Today I had a meeting with one of my managers. It really surprised me, to what extents they would go, what cheap and dirty tricks they would pull out to get people to do what they want and keep their mouths shut.
The short version of the story is that we are 5 people (was 6.. spoo left) who have been brought to hyderabad on company's expense. Now when the expenses are being paid by the company, they expect something in return, therein lying whole logic of actually shelling out about 1.5 lakhs per person for a total of 6 months. All this money would have to be made back and more by making clients pay up good money for us. But this is were the glitch happened, in the fact that they actually failed to get any one of us satisfactorily billed for the enough amount of time so as to justify the company taking so much expenses on itself for our benefit. The time has almost come upon us when we are to be returned to our rightful masters, that is to the imperial lord of the office in Bangalore, without much to show for paying us so much dough. Heads have to roll. Heads have GOT to roll.
Now at this point it would have been nice, even amusing to see the managers take the fall for their mistakes or lack of foresight or pure lack of managerial skill which brought about this immense investment/return anomaly. But since two of us(which sadly didnt include me) flatly refused to stay back in hyderabad when asked directly, he resolved to the underhand method of a completely unexpected and intense battery of one's senses with pretty obvious(to me) psychological tricks. Thankfully he picked my teammate for the first round and I was more free to observe the tactics that were being adopted, and saw to my relief that this guy, how ever experienced he was in this, was leaving far too many openings to be classified as a completely unsurmountable obstacle on the steep road of career progress. But my colleague fell for it, and was dutifully mashed up into a pulp state somewhere in the vicinity of a mango milkshake. And when he turned to me, I was prepared mentally that I would reply reply professionally to what ever he asked and appear to be as competent as possible and not give him much of a leeway for him to do his bagdering my self esteem.
I could see that even though the meeting was held under the pretensions of being a discussion he was expecting more of a one sided monologue. But how could any self respecting professional who thinks he is any (or a lot) good in what ever he does keep his mouth shut when their skills were being blatantly played down. Underappreciation was not even in the same league as this. So what ever point he made, I made it a point too to somehow make him lose his flow by either agreeing with him at the wrong point or not agreeing with him at all when ever possible. Finally when the meeting was over, neither me nor my colleague could recollect what had been actually discussed even though it has lasted for a good 30-40 minutes. Anyway since this was not a proper HR manager (was a techie manager) he was also definitely not able to achieve his final objective. Actually if we are lucky enough we could both wring the situation a little more and collect the money that leaks out it, in the form of another extension to our relocation and personally I could do with a stub for the future in the form of a BizTalk resume entry.
Though staying in hyderabad without finding a real nice chick would certainly not be worth it... even with the money.
Somethings never change.. where ever a person might be .. or how much ever time has passed ;)
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