Monday, October 29, 2012

Office Busyness


‘Urgent!’ said the paper the came to my desk at 6 PM just as I was packing up to leave. At last! It was early days in my working career and, hitherto, I had not had that feeling of importance that comes to a person who has to urgently do something for his office. Maybe it was not that special glow that one gets when one has saved a child from a burning house but it came close to it.
I sat till 8 PM working out the prices to be charged for the products that a new customer had sought from us, left the paper on my boss’ table and left home feeling like a knight would probably feel after vanquishing a dragon. Unlike the knight, however, it is not given to lowly junior managers to know what the result their efforts had had but that knowledge did little to diminish the feeling of accomplishment I felt that day.
Little did I know that over the next one year I would have a lot of such wonderful occasions. I was working for a boss who was very generous when it came to distributing that special feeling of importance among all his subordinates. If he had a note to dictate to his typist after office hours, he ensured that his entire staff sat late with him and enjoyed the pleasure of feeling the satisfaction of doing urgent work. What is more, he also had this generous habit of calling you to discuss mundane matters just as you are about to leave so that you had ample opportunity to feel that glow. Suffice to say that within six months that special feeling had become so ordinary that I no longer felt like looking down my nose at people who were too unimportant to be kept late in office. How true is it that ‘Familiarity breeds contempt’.
The same boss was also the person who rid me of the unnatural respect for the words, ‘The boss is in an important meeting’. I was once in his room and he was in an expansive mood that day talking of how he cracked CA in his long gone youth. His PA pinged him about some phone call from one of the manufacturing units and he snapped into the phone, ‘Don’t you know I am in an important meeting? Ask him to call half-an-hour later!’ So, now I know all about important meetings!
So, a year into my working life and with all my illusions about urgent papers and important meetings totally gone, I received a reasonably massive file with the same superscription “Urgent’. I opened that file lackadaisically and quickly browsed through it. When I reached the last page my eyes opened wide in surprise. It was the same paper about costing of products that I had sat late for the first time and put up! All that had happened with that paper was that it had traveled up and down my office, seen more people there than I had and returned to me for review. That must have been one patient customer if he was still waiting for the prices of those products!

37 comments:

  1. All right, Suresh, you are touching a raw nerve here! I can only say there are times when I am gone from the office for days on end all the 'Urgent' files simply cool there heels somewhere in nothingness. But the moment I return, they all assume such earth-shattering importance that they may cause one's hairs bristle on their ends. I especially hate the ones that arrive at the nth moment when you are about to push for home.

    Yours is a classic example indeed. It should be part of the curriculum of the IIMs!

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    1. I should probably write a book on 'What they do not teach you in any management school' :)

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  2. It is an unsolved mystery or perhaps extremely perceptible in today’s working environment, but the work that lands up at our desk during the last hours of the day are marked urgent. You touched upon a very sensitive issue :)

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    1. Don't I know it? :) Now that I am free of all that I can write frivolously about it :)

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  3. Superb stuff. Why don't you seriously start writing. You do have a great style and people will love it.

    Cheers,
    Sabyasachi
    PS: Once I skipped my lunch to finish a note and after the reaction I got, I knew that these urgent things can simply wait. :)

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    1. Thanks, Sabyasachi! Maybe I should seriously think of it.

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  4. haha..Good one, Suresh.. Now you opened the eyes for all the younger gen who begins a career freshly that don't believe all urgent work to be urgent :P

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  5. it's really difficult to forget those painful memories. they know how to torture their subordinates. by the way, you were destined to be unemployed like me :D

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    1. Not merely destined, Debs - I planned to be as well even before I passed out of IIM :) You have gone out of your way to get employed again - even if it is self-employed :)

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  6. somehow we seem to have had the same boss. He has spoken to me 55 times about how he had rennovated his Mumbai office

    Balu

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    1. And, I suppose, every time was an important meeting for the others :)

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    2. ha ha with the black tea and lectures on how his subordinates used to adore him

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  7. The Importance of that Note marked "Urgent". I think nearly everyone will have a tale to share, but no one can write it like you.

    At the organisation I work in, my work and that of my department is at the fag end of a production chain. So what happens is that everyone one takes their own sweet time and by the time the file, note, document reaches me, the urgent note has become super urgent. My department is often expected to read, edit, typeset, and print stuff overnight. And an error free one too. Need I add that most of this comes at the end of the day or on Friday evenings?

    Urgency has acquired an entirely new definition. :-)

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    1. Sometimes, I tend to feel that organizations create emergencies merely to feel important :)

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  8. Funny but true. I am sure all the readers would have experienced such things in their working life more than once!

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  9. You know the railway reservation system where the server shuts down sharp at 8 pm? Dunno if its still that way. Few years back when we went to the counters to reserve tickets, sharp at 8, the counter would close even if you had just arrived after waiting in a long queue. Centrally controlled. ALl offices should have something like that which pushes the employees out sharp at 6 irrespective of urgent work remaining. I hate this attitude in todays offices Suresh and I really hate these managers too!

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    1. Mmm! Been a manager in my time :) Hopefully not this sort of manager :)

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  10. Ah ! this has happened to me soooo many times ! Never thought I would look back and smile ...but that way you have written has brought a smile to my face thinking about all those late evenings at office working on supposedly 'urgent' stuff !

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    1. Good for you TTT! I am able to look back and smile only after I quit working :)

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  11. Ah, ek gyaan ki baat which I lernt recently - "There is nothing in corporate world which cannot wait till post lunch or tomorrow"

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    1. And quite a few things would not matter even if they are never done at all :)

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  12. Hahaha! So now, we also know all about important meetings and what keeps our bosses so busy! A wonderful hilarious piece! Your writings leave me in complete awe, CS! :)

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  13. Haha!!! Had a good laugh at this one!! Can relate to this so much it seems you have taken incidents from our office!!!

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  14. i believe many will relate their every day office story with the example you have quoted.. :)

    really the work never melts down, doesn't matter if you work late hours, skip food.. :P

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  15. The life of almost every office going India..nice post

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  16. The ending was the icing on the cake.

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