A Job Most Interesting

Many a article, blog and even a few books have been written about the so called life in an Indian call centre. To many its a complete mystery, to many hordes of caffine fuelled, sleep deprived teenagers working in air conditioned environs but to me it was a period of life filled with the most incredible and at times hilarious events.

A top B-School grad working as a so called HR Business Partner at one of the top Indian BPO was not exactly how I'd dreamed my life to be... But then like they say, we are only following our destiny. Anyway here I was in the city of Pune during a summer not too long ago.

The first thing that one needed getting used to was the crowd of youngsters all trying to outdo each other in terms of being weird, weirder and weirdest... And obviously the multitude of women... girls ahem!!! It seemed like heaven till I had to deal with them; which came later...

Even the HR team had a majority of the fairer sex... One thing must be said that the ladies in our team were an unique lot... One was wise beyond the years, one was a dynamite, one a crybaby, one a chilled out curly haired beauty and the last who had joined with me was nutcase, who once sprayed water on me when I cracked a joke while she was attempting to drink water... what a mess!!!

But the baap of the place was our boss... an ex-Army major, who had penchant for Fish philosophy and fast cars. His apprehension with me was that I had a chip on my shoulders and he decided to knock it off, by giving me my first assignment... Go get all the employees to fill the employee satisfaction questionnaire. Only hitch was that (a) nobody knew who I was, so I was eyed suspiciously (b) there were more than 2000 employees who came over 3 different shifts covering all time zones (c) paper could be taken onto the process floor, so I had to catch people either when they came out for coffee breaks or even worse pee breaks & (d) the piece of paper had more than 65 qs. To sum it up, I was screwed for good and I had this sinking feeling that I was gonna be an utter failure in my first assignment.

to be continued