Aham Vyaktam

There are oodles of disparities between the work environment I have now and the one I had before.

I had seen only micromanagement before [I hold meager years of experience in the industry and had been only under a few managers though. Sachi, and Abhi-if you read this, you know what I mean J]. Now I am being given the tasks and schedules and will be reporting about it only on the day of deadline. I see a complete sense of entrustment and am emancipated from frequent jabbing.

I had always sensed a huge distance between the manager and the subordinates before. My manager now cries if some times the team quotes him as manager. He reiterates considering him as yet another team mate.

I have never seen
Work load / (engineers + Manager)
But now for the first time I see it happening.

Of late we have taken up the practice of solving a riddle a day. There is this team mate of mine who always wants to put forth questions and hates answering. This notion of solving a puzzle a day was incorporated into work by him. He started throwing a riddle a day, leaving the rest 3 of us in the team to scratch our brains. We used to solve the puzzles together brandishing the zealots inside us, creating a huge hullabaloo around. My manager was more than a zealot I should say. The moment we receive the riddle, he would yell "everybody, drop your work off. The next few minutes for the riddle". Then this he-who-questions conjured up an idea that the puzzles are to be solved individually for which each person would be allotted points. This created a healthy competition between us and we were racing with each other to score. Am at present at par with my manager, my teammate lagging behind us by 2 points.

I actually would have been in the second place. One day, after solving a riddle while at home, my manager had called my organizer teammate and had told the answer and gained a point. The next day I went to him and told the answer, not knowing that my manager had already solved it. So my finding was considered to be disqualified. Will I be passive? No. I fought that mine was valid and such over-phone cracking of the puzzle shouldn't be encouraged. I didn't have to chew much over it as my thought was immediately accepted [becoz I was pretty younger than everyone, I would rather say I am a kid besides them and deary to everyone that they don't want to see the kid crying J] and I was also given a point for that riddle. That's how I became at par with manager and secured the first position. Brand me crooked, I don't mind.

We are having lots of fun at work, these puzzles not being the only ones contributing to it. I at times feel am at school, when my team tries to scare me when I come out from in between the dark racks in lab. We hang out atleast twice a month for lunch. We go for bowling or gaming every month. Its absolute fun. This week seems to be snailing as everyone is on PTO and am missing the fun, awaiting them to come back with a bang.

The entire credit goes to my manager, who encourages such things and wants his team to be cheerful. He not only encourages the team to learn new but also sits with us and explores and learns things. I haven't seen any manager like him till now. Keith – you are a marvel !!!!
[For those who conclude this post is to boot-lick my manager, I swear he doesnt read this :) ]

And for zealots like me (?), here are the few puzzles which went around us:

• One of your employees insists on being paid daily in gold. You have a gold bar whose value is that of seven days salary for this employee. The bar is already segmented into seven equal pieces. If you are allowed to make just two cuts in the bar, and must settle with the employee at the end of each day, how do you do it?
• There are three on/off switches in one room, each controlling a different one of the three out-of-sight light bulbs in another room. You may manipulate the switches (only to the extent of turning them on and off), then you must go into the room with the light bulbs and stay there until you have determined the mapping from switches to light bulbs. How do you do it?
• An explorer wishes to cross a barren desert that requires 6 days to cross, but one man can only carry enough food for 4 days. What is the fewest number of other men required to help carry enough food for him to cross?
• There are 3 baskets. one of them have apples only, one has oranges only and the other has mixture of apples and oranges. The labels on their baskets always lie. ( i.e. if the label says oranges, you are sure that it doesn't have oranges only,it could be a mixture) The task is to pick one basket and pick only one fruit from it and then correctly label all the three baskets.