Four more weeks and we will be thrown out of college. Be it internships or placement, we will be pushed back into the corporate world from where I thought I escaped for good. The very thought of entering those air conditioned morgues floating with formally dressed corpses flashing plastic smiles and eat-me-if-you-can-attitudes is unnerving.
A few days back, I heard Prof Merchant’s "face your fears" lecture and so I started thinking. What is it about the corporate world that disturbs me so much? Here goes the list.
1. I will have to smile and wish my boss good morning while stifling a deep urge to strike him with the first object within my reach that can cause irreparable damage to his cerebrum.
2. I am expected to be coy and chivalrous with those overfed; heavily perfumed HR bimbos dressed in ill fitting western outfits and massage their bloated egos to make sure that they don't turn their misappropriated power of I-can-screw-anyone’s-happiness towards me.
3. I will have to say "bravo" to all the half baked ideas from some harebrained MBA who happens to be my team mate and who holds the illegitimate power to influence my boss, courtesy his fawning skills.
4. I will have to stick around in the office and act busy for 9 utterly unproductive hours irrespective of whether I do some meaningful work or laze around reading Dilbert comics
5. I will need to put up with insurmountable levels of stupidity of my co-workers who cannot distinguish between formal conversations and tea time chats and usually end up re-telling how I joked about my boss in the conference call.
6. I will have to act nice and befriend the dispatch room bug and beg him for two sheets of white papers to get a print of an expense bill amounting to RS 500/-, which everyone from the CEO downwards have approved after 2 weeks of haggling.
7. I will need to undergo that extremely frustrating annual appraisal cycle that is designed to screw my hike. No matter what I achieve or how happy the client is with my performance, I end up in the dog’s tail of the wretched bell curve where I am thrown a lavish 1000 bucks as annual hike. Adding to this I am served some serious bullshit in terms of how the company is facing an uncertain future, how the market is bad and all that sorry stuff while in reality the company is minting truckloads of money and the stock price is through the roof and the top management is rolling in dollars.
8. Whenever I have to travel for official reasons, I need to raise an e-ticket that is charted to go around half the universe and I am expected to follow up with every Tom, Dick and Harry, not to mention their lousy secretaries and get an approval. After all the dog race, I invariable end up late at the travel desk who will squarely lay the blame on me and announce in no uncertain terms that since I raised the request late, there are no tickets available in cattle class for the travel date mentioned in the ticket. Meaning I have to repeat the entire circus again, this time twice for both cancelling the previous request and raising a new one. After all the hocus-pocus, I will end up getting a ticket in the cheapest and most uncivilized flight that ever flew from that airport and I will hide my luggage tags from public view lest someone I know finds me boarding these rattle ships.
9. I will have to resort to a lot of hara-kiri like begging proxy passwords from allegedly legitimate users or using tunneling websites that mask the actual URL’s I am browsing to visit normal websites like NSE India or HDFC BANK, while I suspect that my boss has access to sites hosting bizarre and decidedly fishy stuff.
10. I will have to screw myself bottoms up to meet the deadlines of a god damned project that the BRM sells to the client without knowing what the eff it is, without the project manager knowing how many effing hours it will take to achieve and worse, the effing client not knowing what he wants. Hilarious of all, these morons sit together, attend multiple conferences and draw up an SOW and SLA, couple it with billing rates and other fancy items and create a neat excel quoting to the last penny the client has to pay once the project is complete.
Now folks tell me if any of the above statements are wrong, I will gladly join the company and write a bond for life…
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