough of these management bullshit artists that blame the economy when things are bad, and take the credit when the going is good. Can't beat the market over a two year period? Fire the fucker.

Now I know that none of the readers of this blog are in position to make the decisions I'm recommending. But if you've got balls go tell your manager what he needs to do.

Or stop reading this blog.

Out of Commission

2009-03-30T01:33:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the unannounced departure and the two month hiatus.
Thanks for all the mail (hate or otherwise)

Me and a few friends launched a new business in the BLR area in the tech space in late January. Things picked up around early Feb (not revenue wise, but in terms of the work needed to get the groundwork set up and get the ball rolling). While this is an exciting time for me personally, it is also a time I get home devoid of any energy. Consequently, I haven't been able to find the time or the faux-rage needed to summon bile up the oesophagus and into my virtual pen, and so I've kept away from the blog site for a while.

Unfortunately - for me - I wont be able to put in quality time toward this effort for another month or so.

Till then, fare thee well.
And wish me luck you insatiable hatemongers

Recessionary Tactics

2009-02-04T02:46:00.000-08:00

So business is terrible and cash is scarce.
Over the past few years companies were growing by leaps and bounds, hiring anybody that could fog up a mirror, and projecting growth out to infinity. Many managers and leaders took credit for heights achieved by their organizations, when the real driver was just a rising tide. Now when the companies are taking a beating, magically the cause is not their leadership but a tanking economy. But hey, that's what most managers will do. Take credit and assign blame.
So lets assume that you are one of the small group of managers who are not in the general category of manipulative weasels. What do you do in these tough times?
Fuck if I know.
But I can tell you what not to do.

Do not delay decision making: Take a hard stand and go for it. Need to cut headcount? Need to cut spending? Don't pussyfoot your way around the bush for weeks on end while your company bleeds cash, and your employees are distracted by rumors of impending doom. Do it already. In the same vein, if you need to spend some money on your infrastructure, go for it. Don't delay the decision because of the economy. Even though you report your earnings to those evil analysts on wall street every quarter, you should hopefully have realized by now that you are in business for more than 3 months. IF anything delaying spending is worse than delaying spending cuts. Especially in these times. Grow a set of balls, make a decision, and then execute.
Do not get bogged down: Even if you're making unpleasant decisions, stay firm and stay upbeat. Nobody likes a sullen manager, and this is not the end of the damn world. And don't walk around like this whole thing is your fault. You're not that important. Smile. You have a job to do, and if you're doing it well, you deserve to smile. (Unless you're one of those investment banker types that was dealing in mortgage backed securities or convertible debenture structured provident gastronomy thingies or whatever)
Do not forget the uptick: It will come. Don't bet on when it will come. The pundits forecasting the turning point are all more wrong than the idiot on acid who writes the daily horoscope column. You do not know when it will come, but it will. And when it does, it will blow your socks off. The economic cycles feel like a roller coaster ride in reverse. The downturn feels like the slow dragging ride up the hill. The uptick will feel like the hair raising rush of speed you get on the way down. Prepare for it. Keep your employees (the ones that remain - hopefully the better ones) motivated, trained and ready to kick ass.
Do not forget the downturn: This is the one you wont listen to. The uptick will come, and 3 months into it, you will relapse into excessive partying, unnecessary travel, inefficient hiring, bloated raises and irrational effervescence. You will forget how you managed your expenses in the bad times. You will forget how you made your operating assets work that little bit harder. This is hubris. Just try to remember that the bad times will be back, and retribution will be had.
Do not get sell your stock: Of course, I'm assuming that you own stock in your company. And I'm assuming that your company is healthy enough to last the downturn. But selling your stock now, if you haven't already sold it a year ago is the worst thing you can do. Hang on to it for a year or so.

Goonda turned Gandhi

2009-01-18T03:31:00.000-08:00

So Sanjay Dutt is going to be a politician.
A guy convicted in the Bombay riots case is actually going to run for office.

And I saw him quote on TV that he was there to "teach people Gandhigiri"...

And that he wanted to get "Jaadu ki Jhappis" from people.

Bhen-fucking-chot.

You know what bothers me?
Not that another guy with a criminal record is running for office. Every other politician is or has been a criminal. In fact probably more than 2 out of 3.
So no. That does not bother me anymore.
What bothers me is that soon, everybody will forget that not only was Such-A-Butt-head so dumb that he bought guns from a guy known to be linked with criminals, but he also tried to dispose of a metal gun by throwing it in a fire. And his face will be in the news being lauded by the press or some "common man types" for being so down to earth and so on. Just like people like Laloo and Modi are lauded for their achievements in one sphere (railways, infra development), while somehow the media and these common man types are able to ensure that any acknowledgment of their misdeeds don't jump across that wall they have built around their own conscience.
Fodder scam? What was that?
Godhra? Where?
Mumbai Terror Attacks? Did that happen? I'm already forgetting it.
THANK GOD RAMU'S MAKING A FUCKING MOVIE ABOUT IT!!!
And I think that cock-eyed sonovabitch Reieitheieish The-Shmuck is going to play another one of his "loser than pretends to be cool but is somehow loveable in a whomesome way even though he cracks silly jokes and double entendres" role. I hope he gets shot in the movie.

And here's the other thing that's bothering me nowadays:
Have any of you seen that annoying little twerp with a cup of tea looks at the camera with wannabe revolutionary eyes and asks us to wake up from our self induced stupor - ostensibly just so that we can vote, but really just so we can run out to the neighborhood FabMall and buy his fucking tea leaves?
I would like to meet with this guy and tell him how the reason people are all staying away from the voting booths is much more serious that a mere sleeping disorder. It's because we have this huge numbness in our souls that prevents us from caring about anything but ourselves. And not even ourselves in the long term enlightened way, but more in the short term, how can I get ahead of this annoying Santro in the next lane so I can be the first at the next red light kind of way.
The people of this country, by and large, don't care about this country.
They don't even care about themselves.
So nice try with the "buy my tea leaves because I'm trying to raise the collective consciousness spiel", but all they're going to do - even if they do drink your lousy fucking tea and show up at the voters booth, is vote the goonda turned gandhi into power.

And then what are we going to do?

Fucking pathetic.

Satyam. (And God! what a King sized dick!)

2009-01-07T03:29:00.000-08:00

Satyam means truth.
Funny No?

4th largest IT services company has been put in a precarious position by it's own founder Mr Ramalinga Raju. Ramalinga can be broken down into Rama (a god) and Linga (loosely, dick). Raju is a moniker that means King in the Andhra region, or so I'm told. So Ramalinga Raju can be translated into "God! A king sized DICK!!"
Funny No?

If you're a Satyam employee, it's probably not so funny. My heart goes out to those poor souls
The company's entire balance sheet is a lie. It's operating profits are a lie, which probably means it's P&L is a lie too. Nobody knows how much cash is really on hand, and how many days the company can run on without grinding to a halt.
53000 employees and countless shareholders have been cheated over the last several years to the tune of at least 1.6 Billion USD according to Dick's own confession (click here for text of the letter to SEBI)

And what does the SEBI chairman do after he gets the letter. Says he is horrified (wow!), and that he is in touch with the government (yay!), and says he is in discussions to figure out what steps the ministry and SEBI can take under the law. While you're in discussions, Mr Bhave, precious time is being lost, in which Dick and his scrotal cohorts (meaning brothers and sisters) are probably cleaning up evidence, destroying emails, and setting fire to proof of collusion and evildoing.

But anyway. Screw that. Back to the employees. Poor Poor Souls.
If you're a Satyam employee, all I can tell you is, I believe your company will come out of this. Not unscathed, mind you, but I believe it will come out of it. Focus on what is in your circle of influence. Never mind the bungling idiots and thieves who got you into this situation in the first place. They will get their comeuppance.
Oh, and I had read various news articles of Satyam employees wanting to buy their own stock to show solidarity with Dick. I hope you're not one of those.

And to the rest (non-Satyam) of the not so regular readership of this blog, I have something to share with you as well.
Clearly I just got done taking off on Dick and his scrotal cohorts, and there will be many more learned but less scathing commentaries on the Truth and it's mismanagement all over the web.
But here's what I want you to think about while you're guffawing about the follies committed by the aforementioned:
It is common to quickly make fun of leaders once their feet have been found to be somewhat clay-like. It is also common to declare the bastards to be the cause of their own misfortune, and that of their followers.
But it is probably necessary, before we unleash the fury of our scorn on those fallen from grace, to see how much of their earlier heights were reached on the gentle warm gusts blown by none other than ourselves.
Many rats have been racing in the corporate track in pursuit of higher profits and even faster growth rates. And we have, over the last few years, cheered them on.
While we clapped and celebrated every one of these growth stories and rejoiced over "India rising", we didn't deem it necessary to look hard at the means of their results or honestly question their claims.
We placed them on the pedestals they occupy. They didn't get on them without our help.

So while it's all fine and dandy to whip them for letting us down, we must remind ourselves to be more careful about whom we thrust greatness upon in the future.

--------------
PS: some articles on Raju/Satyam from 2007 and 2008
E&Y entrepreneur of the year
Economic Times Interview with Raju - check out the flowing praise (Jun 2007)
Raju, his sons and Maytas (again ET, Jun 2007)
Golden Peacock Award for Corporate Governance (Sep 2008) - Not even 4 months ago! "This honor demonstrates the value Satyam places on corporate governance, and on the importance of serving the interests of our investor, clients, associates, and of society", said Jayaraman - head of Corp Governance for Satyam.

Managers, Experts and Masturbating Monkeys

2008-12-17T05:57:00.000-08:00

As I go through my everyday work life, I often get figuratively kicked it the nuts. If you're a guy, you already know that even a metaphorical kick to the groinal area can be very very painful. And this happens every time I have to deal with people at the workplace, who do no work.
No work at all.
I'm not talking about people who take multiple breaks for coffee, walks, smoking, blogging (*smirk*) and downloading Sarah Palin posters. Even the most compulsive break takers do some work. I'm talking about people who do NO work.

Many experts fall into this category as well. You know? Experts? The guys who have not done anything useful for at least the last 7.3 years. They are still basking in the long faded glory of this one product he designed using techniques that are outdated, that introduced features that are today routinely found on (or in) toilet bowls, and fulfilled a market need that can now be successfully addressed by Chinese made cigarette lighters. Some of these experts have actually not even done that one product, however long ago. These guys have just read up everything available on a a very narrow area, and avoid helping budding engineers by answering questions with incomprehensible blather like "Given the thermal geodynamics of the varying nature, if you're really interested in using the winged schema in your product spec, you should look at the drive architecture of the compounded spoilage in our last generation product."
They never actually do anything except pretend to advice. They sit in on review meetings and ask irrelevant and inane questions so that they can get their name on another patent. And whenever I have to deal with one of these guys my scrotal contents cease to effortlessly swing about and commence to shrink violently into tiny pain points.

Obviously many senior managers, directors and presidents fall into this pain causing category. They are supposed to manage, direct or preside, but there's a bunch of these guys who do nothing but postpone decisions till only one option remains open. They play a sick version of "passing the parcel" whenever something actually lands on their table so that every request becomes intertwined with so many departments that nothing will get done. And if all else fails they will create a board or a committee or a task force and get their rocks off by reviewing actual work done by others Whenever I have to deal with one such management flunky, I feel like I just got kicked in the you-know-where with a steel toed boot. You could replace these kinds of managers with bald masturbating monkeys. Same effect as the erstwhile manager - a disgusting display of flailing arms and self pleasuring.

But the most magnitude of pain is caused not by Experts or Managers. That happens when I have to deal with Expert Managers.
People who used to be good at something as an engineer, line employee, or supervisor, and have now been unfortunately promoted to manager, but have refused to give up their expertise in one or many technical area. They not only want to retain their expertise, but they also want to continue to be seen as the big dick expert in whatever area they used to be the expert in. These guys continue review the tiniest detail, ask questions about the most irrelevant aspects, and sometimes even take over interesting assignments to execute themselves. They impede the progress of projects and development of their staff, and are the worst possible kind of expert and the most ineffective manager that you can find.

At least the monkey works for peanuts

Busting Monopolies

2008-12-12T03:39:00.001-08:00

Have you ever seen somebody who loves their IT support?
How about somebody who can’t stop praising their HR?
Or somebody who would give their right leg for their facilities maintenance team?

I’m guessing the answer, on average, is a resounding “fuck”
You know why?
Because these centralized support functions are lasting political monopolies.

By lasting political monopoly, what I mean is that these organizations have been placed in a position of a monopoly without having earned it, and have no specified limit on the time for which they are allowed to function as a monopoly. Unlike, for example, a patent, which is a Limited Apolitical Monopoly where the owner earned the patent, and has a time limit imposed on the monopoly powers it gives him, the DMV, is a Lasting Political Monopoly, where from now until the end of time, only the DMV has the power to issue licenses to drive.

And these lasting political monopolies are terrible things. Generally they will result in
1. Higher Pain: Either in pricing, or in cases where pricing can not exceed a certain threshold (like in our centralized support functions), in the actual experience, the monopolies will create excruciating pain for most customers. Badly designed databases, insane forms, irrelevant categorization procedures and labyrinth-like procedures are all signs that your support group does not care about you.
2. Lack of Innovation: Monopolies don’t need to innovate. The market is their slave. They laugh at innovation. Even in creating horrible customer experiences, they will not innovate. They will do it the same terrible way every single time.
3. Inefficiency: Without pricing pressure and competition for their business, the monopolies become inefficient, sloth like, and apathetic. With time, these monopolies get infested with incompetent employees who can not so much as understand your problem, much less actually solve it. I think that in a few years, all support functions will be staffed by comatose people on life support systems. And whats more, nobody will notice the fucking difference.
4. God Complex: These paragons of inefficiency eventually realize that their customers have no power over them. As soon as that happens, these bastards will start bossing they customers around, telling them what they can do and not do (You can not use a taxi if the travel company is not authorized by me), telling them what they can have and not have (You can have a pen to take notes, but you can not have a black pen), and telling them when they can have it (The lead time for getting a hall organized for your team in 145 days), and finally, telling the customer what is wrong with them (Why don’t you invite ME to your review meetings. Maybe the perspective I have gained by my years of experience ignoring your requests for service will add value in a discussion about cloud computing)
And in companies in India that are remote sites or development centers for their parent companies, this situation is made worse by the fact that more often than not, the heads of these support functions are placed at an organizational level that is a few notches higher than the heads of their customer organizations. In addition to that, their American or European overlords more often that not do not care about little manifestations of the bigger problem. And even if they do want to talk about it, they are easily slowed down by the monopolies by throwing some region specific sand - like legal and regional compliance directives – in the overseer’s eyes

So is there a way out?
Is there something organizations can do to prevent their support functions from turning into torture chambers for the rest of us?

Maybe.
For starters the regional support functions should be clearly told that they are accountable to the regional business unit managers.
Second, for every regional support function, one business unit manager should be assigned as the outside reviewer to review progress and performance on at least a monthly basis. And this manager should change every year. This has two benefits. Not only does the support function get reviewed by a customer, the customer gets a feel for what the support functions need to be successful. (Coz lets face it, not all customers are right all the time either. There are incompetent bastards among all of us)
We’re trying this in our business. I’ll let you know if things change.

If any of you have any other brilliant ideas, lemme know!

Moving on after Bombay

2008-12-07T22:27:00.000-08:00

It feels odd to begin posting about random and minor aggravations after what has happened in Bombay, but I guess we can't stay stuck on that forever. The part I am struggling with though is that all of us try to move on individually, the society moves on as well, and then what happens to the focus required to systemically prevent such attacks?
The media will move on,...
I was glad to read - in the front page of a daily "newspaper"- that Brad Pitt is shocked at the events in Bombay, and that "full service was now available at the Bangkok airport" - Happy ending anyone? And many TV channels continue to claim inane non-events as exclusive news, and I'm as sick of Darkha Butt being touted as a great reporter as I will ever be.
The politicians will move on...
RR Patil (Deputy CM/Home for Maharashtra) was sacked or resigned, claiming moral responsibility. Shivraj Patil (Home for the country) was sacked or resigned, claiming moral responsibility. And Deshmukh (CM, Maharashtra) was sacked or resigned kicking and screaming, on the principle of acconutability (whatever the hell that means). I guess only Manmonia Singh does not have any moral responsibility or accountability in this matter. The buck stopped somewhere on the way to his desk... Everybody that comes to replace those poor bastards will probably begin with frank and open statements about admissions of failure. They will because none of that failure will mar the crispness of their white politicians garbs. PC has already begun by admitting intelligence failures. The question is, will these new guys do anything significantly different?

But move on we must.
To maintain our sanity.
To maintain our illusion of safety.
To maintain our ability to function.

It would be nice if there were one guy who was tasked exclusively with the dual tasks of apprehending the bastards responsible, and fixing the system. That one guy could give the country an update every week in the beginning and then every month or so. That way, the focus would remain. People could move on, snug in the belief that someone somewhere is working to keep them safe. But for some reason I do not think that anything remotely like that is going to happen here.

Speech in response to the Mumbai Terror Attack

2008-11-26T23:12:00.000-08:00

------------
Yesterday, our beloved country was placed under attack.
Without any provocation, we were invaded by a small force that aimed to disrupt normalcy and peace in our effervescent city of Mumbai. Their force was too small, and their acts too weak to shake the spirit of our Mumbaikars, but they will rue the day they decided to take the lives of our citizens, our visitors, and the brave souls that defend the freedom and the way of life in India.
We do not yet clearly know who the perpetrators of this cowardly act are because unlike people with honor, they chose to cower under the veil of anonymity.
We do not yet clearly know what cause the perpetrators are waging this war for, because unlike people with a true passion, they are unable to articulate their desires.
Our country has a long history of tolerance, and is renowned the world over for it's staunch opposition to being the first aggressor under any degree of conflict. We are patient, we are calm in the face of adversity, and we are committed to a fair process. But the perpetrators of this unprecedented attack on our soil, have misunderstood this for weakness.

Now we will answer these merchants of terror.
We will answer them with a force they have not yet seen.
With a speed they can not comprehend.
We will smoke them out from their hiding holes and bring them to justice.

A deluded gang of thugs have brought disquiet to the peace loving citizens of our country, because they misunderstood the strength hidden in our humility and the ferocity of our resolve. Every grain of this land's soil - every last quantum of our boundless energy - will be used to bring them to book.

We will be strong.
We will be firm.
But we will be just,
Because we are the Sovereign Republic of India
---------------

I wish our PM would make a speech like - and preferably forceful than - the one above.
And then I wish he would mobilize the country's resources to follow up on the promises.
I am sick and tired of these violent sons of bitches waltzing into my country and wrecking havoc in any city they chose to.
Fuck 'em.
Fuck every last one of them.
Bloody spineless motherfucking insane bastards.
I say lets bring Rumsfeld over and make him defense minister. Lets bring Bush over and make him president. Lets elect to authorize a tripling of our fiscal deficit. I dont care what it takes. Raise taxes, let inflation go back to 10 percent, let the traffic jams continue to fester like open untreated wounds, let apathy in government offices continue to increase the days taken to open a new business, let FDI go up or down, let the stock market do it's dance, let all of that go. Because none of that shit matters if we cant stop events like the one happenning in Mumbai.

I say we stop every industry incentive plan, every policy development and infrastructure development plan. Let everything be status quo for a while. I say we make every fucking minister a defense minister or a home minister. Lets find these sisterfucking sons of bitches and bring them to justice. THEN we'll see about the rest.

Rambling On

2008-11-24T06:03:00.000-08:00

I had decided not to post anything again about the Bombay attack, but I'll put that decision on hold to just say one thing: A message from me to all the politicians from Pakistan and India who have been posturing and blowing hard over the last two weeks.
Guys - You haven't done shit about solving the problem. Either the short term one or the long term one. So do us all a favor and save the fucking hot air you're blowing back and forth. Maybe you can use it to inflate your girlfriends.

Back to business.
Speaking of hot air, I frequently find myself in the company of hot air filled know-nothing managers who have to disguise their ignorance with a cliche every time someone with common sense points out a gaping hole in their chosen plan of action. I call these people Phrase Managers - Managers who go around managing by cliche.

What are these cliches, you ask? Here's some

You must look at the big picture: What the fuck is the big picture man? Something from Reliance's stable of non-products? I hate this. And the thing is, this big picture doesn't really exist. It is complete fiction. Metaphorical. Like saying "You must look at the unicorn". Next time somebody uses that on me, I'm going to say "I've seen the big picture, and it's Hrithick Roshan fucking an aardvark with his seventh finger."
You need to manage expectations: Isn't it funny how when managers are talking about spending money on your project to meet some customer demands, they say you need to manage expectations? Fucking bullshit, if you ask me. Next time I'm in a performance review and the manager says I didn't meet expectations, I'm going to tell him that he needs to manage his expectations.
Think outside the box: What box? The box that YOU fucking put around me? You put restrictions on money, time, people, travel, training, collaboration, and everything else. You fucking boxed me in, in the first place. Now you ask me to think outside the box? What the fuck is this? A lab rat experiment gone awry? How about tearing down some walls for crying out loud
Hit the ground running: How about I just hit YOU and start running, moron? Hitting the ground running is something that you either do or you do not do. You can't walk up to people and say, hey I want you to hit the ground running. If they can do that, they probably already are running. Away from you, that is...
Don't reinvent the wheel: I get they feeling managers say this just because they do not want you to claim that you did anything innovative. So before you apply your brains, they want you to spend a few weeks dredging through out inadequate process/product documentation, and uncooperative senior employees who will not share what they know. What better way to hit the ground running?

RIM Shot

2008-11-18T07:40:00.000-08:00

My boss got a Blackberry three or so months ago.
Fucker's so addicted to this thing that I get replies to emails in less than 5 minutes. At any time of the day. Even in the middle of the night!!
was sitting at work attending one of those meetings where the on-shore tyrants begin by exhibiting their fake empathy for you having to stay late, and then go on to talk about stupid and irrelevant details for hours on end. I usually entertain myself in these meetings by first finishing off my emails, and then entertaining myself with online games.
In going through my email list, I came across an email sent to the entire staff of my department, telling them that the new t-shirts had arrived. My boss had replied to that email. "Thx", he said.
Then I saw an email that had been sent out by production support to members from my division who had requested a particular software install to be completed, telling them the job was done. My boss had replied to that email as well. "Grt work", apparently (even though the damned thing was done 5 days late.
There were many other spurious emails which should actually never be sent: over-eager reminders, meaningless internal surveys, hyperactive celebrations, unintelligible information updates, unnecessary announcements and so on. And my boss had replied to every one of them, expressing satisfaction, dissatisfaction, agreement, disagreement, or enforcements and exhortations.
He was making a mockery of himself. Coming across as a trigger-happy, clueless, mindless, nitwit, who had nothing better to do than send out unnecessary comments on things that didn't matter to anybody.

There were two causes.
The first was obviously the Crackberry. In the new Crackberry universe, every email came with insta-alert, and for the frail minded, this means every email comes with a reply. And in this universe, every reply came shortened spellings that mocked the wonderful and whimsical relationships between vowels and pronunciation in the English language. 'Thanks' becomes 'Thx', 'Great' becomes 'grt' or *shudder* 'gr8', and 'Please do not ever confuse efforts with actions' becomes 'Pls efforts <> actions'
The second was that so often when bastards send out emails, certain key points of note are buried in obfuscation of tons of words. The job has progressed, but will will miss it's deadline? There will be an email of Vikram Mehta proportions about how the job is being done, while the risk to completion on time will be in an incomprehensible sentence in the middle of the email and surrounded by conditional words and false platitudes. E.G "While the team realizes that the detailed analysis necessitated by inanities may cause us to finish on December 14th, quality always comes first." (Note that nowhere else in the email, will the original commit date of September 1st, 2007 be mentioned). And when these emails require you to scroll down till your thumb bleeds, there is only so much you can take before you reply: 'Thx, gr8 tmwrk.'

Just because of his inability to deal with the immediacy afforded by technology he was not earlier used to, my otherwise brilliant handsome and ever so effervescent boss who only rarely, but sometimes does, read blogs, was turned into a caricature of his former formidable self.

I fixed that yesterday.
He was out of his office, and his berry was on the table. I modified his settings that emails don't have any audible or vibrate alerts any more. Last night was probably the first night in three months that he has had uninterrupted sleep.
I did him a service.
And hundreds of employees will agree.

How to Hire

2008-11-18T07:22:00.000-08:00

I posted yesterday about how I was doing interviews the whole day.
An interesting thing happened the week before. I was asked to take a class on management, hiring and team building.
This consultant, teaching the class, had a great job. We paid him upwards of 10K (INR) a day per person to go over obvious homilies from a PowerPoint presentation so old even the electronic projection looked faded and dog eared. Fucking motherhood and apple pie bullshit.
So I decided to have some fun with this guy.

One of the truisms he bandied about repeatedly while in the hiring section of the mind numbing exercise he called a class, was "A good manager always hires people smarter than himself".
Fucking turd.
When the turd masquerading as my teacher repeated that for the thousandth time, I asked him a question, and the following conversation ensued:

Me: That means, if I'm a good manager, my team is smarter than me.
Turd: Yup
Me: That means the boss is dumb?
Turd: Uh
Class: titter, titter
Turd: Uh... Ha?
Me: And his boss is dumber still?
Turd: err...
Me: That means the dumbest person is the CEO.
Turd: Now..
Me: Either that, or they're all bad managers, huh?
Turd: We can't take the messages too literally, now...
Me: Yup. Excuse me while I use the bathroom.

Two Unrelated Items

2008-11-18T05:48:00.000-08:00

Item Number 1:
The VD government (Vilasrao Deshmukh, not venereal disease, although the difference escapes me ) is plotting to reserve 80% of the jobs in the Maharashtra government for locals. Locals being people who have resided in Maharashtra for over 15 years.
I do not know how many people migrate from the corners of the subcontinent to come work in the MH government. I don't think it's that many. My gut tells me (by way of my ass) that it's probably around 20%. So I deduce that the government is just doing this to take over the spotlight from MNS honcho Raj Thackerey. VD is probably thinking that nothing will change. I think what his government is missing is that this is going to make Raj and his cronies livid with anger. I predict that they will carry out some outlandish acts in the name of protecting the sons of the Maharashtra soil. Watch the news this week...

Item Number 2:
I just spent a long time interviewing multiple candidates for multiple positions in my company. Every one of the guys I interviewed had exaggerated his accomplishments. Some guys lied, some guys embellished and some guys committed non-full disclosure, but in every case, there was some reason to probe further. For example the most impressive team projects on each guys resume was something that they had contributed the least to. Like maybe sit on the wall in one meeting, or carry documents from the company to the vendor. And in at least one of the software packages they claimed expertise in, the expertise came from a 3 day certificate course conducted by a fly by night school. And 99.9% of them listed Microsoft word, excel as areas of expertise. One even had Outlook on there.
Interviewing in this country is tiring.
My question though, is what the fuck is HR doing? Shouldn't they be able to dig a little bit and ferret out the weasels or weasel out the ferrets so that I don't have to talk with 548209 candidates before I find the one guy who is competent enough to do the job and ethical enough to admit it?

So this is what happens...

2008-11-17T06:11:00.000-08:00

...when you're out of commission for a month: The whole fucking country turns surreal.

To start off, smoking got banned in public places.
The ban was educational in the sense that it taught me that restaurants and bars are public places too. I spent multiple hot afternoons a couple of weeks ago trying to chill out inside one a/c restaurant or the other without ordering anything, and the restaurant owners turned hostile - even more so when I pointed out that since this was a public place, I was free to come and go as I pleased.

A couple of days later, Rahul Gandhi stated the vicinity of alert journalists that he was not opposed to the idea of becoming Prime Minister. I've got something to share with those alert journalists who thought this was news enough to print in their newspaper:
Your newspaper is just a fucking tabloid that relishes pasting semi nudes in color pages in the back to increase sales.
Give up the pretense and stop fucking printing this horseshit.
You want news? I got news for you. NOBODY is opposed to being Prime Minister themselves. It's how many OTHER people are opposed that matters, you dumbfucks.

And, then, if you hadn't already noticed, the entire fucking economy turned decisively toward shit. Which, I believe, is a good thing.
I think it's going to be a good thing for those snot nosed fresh graduates, and those job hopping frenzy feeders who have never seen a serious downside in their short lived careers. When the 50% pay raises for switching and the I'll-give-you-800K-to-start-if-you-can-fog-up-this-mirror ends, I think we will all have some sanity back in our lives.
Now don't get me wrong. I realize the coming months are not going be easy. Most companies have already started doing the detailed analysis that comes before massive reductions in force. (The word analysis, in this context, comes from combining the Latin root anal, meaning 'of the ass/arse', with the Greek root ysis meaning 'to pull a number').
As a result of this analysis, a lot of good people are going to fall on hard times. And I feel for them. In their honor, I believe the Investment Bankers who perpetrated the sub-prime crisis* should be shot. Or at least taken to jail. The bankers who gave out these sub-prime loans should be taken to jail. Or at least given 50 lashes. And the bastards who falsified documents to spend a month in a million dollar home just to leave when the first payment came due.... Those guys should be sent to work as menial labor for the guys who are going to loose their shirt in the next few months.

*Note: If you do not understand the sub-prime crisis, perhaps this short explanation will help. Hapless service industry employees are routinely driven around in call center vehicles by spastic uncouth drivers in a rash and unsafe manner, on roads full of potholes, where traffic is managed by cops who don't understand the larger traffic control needs of the city. This can lead to serious damage to the property of innocent bystanders, and perhaps their lives.
Similarly, Mortgage Backed Securities were stuffed into Special Investment Vehicles, and driven around by spastic uncouth Investment Bankers in a rash and unsafe manner, in an environment full of potholes, where transactions were managed by regulatory bodies who did not understand the larger impact of certain regulatory decisions they made. This HAS caused damage to the property and lives of various innocent bystanders.

Spell My Name

2008-09-08T06:46:00.000-07:00

I have a simple name, and a fairly common - infamous even - last name. But every time I talk to somebody at a call center, they make me spell it out for them. I have to go through the A for apple, N for Nagpur shit, and in spite of all that when I get my ticket or "parcel" or whatever, it's always addressed to Dare Antulay or Dave and Thulay.
I don't hold this against them. They probably go through a lot everyday - like having to deal with the fact that Sharman Joshi is going to play one of them in a movie.
No, seriously, I think they go through a lot everyday like trying to figure out the precise hour my irregular motions take me to the loo so that they can call and enquire whether or not I need a personal loan.
No, seriously, really, they go through a lot everyday like trying to figure out which pub I'm going to try and get a quick beer at so that they can show up and display their pre-puberty gregariousness at a table too close to me.
But anyway, regardless of the reason, I figure that it doesn't matter how I spell out my name for them, these semi humans at the call center are always going to get it wrong. So I' decided to come up with my own smart-ass spelling scheme that I'm going to use from now on. Some of them - as you will see - proved to be a stretch for my creativity. If you've got a better suggestion for any one of them, lemme know.

A as in Aisle
B as in bee
C as in cent
D as in Djibouti
E as in Istanbul
F as in ephemeral
G as in jijaji (I hate this one. Gotta be a better one for G)
H as in hour
I asinine
J as in gesticulate
K as in knee
L as in elicit
M as in emit
N as in known
O as in oesophagus
P as in pneumonia
Q as in queue
R as in argument
S as in pseudonym
T as in tea
U as in yuletide
V as in wheel (Come one, you know it, all desis say veel and not wheel)
W as in www
X as in exhale
Y as in why not
Z as in xylophone

I hope the next time I try to book a ticket the call center moron has a sense of humor, and doesn't book me to fucking timbucktoo

Truth in Advertising

2008-08-28T05:21:00.000-07:00

I drove past a billboard yesterday that featured a woman trying hard to look proud but really only looking standoffish, or defiant, you know? Like somebody who was about to challenge me to a duel? And next to her was the tag line - "It's harder to get into IIMB than it is to get into Wharton." Or something to that effect, followed by "Bangalore is in my DNA" or some such.

I almost threw up.

And No. Not because I went to Wharton, but because it is a line that is neither true nor false, and it is calculatingly used to misguide people into thinking that IIMB is better than Wharton. And guess what. I've never heard this tag line used by IIMB, It's always by some namby pamby ass to generate a hollow sense of pride in a city and it's institutions, in the hope that the emotion will translate to higher sales of something or the other

Lets look at that statement - IIMB is harder to get into that Wharton.
I've got a few questions.
Q1). For who?
For middle managers with 10 years of management experience and a track record of acadmic excellence sa well as executing in the real world? Sure. For sharp cocky quick wits who have a knack for multiple choice tests, but have never really been tested out in the corporate jungle? Not really. They would get into an IIM much easier than a Wharton.
Q2). Says who?
Comparing acceptance rates (number of applicants admitted divided by number of applicants) is not valid unless the populations that apply are similar. I'm not asking for rigorous proof here, but come on. We all know that the type of people that apply to a Wharton are very different from the type that apply to an IIM. The comparison of resulting acceptance rates is just not valid. It's like saying that a Suzuki Swift is better than a Benz because the wait on a Swift is longer.
Q3). Does it really matter?
All MBA schools are about 30% education, 30% network, and 40% opportunity to find a new job at a higher pay. So what is really important is, how good are the education, the network you build and the brand value of the IIMs, as compared to the US schools.

So the statement is totally meaningless comparison designed to take a statistic and turn it into newspaper sales. This is what all advertising is about though, isn't it? Getting an emotional reaction out of the viewer and hoping that the emotion will drive sales.

There's other examples too. Some coaching classes were saying on the radio that you should join that coaching class because 50% of the students admitted to IIM had enrolled. What kind of shit-for brains thinks that statement makes sense. If it's you, let me just tell you that if a percentage were to make sense, it would be what percentage of XYZ students made it into IIM. If you buy the logic of the original statement, even with the coaching classes, all you're going to do is pad the IIM acceptance rates even more.

But kind of statistical misdirection works. Suckers get taken in by some numbers, and then they feel a surge of misplaced, unnecessary and false nationalism or civic pride. Get desperate for a better city or a better life, and run to the store to buy some product which will give them only more stress and a lighter wallet. Or they go out and hold rallies and burn public property because of that fucking civic pride.

And I think that's just a little bit sad.

I saw another one, this time with a dude, who was asking "If Sepang can host an F1 race, why can't Bangalore?"
To that dude, I would like to say -
"What?"
and
"Are you out of your fucking mind?"
and
"Can we just finish the fucking NICE road first?"
and
"Are you from IIMB?"

Maybe Bangalore is just not in my* DNA.

*thanks anon - I hate making these errors, but I guess I'm not yet competent enough to find and nuke 'em all

Rickshaw Bandhan

2008-08-23T07:36:00.000-07:00

This whole Rakhee holiday isn't really my favorite holiday, and not just because it reminds me alternately of an unnecessarily large woman that was hoisted upon us unsuspecting cinema goers back in the fucking day, or a freewheeling three wheeler propelled by a leering uncooperative toad.
So I am going to steer clear of the damned holiday but not before I mention how I just remember that some valiant Rajput (or Mughal) king was fooled into protecting a Mughal (or Rajput) queen because she sent him an curiously rounded erstwhile Bollywood actress in an envelope. So this Rajput (or Mughal) king rides over to protect the queen from marauding rapists or whoever it was that threatened her honor.
I've always suspected that this story was a lie, 'coz in the days of horseback traveling, neither the enveloped rasagolla looking actress' journey to the king nor his subsequent gallop to save his now sister, would have been completed fast enough to prevent a determined pillager from making away with the sister's dignity. But my teachers brushed away my questions by banging a stiff ruler repeatedly against my knuckles, and ensured that I took away the correct moral from the story, which is,

If a male receives a horse, he must ride Rakhee till his evil sister goes to town with some fiends.

Or maybe it was

If a male receives a Rakhee, he must ride a horse to the town of his sister and rid it of the evil fiends.

It was tough to assimilate knowledge about so many bloody rulers while simultaneously being battered with a fucking ruler.

Anywho.
What I really wanted to get off my chest was the god damned Rickshaw drivers.
What is wrong with these people?

First of all, they never want to go anywhere you have to? What are they waiting for? A fare to fucking Nepal? Listen to me VeerabloodyAppan HallifuckingGowda. You gotta go where you are asked to go, especially if your meter proudly displays the upright "For Hire" sign. It's upright for a reason. Even if you're not.
Second, if they don't want to go where you want to, they can't just say no or drive off. They make this nasty scowl and shake their heads looking down as if to say the place you named is a pestilence ridden crime infested open sewage drain, and not a respectable address. I just want to let a tight one from the back of my hand ricochet off their mangy cheeks when I see them do that. And I would, if I wasn't afraid that all the surrounding rickshaw drivers would take a few minutes off from refusing to ferry passengers and gang up on me.
Thirdly, and I would be more than happy if anybody could explain this to me, these idiots will refuse any fare that is a short distance. Seems to me like short fares, lower than half the minimum fare distance would be something these guys would kill for because they would make more margins in those. But no. I had to lug a fucking 40kilo bag and a mattress over a kilometer because every god damned Rickshaw dude didn't want to make a short fare trip.
Finally every once in a while, I will have a rickshaw guy ask me for "Meter maylay 20" or Meter maylay 10". But I have a a great retort for this. I say "Muh maylay, phir meter maylay" and triumphantly stride away into the sunset leaving confused rickshaw driver scratching his nuts.

I'm just starting to think that half the Rickshaw drivers in this city just don't want to drive. I think they just like sitting in hideous sheet metal furniture with three wheels in ugly brown uniforms and leering at anything that passes and looks somewhat non-male till May 1st or whatever day it is that they hoist giant red and yellow flags and drive around town displaying nationalism.
They're just a horde of pests that have invaded our city and are slowly eating our peace away from the inside out. We need to put a stop to this.

I implore you, if you're female, to dispatch a curiously rounded bollywood starlet to Deve Cowdung, and please have him rid us of these damned rickshaw driving fiends.

Top Ten People Who Should Retire Right Now, But Wont

2008-08-19T08:02:00.000-07:00

Deve Cowdung - from looking for election partners to deceive
Leander Piss and his Bhu-patni - from their incessant dick waving
Sachin Tendul-kuch-kar-nahin-raha - from painfully dragging his career
Ms Dhoni - from his inflated social standing
"Saliva" or is that "Thaliva" Rajani Saar - from throwing chewing gum into his eyes and sunglasses into his mouth or vice versa
"Megastar" Konidela Siva Shankara Vara Prasad - from polictics
Amitabh Bunch-o-crap-an - from hawking everything from Chavanprash to Cut-pieces
Salmonella Khan't Dance Sala - from movies
Shah Rukh Khan't Act - from anywhere my eyes land, AND FINALLY
Mr. Narayan "I'm so simple" Murthy - from public life,

Initiate an Initiative

2008-08-17T22:58:00.000-07:00

Pop Quiz: What's the name of the guy from Bangalore that won the Lead India campaign and then had his opinions on various topics of the day gratuitously forced upon us via the Times?

I'm not being disingenuous, I've really forgotten his name, and I have no idea what - if anything - he did with the prize money from the sms contest he won. That is probably because the ToI has itself tired of him and has stopped asking him for sound bites.
I expected that from the Tabloid of India.
First they started the DO initiative, which didn't DO anything but put Amitabh on screen at some half finished sea bridge in Bombay talking about how India was rising. (I'm still trying to find out what India is rising FROM, exactly, but that's just me being an ass). I'd like to know from somebody if the bridge is done or - a la airport bridge flyover - it's still waiting for some politician or the other to put his thumbprint on a past due payment or for some overloaded judge to rule on some asinine objections.

Next was the Lead India initiative, which started off same as the doo-doo initiative and then morphed into a TV show that encouraged the sms slaves to send in scores of rupees to the ToI-Telecom company nexus.

And I don't know if you have noticed, but there is now a TEACH INDIA initiative. Where we are all supposed to get together and teach people about something or the other. (I'm not really clear on what it is we have to teach them, exactly. Probably how to send sms-es).

I think I've figured out why the ToI needs all these initiatives for India: Money.

See they were supposed to print the news. That didn't make them enough money, so they started printing pictures of women who paid too much for their clothes and men who paid too much for their women, drinking it up at various parties throughout the week. That got the ToI some eyeballs for some time, but there were only so many people attending these DO's - which is why if you notice - THEY'RE ALWAYS THE SAME PEOPLE ON PAGE THREE.
So they decided they have to DO something and hence was born "DO India - A ToI initiative" (to make money). Of course the didn't print the parenthetical part of the title.
Eyeballs must have poured in, and there may have been some impact on circulation, so they decided to take it to the next level and came up with "Lead India - A ToI initiative" (to make even more money). Same as the Do India thing really, but with SMS-es. More eyeballs. More money.
What next? "Teach India - A ToI initiative" (to see how many times we can do this shit to make money).
I wont be surprised if there is an SMS contest to elect the best teacher from amongst the unsuspecting innocent well-intentioned hordes that will surely join in on this Initiative

Meanwhile I'm going to come up with my own initiative. "Screw ToI Initiatives - A Screw ToI Initiatives Initiative". It's simple. All you have to do is switch to a newspaper instead of the ToI (which is not a newspaper, when you get right down to it), and then - of course - SMS me at 56789 with "The Screw ToI Initiatives Initiative" .

Now to figure out how to get the telecom companies to share some of that moolah...

Being Cynical

2008-08-13T08:04:00.001-07:00

One of the eight people that return to this blog on a regular basis is - bless her soul - my mother.
My mother is a saintly soul who shuns strong language, scathing sarcasm and bitter cynicism in totality. If you've read my posts, you will see, as I do, that all the cussing, sarcasm and cynicism that used to be part of my mother rolled up into a ball, festered in that uterus for 9 months and then popped ready to spew unnecessarily strong venom at the world.
My mom still reads through my bile once every week or so.

Yesterday, she called me.

Mom: Hi Son
Me: Hey ma.
Mom: You know, I was reading your blog, and I think you're really a good writer
(of course my mom thinks so. She thinks I was cute when I was born, when in actuality I looked like a sun dried tomato)
Me: Good to hear ma.
Mom: But why do you have to be so bitter?
Me: bitter?
Mom: You seem like you're complaining about the most minor annoyances. It's not necessary.
Me: Yeah it is
Mom: Why?
Me: See this woman and her son were walking down a beach when a giant wave came down and washed her son away. Immediately, she gets on her knees, folds her hands in prayer and says" If you return my son to me, I will visit the temple everyday and donate a coconut". Another giant wave comes down and the son is back, in perfect health. She looks up at the sky and says... "You know, he was wearing a hat when you first took him."
Mom: Hahahah
Me: See. She was complaining about the hat, and it was funny.
Mom: You don't HAVE to be bitter to be funny.
Me: Ma, I HAVE to. I'm not good enough to be otherwise.
Mom: Yes you are.

Only she believes that.
This is one of the reasons I can't stop loving her.

That and her cooking.

Debased Databases

2008-08-10T21:46:00.000-07:00

How many databases does YOUR organization have?
I know that databases are supposed to be repositories of important information, but they've morphed into huge piles of fetid trash.
Most databases are vile collections of (mostly) useless information arranged within carefully constructed "schema". It's called "schema" because the villains known as database administrators are "scheming" to prevent you from getting to any relevant information that may have made it past their defenses.
(Of course these database admins are only the second line of defense. The first line is the IT department which will ensure that you don't have the software, the computing power, or the login information necessary to access the database, without first signing away your life and securing approval from your VP's mother's dogs left testicle, but more of that in another post, later)
The most irritating of all databases are those will their own "work flows". Of course, they're there not to make work flow, but rather to impede the already glacial pace of work. They're called "work flows" because the database administrators want to demonstrate that they have a good grasp over the concept of "irony". Maybe you are not familiar with the concept of "work flows" because your backward company does not have a database. Fear not, o deprived one, I will enlighten you. A work flow is a series of steps that relevant information must stop at, be nitpicked over, changed unnecessarily and sometimes clubbed with a mallet and roasted over an open flame, till it is saddled with enough unnecessary accouterments to hide it's actual purpose, and is delayed long enough to not be timely anymore. Maybe you're thinking that "work flows" are unnecessary, but that's only because you are a lowlife cretin who does not understand that if work flows did not exist, you would never be able to ensure that any information is shrouded in templates, hampered by standards and is approved by people more in touch with the devil than you.

Don't get me wrong. I see the value of databases. It's not those mute tables that drive me up a wall, but the idiots that build them, encase them in rules and render them useless. Every moron who reads up on SQL code on the net wants to develop his own database because corporate databases wont cut the ice for his own specific microscopically unique needs, and so he runs off, downloads MySQL or Access and creates his own specific database and front end. Soon every company ends up with a gazillion little database, each of which contain one facet of information about their products or processes or people and none of which can share that information with the other. So just in case you are actually looking for information that will help you solve a problem, you have to first figure out whether or not that information exists, then figure out which database in exists in, and finally lay prostrate before the owner begging him to understand that your need is indeed a genuine one, before you can actually get your hands on the information.

Beset by similar woes last week, I devised a deliciously brilliant solution.
I'm going to start a database of databases. Every database owner must register in my database - without which his database will be wiped off the company servers. There's just one snag. I must lay prostrate before the gods in the IT department and convince them that my need is indeed genuine.

And our IT VP's mother dog is a bitch.

Watch out, all you cabbies and support groups!

2008-07-29T04:06:00.000-07:00

I understand anger.
For example, when irresponsible (not to mention un-bathed) idiots behind the wheel of a rampaging call center taxi swerves in front of me so he can get to the speed bump a millisecond before I do, I loose it. I hurl invectives at the fecal matter in the drivers seat of the white Sumo with venom. And when I notice that my cursing has had no effect other than coat the inside of my windscreen with a thin layer of spittle, I flip the guy off. While that action seldom has any effect other than cathartis, I understand how anger can cause normally docile, timid, cultured, intelligent and handsome people like myself to behave as if the only culture they were ever exposed to was something that people in white lab-coats in pharma labs are trying very hard to kill.

I also understand frustration.
For example, when after thousands of emails, voicemails and meetings, people who are in a support group behave like animals in a zoo (meaning that they scratch themselves, generally look disinterested, emaciated and mangy, and don't respond to your commands to sit, stay, play or roar), I lose it. I find myself wondering if they are actually as dumb as carpet mites, or if they're actually just smart enough to figure out that they can put on a nice veneer of smiles and yes-saars and not really do anything, and I wont even be able to hurl abusive language or finger gestures at them because their support-group friends over in HR would promptly walk me over to jail.

But even though I understand anger and frustration - at some level anyway - I dont understand terrorism.

Maybe it is because I do not hold many beliefs to be undeniably true. And those few beliefs that I DO hold to be true, I dont believe to be universal. Maybe that is why I do not understand that there can be any entitlement so fundamental and universal that being denied it could lead you to lives of random civilians.

Like I said above, I understand how people may get frustrated with negotiation processes. I also understand how people may get angry because of certain acts. But I don't understand how the frustration and anger of a few people could get to the point where they collude to fill shopping bags and tiffin boxes with nails and bolts and ammonium nitrate and set them off around unsuspecting citizens. An it amazes me that they don't see the futility of such actions.

Several camel-oriented nations have been at this terrorism nonsense since I've inhaled my first lungful of pollutants on this blue marble. They still haven't gotten anywhere. So if people who perpetrate this kind of utter nonsense believe that it is going to get them a solution or even the right kind of attention, then they must be more than simply deluded. They must have the intellectual ability of a single celled organism. (And when I say single celled organism, I leave out the mighty and respectul yeast, which, despite having only one cell has figured out how to turn sugar and wheat into beer, which is far more impressive than the achievements of some organisms with thousands and thousands of cells, like, for example, Deve Gowda.)

Anyway - to get back to the point I was laboring to make - these bomb-planters are beyond stupid. But what I suspect is that the people who walked around unnoticed in the shadows of a crowd and placed their little bicycles in various areas around the city are just the tip of the iceberg. The real evil-doers are the people who cammandeered these unintelligent life-forms and blathered enough emotion-filled rhetoric around their cranial vacuums to fill them with dangerous ideas, irrational conclusions, and incomprehensible hatred.

Nothing frustrates and angers me more than the thought that these guys are walking around free right now. And while even this doesn't anger me enough to want to run out with sticks and swords and committing random acts of further violence, I fear for the safety of the next slimeball in a Qualis that cuts me off, or the next guy in a support group that fails to stock adequate paper for the printer.

Change That

2008-07-24T04:35:00.000-07:00

People love to change. They change all the time. They just don't like it when somebody ELSE asks them to change. And why should they?

I was talking with a friend of mine last night who had just received a steaming hot pile of management bullshit from one of his fearless leaders. Apparently this dude, in an all hands (and no heads) kind of situation, lectured an entire division on how they should be flexible and adapt to the changes that the business was making.

Every time a company changes anything - either because
a). the business environment is changing, or
b). they want to increase profitability, or
c). some executive believes that you are drinking way too much free coffee for your own good
- whatever the reason - every time a company changes anything, the employees get the short end.

This company I'm talking about is going through a tough business cycle. So they're planning some changes. I bet they will be one or all of:

additional product cost reduction programs,
reduction in training and travel expenses,
reductions in non essential spending (Bring your own coffee, pens, papers etc)
Stifled promotions and raises
reductions in workforce,

What are these changes going to do for the company?
More money and more profit? Maybe.
Happy shareholders? In the short term, maybe.

And what are these changes going to do for the employees?
Higher Workload? Check
INcreased Stress? Check
Reduced Job Security? check
Reduced earnings (adjusted for inflation)? Check

So every change makes it tougher on the employee, benefits the employer.
Which is fine.
Really.
Business gets tough and tough shit happens.

But it really ticks me off when a management executive comes down and lectures the hordes on how THEY need to be more flexible.
No bitch.
How about YOU being more flexible with how much money you want to make?
How about you making YOUR BUSINESS more flexible so that you don't have to panic every few quarters for a few pennies per share?

All said and done though, you know what is really sad? The executives are right.
They've got us by our short and curlies.
You've got to change. Because if you don't, you will hurt more than those who do.
Adjust and adapt to the changing demands, and you may be able to keep your job.
You will remain stressed, overworked, underpaid and wretched. And when you come in to work, you won't even be able to swig on muddy dark drown thick goo that used to be your free coffee. But you will retain a paycheck.

So is there no solution?
Yes there is: Change faster.
F than your company can.
Move roles. Add positions, responsibilities on your resume. Change companies. Change whatever. Just do it fast.
Faster, preferably, than allows for any realistic assessment of your performance. That is, before anybody has the chance to find out that you really don't know what you're doing, move.

People like this get promoted my friend.
They get put in CHARGE of change.
Then soon enough, you'll be the executive that waltzes down to India and lectures the teeming millions on how THEY must learn to adapt.

And if you've not had a sip of your own Kool-Aid by then, you will enjoy the irony of it all.

How would YOU like to be rejected?

2008-07-21T05:29:00.000-07:00

What do you do with the candidates you reject?

Lets start with the interviews themselves.
Actually, lets start with HR.
Isn't it funny how long it will take you to find a list of 5 candidates whom you actually want to sit down and talk with? And this is NOT because India is facing a huge talent shortage (although Infosys and their brethren aren't really helping by vacuuming up graduates by the millions and not really helping fill the pipeline).
No - it's because HR cant be bothered to actually take the time to understand what the fuck the job is all about, and what kind of skills (other than the rudimentary English, C++, and *insert degree here*) the job role might require.
Even if you had to hire an astronaut, and you asked HR to send you some resumes, they'd begin by asking you - what degree should your candidate have.Lets say you declare that it should be aeronautical engineering or astrophysics. Then they'll sleep through the rest of your well thought out detail on what the candidate may require, and flood your in box with a deluge of resumes who will all have degrees that begin with aero or astro. Aeronautical, Aerospace, Aerobridge, Astrophysics, Astronomic, Astrology, you name it. There'll be a candidate from it. OF course, they will all have about 3 to 7 years of work experience (since you said you wanted someone with 10). And all of their experience will be in software services companies, on projects that are in no way related to their degree.
In hindsight, I shouldn't have started with HR - that is a tangential take-off into a mindless frustrated rant, just waiting to happen

Anyway. Lets say that a few years later, you have found your 5 guys.
You call 'em in. Then for each candidate, you go through the mandatory minimum of 3 reschedules to accomodate for HR fuck-ups, candidates having urgent projects (which probably means they are interviewing somewhere else), and a inevitable 1 to 2 hour delay before the interview (the candidate is stuck in traffic, car broke down, security wont let him pass without a farcical bag check etc). Then you interview the candidates, and say you rank 'em from 1 to 5.
You go with an offer to candidate 1, but by the time HR has processed the offer, he has joined Infosys.
You go with an offer to candidate 2, he accepts (hurray!). You're on!

Now what.
I tell you what you do.
You assume that HR takes care of the other three candidates.
Lets them down gently.
Tells them that they narrowly missed out because a candidate with a slightly better fit in experience and qualification has expressed intrerest, but that they (the candidates) had a promising resume, and if ever anything similar opened up, HR would immediately throw their hat into the ring. And since they had already come so close, maybe they would make it to the second round of interviews directly.
Yeah.
Wrong.

They only way HR will do that is if you sit in a conference room and insist that they do it in front of you.

Otherwise, this is what happens:

You: Praise be to you O! HR representative (that's how you have to address HR - metaphorically speaking)
HR: Speak
You: As you know, candidate 2 has accepted. Would you be so kind as to get in touch with the rest of the candidates and inform them?
HR: Done.

Break

Candidates Phone: *Ring*
Candidate: Hello?
HR: Candidate 3?
C3: Yes?
HR: Hi this is HR Rep from Acme Rockets.
C3: Yes. Hello. How are you?
HR: Yeah. You failed the interview.
C3: Oh?
HR: Yup. You sucked at it. And what was that about the amount of money you wanted?
C3: Huh?
HR: Ha.Ha.Ha. You must have been kidding.
C3: Sorry?
HR: Anyway. Whatever dude. We'll call you if we need you.
C3: What?
HR: You're pond scum. Loser.
C3: hey! Waitaminute, you can't talk to me like that!
HR: Blow Me. *click*

Of course, I have exaggerated the exchange above for effect. But trust me, not by much.
Whether or not your HR folks use those exact words, the effect they have on a rejected candidate is very similar.

It never hurts to handle your rejects well. They become ambassadors for your company. (Not those white bulbous four wheelers, you jerk.) I heard terrible things about a very prominent company from a candidate they rejected. Instead of letting him down gently, the threw him off the roof, and tossed a bag of cement after him. Then they had the company bus run him over.
We're not talking fresh graduate level. We're talking middle management.
He looked like shit when I talked to him that evening.
He's never going to work for that company is his life, he told me.
And he drew conclusions about that company's culture, it's values, and it's relationship with it's mother among other things from the way he was handled.
Nobody's ever going to hear a good thing about this company from this guy.
A good, capable, connected guy.

Their loss.

Shut your mouth

2008-07-18T03:02:00.000-07:00

Don't you just hate the guys who can't stop walking up to you and talking their ass off for an interminable hour about stuff that even they know you can't possibly give a shit about?

Some of them want to impress upon you how hard they're working. Every day the see you, they will try hard to look nonchalant while the desperately scout for an opportunity to mention how they had to take a call at 6 in the morning. And a few minutes later they will - almost inadvertently - mention that they were up till 3 in the morning as well. It's obvious that there motherfuckers are not working so hard or so late. If they were, they would either be getting promoted or dropping dead. Neither of which seems to happen to them. I've got a message for these guys too: Nobody cares how hard you're working. Get your shit done in 1 hour or 8. As long as your shit's done on time, that's all that matters. Stop telling me how long you worked and how hard you worked. Nobody cares.

Then there;s those who just come by and will talk about whatever it is that they can, and will NOT leave your cube. Even if you patently ignore them and stare at your monitor and type away while the speak. To these guys, I just want to say: Get a life dudes. You're boring us normal people. We pretending to work even though we don't have anything pressing to do. We prefer working on the dregs of our priority lists to conversing with you. That's how much we like having you around. Now leave.

And how about those arseholes who will call you when they're commuting. These guys are so not used to being by themselves, that when they're on the bus or in their car, they have to fiddle with their phones and call you up so they can ask you a transparently unimportant question or give you a frighteningly unnecessary update. And if you make the mistake of answering the phone, they wont hang up till they're conveniently close to home or if the call drops. To these guys, I say: Get a life. Are you really so scared about being alone with your thoughts for a few hours? Can't you get a radio in your car or your phone and listen to crappy nasal renditions of the Himmesh kind? And do you think you're fooling us when you scream over honking maniacs to talk to us about an update on what the IT guys told you about how to get your email signature changed? You're annoying both us and the people around you. And no the call isn't dropping and the cell network doesn't suck. I just like hanging up on you.

There's these guys who can't stop talking about their children. Well, I got news for you. Nobody likes your children - especially your newborn children.
Your newborn children are cute only to you. And I wonder why given how they look more like they were born when the creature from Alien fucked a California Sun Dried Prune. I understand you're all gung-ho about the kid you just had, but really there should be a limit on how long you should be allowed to talk about them - especially at work, with people who might actually qualify as total strangers except for the fact that the logo on their badge matches the logo on yours. I mean, if you like them so much, why don't you quit wasting your time, finish your work and go spend some time with those precious little runts inside your house where neither they nor you can bother me while I furiously try to get to the next level at my favorite online free game.

So… How much do you make now?

2008-07-17T03:26:00.000-07:00

I need help understanding something.

There’s only so many kinds of jobs. And there’s only so many levels. Right?

Let me explain what I mean through a long winded example:
Say the entrepreneurial bug wafts by gives you on day, and give you a good chomp on your rear. Right after you yell “FUCK!”, it’s likely you will run out and start a small business.
Say it’s a restaurant.
You hire a few people. A cashier to handle the cash, a buyer to scout for the deals in raw materials (a few veggies, a brown gravy and a red gravy), a chef to decide which gravy color to use, a waiter to plonk the things on the tables, and a disheveled minor to pick up the empty plates and clean up the ash trays.
Say you do well in this business.
And you grow.
Are you going to create more jobs? As in – more job types?
Probably not. You’ll promote those that haven’t yet been lured away by Infosys and hire under them some assistants or more thambis, and annas.
If you start serving beer, you may add a barman and a bouncer.
If you do really well, you may add a valet.
You may even add a guy in marketing that tells you when to air annoying jingles and sponsor irritating contests on the radio.
But that’s it.
So there’s only so many kinds of jobs. And there’s only so many levels.
And, what’s more, as a business owner, you know how much you want to pay for what kind of job, at each level. Right?

Ok there’s not one number, there’s a range for each level which may vary based on how good that hostess will look. But still, generally, for each level, there’s a range of salary outside which, you wouldn’t expect to pay. And once you’ve seen the new hostess and you’ve “interviewed” her about her “skills”, you will have a pretty good idea how much you should pay.

And here comes the leap – stay with me now – you NEVER need to know what she is making today.

With me so far?

So here’s the part I need help with.
Why is it that these HR guys in India are always asking to see your last pay slip?
I think it’s fair for them to ask a job seeker how much he/she wants, but not how much he/she currently makes. So OK, I’m no babe in the woods, I know that HR is not really out to be fair. Or intelligent. They’re just out to lunch – in the metaphorical sense. So I’m OK with HR asking for the pay slips. What blows my mind is that PEOPLE TELL THEM!!!
People tell them even before they ask.
They put it on their resumes that they send out.

Are these guys some kind of dimwits, or what?

Look you idiots, the biggest bargaining chip you have is that these guys don’t know what you make. So if you’re confident that you’re getting considered for the job, (meaning that you are going to be entering a negotiation for salary), then telling them what you make currently is like opening up your cards even before the ante’s on the board.

Whether you like it or not, HR here (in India) has a policy of hiring somebody at the lowest pay the guy will accept. They don’t believe in paying for the job. They believe in paying for the candidate. If that sounds suspiciously like whoring to you, I don’t have to tell you who’s being the whore in this bargain.

Then again, if that needs to be spelled out to you then you deserve what’s happening to you.
And you know what? The company will get what it’s paying for.

The thing about tall cubes

2008-07-15T02:13:00.000-07:00

I used to have a nice cubicle.
Ample storage for stuff I never used, A whiteboard for doodling while on long drawn our phone calls, a pinup board to stick up motivational posters of the deviant kind (it's OK, they were fully clothed) and short walls so I could look around.
Then the facility god moved me. They put me in this corner cube, which was supposed to be more "special". I've still got the storage and the whiteboard and the pin-ups, but I've got tall walls.
I hate it. You know why?
Two reasons.
For one, I can no longer see the nitwits approach me. They just sneak up behind me now and stand there for a few seconds till I get that weird sensation of being watched. And when I turn around, they're standing there looking at my computer screen as if captivated by the pastel colors on the powerpoint presentation on upcoming cost cutting measures. But this is OK. I'm never really looking at real sensitive information while sitting in a cube. They worst that they will see is me amusing myself with Knuckleheads while pretending to be working. So this is just a minor moan. Here's my major bitch - my second reason - about the tall cubes: Previously, I could see people approaching me, and now I can't.

Everybody has people they don't want to spend time with. Especially people from organizations that are always trying to get you to do their job. So whenever I saw one of the people approaching, I would open a serious looking excel file that I built in one of my more productive meetings. It has multiple charts, a pivot table, a couple of dollar signs and looks like a business review template, but it has numbers that mean diddly squat, and column headings that are random acronyms like AGHM, HHTG, and TRGS. So, I would open up this excel file and stare at it like I was trying to melt the computer screen. When the offensive intruder got close enough and said something patently useless - usually something like "Hey D, can you review the 987657 page procedure I wrote up for ordering pencils to stick up my ass, and give me your feedback?" - I would just excuse myself because I just HAD to make sense of the excel file. I have that file on my desktop and it's called "savior".
Another technique I used if foul colleagues approached, is that as soon as they got close enough to my cube, I would get up and start walking away, pretending to talk on my phone. If they called after me, I'd just point first at my watch and then in some random direction, all the while saying "On my way, coming, coming." into my phone. I would then raise an arbitrary number of fingers to signal a vague time for me coming back (could be 30 minutes, could be 3pm). I'd go take a walk or a piss and come back to my peaceful existence.
Now I can't see people approaching.
I'm trapped.
I'm frequently unpleasantly surprised by irritating idiots who walk up and first ensure that I am doing nothing remotely important looking, and then pounce on my free time and club my motivation to death with their dull personalities and inane ideas.
I think they only put me in this "special" cube, because they were onto me.
The scheming bastards.

I hate it.

In Flight Irritations

2008-07-14T04:34:00.001-07:00

Last weekend I took a trip on a renowned low cost airline, and the experience was fairly detestable.

For starters, they had done such an admirable job of turning the plane around quickly that my seat was still warm from whose-ever ass was on it before mine. I don't know why but this puts a vague sense of discomfort through my being, even when I KNOW the person who has left his bodily warmth on a seat for me.
Then I had the best travelling companions I could ask for.

A restless dork ahead of me who would move his seat back up and down every few minutes, with a vengeance that could only have come from WANTING to take out my knees,
A kid behind me who kicked MY seat back repeatedly because he was spoiled little brat and because his parents are probably ugly un-caring trolls
A guy next to me that was big enough to be his own republic, and who had that smell that seems to accompany only the grotesquely large specimen of our kind. And of course he insisted on unburdening his experiences in Bangalore on my hapless self.

The only person who talked more than him was the pilot. He insisted on telling me how high up we were, what turbulence was coming and how, if I scrunched my nose up against the window (which I didn't have to put much effort to do, since my desire to get away from the ginormous idiot next to me had already put me in said position), I would be able to see some landmark that I didn't care about.
And this captain would come back on the speakerphone to bring me up to date on the fascinating fact that he had either turned on or off the seat belt sign.
He did have a deft touch though.. When we landed, he seemed to skim off the runway much like a stone skims over the surface of a lake, only - thankfully - we didn't all sink at the end of it. (Is that a terrible analogy, or what?).

Anyway, the most interesting part about my flight was how anxious everybody seemed to get off the plane. It seems like only a few nanoseconds had past after the first time the rear wheels touch the runway that half the plane sprang out of their seats and started shoving each other out of the way to get their bags out of the overhead compartments and got ready to walk out the door. How much sooner are these people going to get out? And most of them stand staring at the empty baggage conveyor for hours after their hurried exit out of the tube. I don't get it.

But the highlight of the trip was that the flight was on time, and the chunk of change I saved on the tickets allowed me to consume a copious amount of cold alcoholic beverages at my destination.

And that was almost reward enough for me to try low cost airlines again.

Quality Experiences

2008-07-11T06:14:00.000-07:00

Quality.
That's a word I have come to severely detest.
After I moved to this country, I have had low quality employees in the Quality division all over me trying to get me to support their hare brained process documentation and audit passing schemes.
These idiots believe that all you need to do to be a quality organization is write everything down, link up a bunch of word documents in a ridiculous home grown kluge of a database, and then sit back and relax as the auditors waltz in an out of your facility asking mind numbing questions and making non-value added remarks.
Of course you get certified - you paid the auditors for that - and then the Quality organization picks up their bonus check and smiles their annoying smile on the way to the bank.

Now here's the rub.
Sometimes you get smart, scheming people. They know how the system works, they exploit it to get paid, and they end up with large sums of money in their back pockets with nary a bead of sweat on their forehead. They're bad, evil people. I detest them.
The people I've met, who work in Quality, are not these kind. They're people with the IQ of a glob of sputum, who just are in a system that helps them get paid. I detest them even more because I'm jealous that they receive the recognition and financial rewards that I get only when I find enough time from my job to sneak in a nap long enough to allow me to dream.

I'm struggling to understand why the Quality division has the lowest quality of people in the organization as a whole.
These people believe that the tool is more important than the outcome. They will spend insane amounts of time and money to come up with a database/automated scorecard/statistics package and what have you without ever trying to understand what needs to be stored/measured/analyzed.

The most irritating aspect is the scorecard part. They will measure things that don't matter, reach conclusions that are just plain wrong, and take actions that don't even justify their conclusions! It's truly amazing to me.
They don't have the ability to generate a simple root cause analysis. I was -probably inordinately - pissed off with a (low) quality employee who had completed a root cause analysis and arrived at an explanation so startlingly inadequate that it seemed he did not understand what "root" cause even meant. I found out later that this dude's entire understanding of RCA was to ask the question why. And this guy wanted to do a six sigma project. **shudder**

So Quality dudes, here's some advice for you, which, if followed, will help you and your parent companies actually get some benefits. In fact, you should write out the parts in bold and stick them in your cube.

Screw the tool. The tool is not the end. Team Force India will beat Ferrari every time if Ferrari chose to seat you behind the wheel. Sometimes the tool is not even the means. In fact, screw the tool, it's the last thing you need to develop. Focus on the intent
Think before you measure. (I know I know, thinking is hard, it makes your head hurt, I know.) Measuring the wrong things is worse than measuring nothing. If you select "number of times your employees take a dump" as a metric to indicate "productivity", You're not going to end up with higher productivity. All you're going to have is a smelly workplace because your employees are shitting their pants.
Any actions you recommend based on one metric is wrong. Metrics never tell you causes. They only measure things. You have to analyze to get to the cause. And to analyze, you need a couple of things (a) some basic intelligence, which means you have to evolve a brain that is a little better than your current single celled thing (b) understand the business process you are measuring, which means you gave to get down and dirty with the boys who actually do the work
Documentation is step 0. Documenting a process and putting a bunch of crapola in a database so you can show it off to a bunch of asinine auditors (and trust me these guys are the bottom of the barrel even in the Quality organization) doesn't achieve anything. You have to understand the process, ensure that it reflects reality, and then set about improving them.

So stop nodding your heads and question if you truly understand the four things above.
If you do, please spread the word in any forum of Quality morons you attend, and maybe some day the world will live as one.

On Visions and Slogans

2008-07-10T05:26:00.000-07:00

Do you know your company's vision?
If you work for an MNC, or for a company that primarily serves MNCs, I'd be surprised if it didn't have one. It's supposed to be a compelling description of your desired outcome. Something that energizes and motivates you to get up and come into work everyday and beat your head against the brick walls of bureaucracy. Many companies take pains (as in - pay consultants a gazillion dollars) to come up with a sufficiently inspirational vision: Something that is inspirational, catchy, and sometimes involves improving the world at large and making every body happy. But more often that not, it turns out to be just a sticker people put on the walls.
Isn't it ironic that a vision is also something you get when you consume copious amounts of illicit hooch or something sufficiently hallucinogenic? Read your company's vision and tell me if you think that people were on drugs when they came up with it.

And a related thing is slogans. Each one of our big companies is coming up with slogans, closely related to their visions. I don't know about visions. I've never really had a religious experience, and I say no to drugs (even though they don't seem to be listening when I talk to them, and passers-by think I'm on them because I'm frequently yelling "NO" at white powdery substances, but I digress...). But here's one related thing that i DO know about - Slogans

All large companies are coming up with slogans. And it's really simple to come up with one.
Step one: Write the following words on small pieces of paper: Application, Innovation, Imagination, Solution, Thought, Quality, Your business (engineering, services, construction, whatever)
Step two: Fold the pieces of paper, jumble, and throw them on your desk.
Step three: Pick one
Step four: Convert the noun into an adjective or a verb. E.G. If you picked "thought", convert it to "thoughtful" or "thinking"
Step five: Pick another.
Step six: Combine the two and you've got your slogan.

Some examples:
Innovating Thought
Thinking Innovation
Imagining Quality (probably not a good one there)
Qualtitative Engineering (also one for the dustbin)

You could also come up with variants by combining the two words to form one. E.G. Thinklity (Thought, Quality);
Or you could use prepositions. E.g. Application at Services, Imagination in Quality and so on.

Now you have the basics in place. You could expand on your list of words, or pick three istead of two and use the same logic. Either way you will come up with a slogan that I'm sure many companies would pay good money for.

You think I jest? Just look at some examples I dug up while merrily traipsing around the net:
Applied Innovation (Wipro)
Applying Thought (Wipro)
Imagination at Work (GE)
Think Different (Apple)
Innovation (3M)
Empowered by Innovation (NEC)
Keep on Thinking (Infineon)
Imagineering (L&T)

And to think. I could have been a millionaire. I should have struck it out on my own. I even have a slogan for my company - Thoughtfully innovating in sloganualityneering

Starting Block = Writers Block

2008-07-10T04:47:00.000-07:00

So I started this blog thinking that I would post eloquent rants on workplace frustrations and other related aggravations, but as soon as I registered my blog and did the usual introductory posts, my mind kinda shrivelled up and went on a holiday.
I'm still surrounded, baffled, and just as frequently irritated by the idiosyncrasies of corporate life as I was before, but somehow I can't seem to write about a topic where I can be funny and simultaneously make a point of some consequence. I figured that maybe I have ambitions that are just not supported by adequate skill. Or maybe I'm just worrying too much about the quality of my writing given as how I'm probably going to be the only one dropping by this nascent neighbourhood.
So I thought I'd drop by some workplace humor blogs to see what existed, what they were posting about, and maybe generally get some inspiration.
Logging into Technorati and searching blogs tagged workplace humor turned up 37 blogs.
Mad Kane, by far the most poplar of these (by authority) was actually more of a light humor blog with limericks and song parodies and stuff. Not really workplace humor as I thought I found find.
And in a fit of rage at not finding what I wanted, I signed up for the limerick prompt.
Here's my (lame) limerick.
I'm a newbie to blogging too,
frustrated by work I've got to do.
Limerick-ing is lame
coz it's a rhyme scheme game
But since I'm a deviant, I'm just gonna end it whatever way I want in a shameless attempt to get hits to my blog

The others that showed up on the rankings didn't interest me, OR fit what I was looking for, so I thought I'd try searching for Corporate Humor.
Pointless Drivel, by far the most poplar of these (by authority), is now closed. That's kinda sad, because I looked through some old posts, and it was at least funny, though not what I was looking for.

From those excursions, I realized two things:
1. I still haven't found what I'm looking for
2. That is a U2 song.

So I figured that looking for similar blogs as a search of inspiration is pointless, and that I'd just as well go on and write up some stuff, throw it up here, and see how it goes. And given how many words I've put out here in spite of my brain being shut out on vacation, I may be able to get a hang of this pretty soon.

Radio Ga Ga

2008-07-04T05:28:00.000-07:00

As if it was not bad enough to begin with, radio in Bangalore has really started to get worse.
There is nothing that differentiates one station from another save the inane by lines they have.
Indigo (apparently the colour of music), Fever (which I guess is the disease of music?), and Mirchi (Sucketh lots maga), who used to play some English and Hindi stuff in addition to a little Kannada have now all shifted to a mostly Kannada format.

I have nothing against Kannada music other than the fact that I don't understand it. But doesn't any one radio station want to set itself apart? Focus on a genre, a language, a niche of some sort?

There's GOTTA be a large population in Bangalore that doesn't understand the state lingo, and I'm sure they're sitting in the parking lots that Bangalore roads turn into during rush hour and banging their heads against the steering wheel because regardless of the number of times they wildly switch radio stations all they hear is Satyaaa is in luuhhhve...FLIP... Ay Mutttu Mall-Laye...FLIP... suthide yaako elloooo.... FLIP... And this is Rohit Barker wishing you a....FLIP.... Radio One FM 94 point... FLIP.... Oh Gunavantaaa.....FLIP....Satyaaa is in luuuhve.....

Cut us a break somebody. And play something different. My steering wheel is getting blood on it.

Oh, and Rohit, get rid of that accent. You sound like you've taken one too many accent neutralizaton classes at call center operations.

Welcome The Deviant Cynic

2008-07-03T05:43:00.000-07:00

Q). In the immortal words of Pete Townshend, "Who the fuck are you?"
A). I'm another one of the teeming millions who moved to Bangalore over the last few years to work for an MNC, got sick of the traffic in spite of the weather, got drunk on weekdays in spite of the 11 0'clock travesty, got raped on the rent in spite of living 30 kms away from work but still loves it here in spite of being sick of it.

Q). Deviant Cynic?
Deviant is the nick name I picked up in college. It's a play on what my real name sounds like. It's also a fairly accurate adjective for me - I don't always meet the norm or the accepted standards of society.
And my faulty vision only allows me to see things as they are, and not as they should be. So that makes a Cynic, says Bierce...

Q). And why in blazes are you intending to impress your deviant cynicism onto hordes of unsuspecting surfers?
A). I have opinions that I can not express publicly for fear of damage to my physical configuration and my cash flow situation. I also can not keep them bottled up for fear of my brain exploding from the pressure. Solution: Blog