Onion Uttapam : India's Leading Satire Daily

I was humming through my breakfast, an Atif Aslam's number from one of his older albums, when I heard the 3 sharp honks that announced the arrival of my company cab 10 floors below. Pushing my plate aside and wiping my hands on my brother's Tee bought yesterday from Levis, I raced to the lift leaving in my wake my mummy's shriek promising me the same kitsch re-heated for dinner. She was rushing to her office too!! I climbed breathlessly into the cab, pulled out my mobile as I said a loud Good Morning to everyone seated inside. Mr Libran, the Sys Admin nodded and looked away. As I plugged in my headphones and tuned to Radio Mirchi 98.3FM and waited for Suchitra's Top 10 to come on, I remembered my 50 yr old pal on gtalk whom I had never met and who had promised me that today he would send the mp3 of Atif Aslam's Hungami Haalat. This was one man who thinks he is some 20 plus, the idiot, and maintains a steady chatter throughout the day. I usually reply with my polite hmmmmmms and finally the old dodo gets the point and stops pestering me. As it is I am running against time to finsih my assignments for the day and he has to bug me with his inane, boring experiences of his personal history.Ha!

I start bookmarking the songs I need to download as I listen to Suchi's Top 10 and then I remember last evening's muttering under the breath of Mr.Libran as he spoke to Uncle Murti about banning gtalk, disabling file sharing and cutting off music at the work place. At that point in time I had put it down as his pathetic, grovelling attempts to get into Uncle Murti's good books. But this morning, by his demeanour, I was not sure now. Probably he was not getting his fair share of attention from the girls here. His sense of humour was pathetic but everyone in his team dutifully lol-ed and rotfl-ed their messages on the intranet. Pity those creatures. And I shrug away that knawing feeling in my tummy. Serves me well, I should have completed the breakfast and taken a bus to our sprawling office with its green manicured lawns and glass and chrome finish buildings. Our cafeteria was the best in that sense. It was half-covered and half-open to the sky with lush trees and small benches. As our company cab turned into the lobby and screeched gently to a halt, I fished for my ID card to be swiped and removed my headphones and thrust them into my bag. I took the stairs, the lift being crowded and I just couldnt stand next to that moron, Mr.Libran, reached my cubicle, powered my computer on and grabbed my water bottle and ambled down to the water cooler.

Making my way back via the pantry to check on my mails on the company ID I found a curious one-liner from a colleague in Marketing to check my gtalk. Wondering what had happened I made my way back, throwing my Good mornings and His' to my colleagues and perched myself on my ergonomic chair. Ergonomic, my foot!!. It heated up our backsides and many of my senior colleagues were complaining of piles problems:-). Pushing the thought aside, I sign-in to my gtalk and find a message that oldie had sent stating that he was unable to send files to my colleague in NOIDA on gtalk and could I please ping him? Ping him I did and got a reply saying that he was unable to send that Atif Aslam file. I put him on hold and looked at my work sheet for the day, prioritised them and soon launched into my work.Being a part of a “reputed” corporate firm gives me immense pride. The work culture, the job profile and the growth prospects are some of the factors that lead people to spend a few years of their lives in this place. Plus the money was good.

Taking a break, I pinged the oldie to send me the mp3 of Hungami Haalat and he took his own time replying. But when he did, I got the shock of my life. And it had happened finally. That moron, Mr.Libran had disabled peer2peer file sharing.:-( I casually spread the word around on the BB and got affirmatives from everyone.It was 11am. Let that idiot come to the lunch table. My momma had packed some yummy fish that I usually shared with everyone. Today Mr. Libran would get only fish bones.Ha! I consoled myself by saying that Uncle Murti must have murmurred a soft yes without listening to Mr.Libran, just so that he would disconnect. My work beckoned and I immersed myself in the arcane world of writing code for some client in Kazhakastan. Ping!! It was that oldie with some links to mp3 d/l sites. I was blocked on a few but on the 19th link I got what I wanted and quickly down-loaded the song and spread the URL of the site to everybody and soon we had downloaded all the songs that we had wanted.

My music player was playing softly on the PC and I hummed my way through my work schedule. Music helps a person like me and I use it for stress-busting, mood alleviation and also sometimes for absolute concentration during work. With the boom in technology, work culture has changed too. Employees are generally surfing the net, listening to their favorite music or having an online conversation with a school/college friend, during the course of the work or sometimes after that. Now its debatable to say that this culture is fine, as one may say that it affects their efficiency and quality of the assignments delivered. But, to look at it in another sense, these little and innocent diversions provide the small bouts of relaxation mechanisms from the stress involved in the tedious jobs that are done in the corporate sectors.

1pm. Lunch time. At the table, Mr.Libran was missing but he had sent his box through his favourite girl of the day and I quickly managed to tune-in to the talk that was going around the table. Most of the people were agitated. Sandy, Vidya, Mohan, Atul, Nambiar and Rajiv were muttering that we may have music pulled out too. I pacified them saaying that they just pulled the file-sharing and how could they pull out the music too. Surely, Uncle Murti was not insane? He never believed in the stick policy and after that mail he had sent which helped us to organize ourselves we had stopped over-staying beyond 9pm and 99.99% of us finished our work sheet for the day. Just in case, if this was going to be done after lunch, I carefully packed the fish-bones in a small paper bag and sealed it tight. After burrping politely all of us left for our cubicles, sated and happy to the core. A sated tummy-mind doesnt have an ideology, is what that oldie used to say whenevr I mentioned the facilities that we had been provided with.

I got back to my cubicle after making small talk with 2-3 colleagues and resumed my work. Just before tea-time I wanted to chill and switched on my player. Imagine to my horrors when my screen displayed an access denied message with a ping. I peeped int my neighbour's cubicle and he too shook his head in dismay. That idiot, Mr. Libran had gone and done it. he had disabled the music. The silence was deafening and I felt that I was in a solitary cell in Alcatraz. This was something that was absolutely not called for… Something people had no clue about… And yet some invisible hands had done it. Must have been that frustrated Mr.Libran's team. At least they could have given us 24 hours polite warning.I strongly feel that if not for anything else, at least music should be allowed to every employee, along with all the basic facilities that are given during their stay here. For a person like me who lives on music, it becomes a total handicap if the employer or someone who has to make his presence felt; [for he too has a job to do] has suddenly decided to remove this sole source of mood alleviator at work. What does Mr.Libran expect? For girls to go and flirt outrageously or guys to take him out for a beer with a bunch of gays? It becomes difficult to keep oneself motivated throughout the day when you know you don’t have anything to fall back on. Are we as employees expected to just work our sorry lives out, meet all kinds of unfeasible deadlines and gather maximum profits for the company, while our small demands are overlooked! After all what loss does the company incur if its employees use a little extra bandwidth for their benefit which ends up boosting productivity? There are other ways to check an employee's efficiency at work, and not such audible means!! I think I will use the FM on my mobile until they ban that too. Then, and only then, Mr.Libran will get his bag of rotten fish-bones mixed with tomato-ketchup and chilli-sauce. Serves him right.

The stick policy doesnt work and work itself will take a backseat while this topic will dominate the bulletin board of our branch here and elsewhere thus making the asinine Sys Admin a butt of jokes all around the country. Imagine the consequences, if the outside world came to know about this. Or is our company bent upon increasing the clientle of a certain psychiatrist?

Enough, Big Uncle Murti is watching.

Comments (6)

varun_manipal said:

	hahaha .. that is one funny store... well why do i crib with all the downloads available, all the streaming websites available... all the proxies open for gmail and orkut..... the only trouble being everything watched and monitored... probably this comment written too... who knows someday i get kicked because of some comment which curses my CEO or the fat ugly guy sitting in the IT room....
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June 16, 2008
Votes: +1

Abhishek Soni said:

	lol its the story of every company........ but we are techies and we know ways to get around such hurdles....... afterall one among us is the one who created those hurdles...... looooooool
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June 05, 2008
Votes: +1

itzmee said:

	Dudette...we don't have file sharing, no downloadable links and horror of horrors...no gtalk....soo.....hemm....for ppl like me...ipod zindabad
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June 05, 2008
Votes: +1

Shruti said:

	Hahahahahahaha! Well well....I can't imagine the attrition rate if gtalk is gone!!! I suppose the managers in Infy know that only too well!
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June 02, 2008
Votes: +1

bigstoner said:

	Its akin to an a/c jail with food thrown in at subsidised rates.
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May 30, 2008
Votes: +1

sreehari said:

	Should I appreciate Murthy uncle for his strategies to make 100% efficient work environment or My friends who is still able to survive there .. Kudo's To Uncle and His Colleagues
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May 30, 2008
Votes: +1

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