Dull Days
Unlike most professions, the IT professional have no boundaries between work and life.
Greg feels a slight chest discomfort while offering meat to an elephant. The antagonized elephant along with its herd chases him. Running for his life Greg’s heart rate increased with the adrenaline rush, he runs zig zag to evade the raging elephants. He thinks to dodge them by hiding, by this time his chest pain was at its peak. Owing to his chest pain he can't run any longer. He plans to act like he is dead only to come to sense that its a dream, however his heart is still responding to the dream by beating faster. Greg reaches to his mobile phone instead of water bottle. He then starts to open his slack app to see if there were any showstoppers while he was asleep.
Greg’s heart slowly reacts to reality by slowing down. Greg’s frowning face (because of the chest pain) eases to his usual grim outlook. To get the most of the waking in the middle of the night, he runs a couple for monitoring scripts that tells performance of the application. There was no deviation in performance, however Greg shoots an email in the wee hours to the who is who of the Organization with a perennial issue(known existing not impacting). Having made most value out of elephants chasing and chest pain, Greg goes back to bed with a feeling of achievement. Little did he care about how different people would react to it or the consequences of such a poor work. Greg least anticipated that the email would snowball into a monster.
Next morning, more than a dozen of emails fly cornering multiple teams. As usual every team defended their position by passing the buck.
On the smoking lounge, Tom said the head honcho had no idea of what Greg was pointing out. All he wanted is to make the best of the situation by pushing Engineering two steps back.
Nila said, Greg knowing or unknowingly (given the benefit of the doubt) exploits the knowledge gap of the management. She asked Tom isnt it evident from the questions of the Head as he hardly knows what he is talking about. Why dont someone say that he is
Nila also pointed out to Tom that the Head honcho was just back from his meeting with investors. She said he is giving what he got from his boss(investors), she giggled and said no one is an absolute boss.wrong. Let them ask me, I will point out to him.
Tom said, just because it was Greg the head took notice. I have been yelling on top of my voice about the same issue for the past two quarters hardly anyone noticed. Forget about everyone, even Greg brushed it off as it was not service affecting issue.
Dont be naïve Tom, although we work in Tech we are driven by human emotions than by logical thinking. People are not robots to distinguish between credibility and content the person brings to the table. We need not deceive people but we should play the game atleast in such a way that we do not get deceived.
Nila told Tom, she knows at least 100 such issues just as the one reported by Greg and that the application would have atleast half million bugs, however most of them may not be visible to end users. But few of them are timebombs waiting to explode in future. She acted like we are every day walking in minefield where small mines keeps exploding reminding us that the fatal ones could be next. She then shouts boom and they both walk into their respective workplace.
Tom said, Nila when the hell is breaking lose, you have a different perspective on our Head’s motivation to act dastardly. It feels lighted when you are around, I was paranoid about the tables turning against me. I just upgraded my mortgage and bought a big home.
While Tom & Nila were having a lighter moment discussing about the trail of emails, she didnt anticipate that everything could turn against her.
Greg walked in to his workspace knowing the damage he has caused. He is worried that the Head could figure out the real issue if he listens to wise people on the floor. He plans how to get him out of the situation. meanwhile, his thought wondered as to why he had chest pain yesterday night. He started to feel down as to whether he has any serious health complications. He consoles himself that he eats healthy food with reasonable physical activity.
Tom asks Nila to watch the aweful reactions of Greg across the hallway. where Nila tells Tom to experience something more dramatic to the chaos unfolding anticipating a WAR room discussion, every Team prepares to defend their position and throw mud across the room. They sincerely work to cherry pick data to suit their narrative as some of the members were busy creating colorful slides.
