The BIOTE Diaries: Exit Hamster

With his rounded apple-cheeks and squeaky giggle, and his penchant for spewing technical gibberish, the Hamster proved to be a real cartoon; a cross between a Hanna-Barbera character and an IT geek. I (secretly) gave him the moniker partly because of his rodent-like appearance and mannerisms, and partly after a similarly annoying insider who followed the Australian team around in Tim May's book, Mayhem. Heaven knows why he decided to temporarily leave the Indian office and seek a project from the Sacramento center, given the barren nature of the job scene here. He arrived here a month-and-a-half ago, five years of work experience under his belt, having never lived away from home before. Being familiar with the bouts of homesickness and sudden helplessness which us mollycoddled Indian bachelors face when confronted with alien surroundings, we did our best to set him at ease and help him with the initial adjustments.

As early as on the third day from his arrival, the Hamster gave us an indication that he was all set to make a royal pest of himself. In this previous post, I talked about the stove-cleaning incident in the apartment which left me completely bemused. Let's just say as soon as his eyes fell upon the stove covered with the imprints of spluttering oil and gravy, the Hamster saw an attention-grabbing opportunity. Summoning up all of his whistle-blowing intent with the enthusiasm of an eighth-standard teacher's pet, he promptly complained to the office guest house coordinator of the same and earned us a reprimand. Well, I suppose we had it coming, but still..

Despite all the homesickness, the fairly orderly nature of the house meant that he became a little too comfortable, not lifting a finger to help with the cooking or cleaning. Over time, he would demonstrate previously unseen levels of tight-fistedness, seemingly believing in high thinking, simple living and maximum scavenging - but taking the last two much more seriously. He appeared to be a storehouse of technical knowledge, meticulously poring over books and numerous pdf files, and claiming mastery over several technologies on his three-page resume. He also seemed to think it was his duty to share his infinite knowledge and resources for the betterment of mankind, and subjected us to the same. Now this wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, when you consider his standing as an experienced pro and our state of being struggling engineers on the look out for adequate jobs. The problem was, our man's enthusiasm was greatly in excess of his ability to put across ideas. In his almost embarrasing excitement at dispensing advice, he often got way ahead of himself - whenever he spoke, his brain-mouth coordination seemed to disappear in a flash, and he ended up being plain incoherent. On most nights upon our return from the office, he would unwittingly excite the tinge of regionalism in two of my roomies, with whom he shared a common language. Typically, they would switch to the online stream of the regional channel's Election 2009 coverage, yak excitedly about the manifestos of the local politicians, and eventually drag us all into a their-state-versus-rest-of-India debate. The upshot of all this was, not only did it prevent the rest of us from crashing immediately after a long day's work (much to our chagrin), it elicited several complaints from the neighbours directly a floor below - whom we had successfully managed to antagonise earlier through the ill-advised move of playing cricket in the corridor.

He was as insufferable in the office as in the apartment, apple-polishing the associates whenever possible. During the classroom sessions he attended along with us, he displayed the peculiar habit of giving off a stifled laugh - sort of like the snickering of Muttley - upon hearing a random word, for no apparent reason. For example:

INSTRUCTOR: Struts is a widely used framework...
HAMSTER: Framework ehh heh eh heh
INSTRUCTOR: ...which you might find confusing initially..
HAMSTER: Confusing ehh heh ehh eh

If this scene were a cartoon strip, you'd have thought balloons with the word "spastic" floating over most of our heads. Eventually, he seemed to single me out for special treatment. I suddenly became the focus of his gyaan-giving trips, with him stopping about twenty times a day to peer over me working at my laptop, and professing advice on how do it differently. As I said earlier, he probably had only the best intentions, but somehow ended up sounding like Donald Duck on crack. Unfortunately one day, he happened to ask me a couple of questions after a particular session during which I had completely switched off, and came to the conclusion that I was suffering from attention deficiency syndrome and needed help. More gyaan from his end, then. In every ensuing session, he would suddenly turn to me with a weird smile on his face, one that seemed to say "So how's the concentration thingy coming along?", as well as "Got you by the balls!" at once. At this point, I decided I was having enough, and something had to give. I remembered Tim May's words, "Alcohol is the solution", and decided I needed to apply the same to this problem at hand. What could I do, get him drunk before a session to sedate him? Nah, not plausible, he'd probably end up talking all the more. Give him a round of straight talking? Probably wouldn't get through his thick skull. When and how would we get rid of him?

Two of the other roomies ended up solving the issue for me, bless them. I earlier whined about their stinginess and their obsession with keeping accounts to the last detail; but on reflection, managing accounts and expenditure for the entire lot is a thankless task and requires much focus and bloody-mindedness, and for that they deserved credit. Unknown to us, they got into some sort of a bitter argument with Hamster, ironic given the amount of Election revelry they had been indulging in together over the last month. They claimed that Hamster was unwilling to pay up his dues for the month, because he was unhappy with some of the items he was being made to pay for. Hamster told us instead they were coercing him to pay for the petrol/gas, which we had initially agreed would not be split even, and was adamant they were out to fleece him. The roomies then revealed that we had only recently revised the agreement on the petrol (apparently, I was not around at the time), and Hamster was trying to get off cheaply. Whatever breakdown in communication had transpired, the rest of us were being kept in the dark and simply decided to let the dispute stay between them. A few days later, Hamster got a call from a friend in town saying he would be away for a few months and subletting his apartment; he jumped at the opportunity of being able to use his friend's home, and was gone in the blink of an eye. He also announced he would be working from home for a long while, so we wouldn't be seeing him at office. A little later, I was soaking up a stiff drink and the sudden peaceful feeling which seemed to have engulfed the apartment.

Current Music: Coldplay - Viva La Vida

Don't Become a Techie: Reason #47

A relative who works at Intuit Inc., Mountain View, told me of Wipro chairman Azim Premji giving a talk at their California headquarters recently. One of the issues he had apparently touched upon was that of Indians returning from the US, which naturally got me very interested considering, like Yossarian stuck in Pianosa, I've always been hell bent on eventually returning to my home country only to find some 22 potential catches acting as obstacles in my path. In a thinly-veiled fit of nationalism, he commented that US-returnees were "cultural misfits" in the Indian corporate environment, and thus better off working in America which affords them the sort of work culture they might have grown accustomed to in the recent past. He added that Wipro would soon stop recruiting these kinds of applicants for Indian offices and post them in the US, where they belonged, instead. He cited the number of such people who were only too happy to get back to the US after a returning stint in India as justification. (It's difficult to escape the feeling that the translation might read: "Indian IT professionals are a largely one-dimensional lot, given to doing as they're told without really questioning everything around them, making them a manager's delight. Having US-returnees, with their revised expectations and their newly-acquired notions of voicing opinions, of being treated on par with their seniors in the workplace - not to mention their ridiculous salary demands - would be a hindrance to the conveniently implicit, understood hierarchical system prevalent in corporate India".)

If this is a common perception, consider an observation which anyone who's worked with a major IT firm such as Infosys, TCS, Wipro, or Cognizant will attest to. Such companies, whose customer base is largely made up of American clients, are extremely conscious of the image they project overseas; one of their major concerns is that many of their employees may be a liability when it comes to the art of schmoozing with foreign client representatives. They spend substantial amounts of time and money on holding training programs which deal with the "soft skills" aspect, covering everything from US workplace lingo and warnings about chatting with your co-workers in a regional language, to table-manners and fork-and-knife etiquette. So, us wannabe returnees will supposedly have a tough time fitting in with those who are preoccupied with trying to fit in.

Rich!

Current Music: Tiger Army - Through the Darkness