Aham Vyaktam

A year of contractorship bundled with insecurity, longing, am-sorry-no-PTO-no-benefits look from Manager is all over.

I was forced to enter this “C” company as a contractor due to situations before a year. Though every Tom Dick and Harry does contracting in this country, I somehow felt I cant do it. I have heard that the contractors in most of the companies would be singled out for any happening in the company and the manager, if he wishes, can throw an offer of attending them. Most companies mask the contractors from the client they are working for and any transaction to/from the client has to go via an employee. This feel drove me insane and I wasn’t quite inclined to this. Whenever I had spoken about this with my friends, they said its just the same as you come onsite to the client’s place, being an employee of some company in India. I couldn’t agree to it. In my case, the company which sent me onsite was a big shot atleast in India and I didn’t have any feel of insecurity when I came onsite with the same contractor banner. But getting into some X consulting company based here and bearing a contractor banner was so difficult. Both weren’t the same at all for me. I know I may be marked to be obsessed with the brand names.

Luckily, this C company, or rather my team in the C company wasn’t the one which exhibit disparity between the contractors and employees. I never had the feeling that I was treated lowly, except for the facts that I wasn’t entitled to any benefits. The talks for converting me would start every now and then and would vanish without a trace. The reason given was budget, what else.

I couldn’t take this shit any more and I decided searching for opps elsewhere. I succeeded in getting offers from 2 companies and told this C company am resigning. A morning I told them am quitting, in the afternoon, they came back to me telling they’ll make me their employee, matching the other company’s offer and giving more benefits than the other. As I loved the C company and the work and its environment so much, I accepted their offer. The formalities happened in an unbelievable pace and they took just a day to complete them as against 15 days usually. The guy who verified my I9 asked me “there are so many follow-ups on your case. Are you the daughter of a big guy or something?”.
I just said “its all coz of one magic word – quit”.

My company issues different ID cards for contractors and employees. [Yeah, you can see “my company” in my sentence. When you are a contractor, you never get a sense of belonging to that company. When you are an employee, that feel automatically creeps in].
Contractors will be given a red card and employees green one. There are more contractors in my company, as it has accounts in almost every Indian company and there are so many people onsite bearing the red card. When I used to have the red card, people during conversation used to ask me through which company I have come onsite. Onsitees who were unknown to me, would give a look of you-are-just-like-me. I have yearned for the green badge. I know its kinda silly but that’s how I was.

Now when I walk with my green badge around, I see the awe, pining look on the contractors or atleast I feel that they have that look. :)

I have always stayed with onsitees and I have heard them speaking about some one like “shes marrying a full time employee of C”, giving the sentence a dignified tone. Now am happy that I am also in the list who are envied by a group of people.

I had a feel that I got to this position only after I said am going away. But my manager said “had you been given full time emp without you having said you are quitting, it would have been just a favor from the company to you and you wouldnt have been in a position to demand what you want. Now, you should be happy that every company is at the back of you and you know what your value is. And, you have done a favor to this company by not denying its offer”.

Those were “the words”.

People say that my company is so employee friendly to such an extent that it mollycoddles its employees. Lemme see.

Am happy about everything except for one thing. I am back to appraisals, which I was free from for a year. I have to start boasting pages after pages in about 3 months. :)

Wish me luck!

Caution: This post will be a lackluster for non-techies or may be even for techies. The author suggests the reader not to go ahead if he/she is allergic to technical stuff :) [especially Project Managers LOL, pun intended to you-know-who] The other techies – be content if you know how to do these stuff; no worries if these are Espanol to you as there are many sailing in the same boat like me.

Last week was terrible at work. I was pissed off to such an extent that I started throwing everything like a lunatic and my teammate had to ask me leave the place, freshen my mind and come back. Whatever we engaged in, went on toss and not a single thing worked. We had been brooding over them for nearly 3 days but in vain. They were completely new stuff for us and none knew how to proceed. I’ll not be surprised if Google comes back to us with an accolade saying we used their search engine efficiently or sues us for having hogged their servers requesting too many pages.

We had to install Support Pack 7 for Netware 6.5 server. The pain started off with the SP7 not going in one CD and we had to burn a DVD, only to realize that the server didn’t have a DVD drive. So we had to hook up a USB DVD drive, which led us into a different problem. After loading the cddvd NSS file, the DVD was detected and mounted as a NSS volume. But we were not knowing the way to access NSS volume so that we can read the contents of the DVD. Googling went on and on with various search patterns starting from “how to access USB DVD in NW6.5” to “how to access NSS volumes”. The administrative guide said we have to load the cddvd NSS file, by which the CD gets mounted as NSS volume and from there on, you can use it as any other NSS volume. We were like “come on man. We know it. Tell me how to access NSS volume”. I wish the admin guide had ears.

We sensed there’s no point in dragging it and so put the SP7 in 2 CDs and copied the files to the server through the CD drive itself. Finally started installing the SP7. When it asked me if the backup of files is to be done, I gave a yes to be safe. It took nearly 30 mins and came back and said its left with only 3MB and cannot do a backup. [why the hell did it take 30 mins to report it man?] The installation terminated. [why wasn’t it user friendly to ask me if it can proceed with the installation without backup?] Had to start all over again. This time I asked it not to do a backup. Before the install could start, the user was prompted for the username and password, and there came another hitch. In Netware, during SP install, you need to provide the user name in the format “CN=username.O=context”, wherein username and context would have been given during fresh install of Netware. We didn’t know the context part as nobody made a note of it anywhere. Trying different contexts didn’t work. And again we had to exit the installation to go back to the console and grab the context.

Started the install all over again expecting some problem to popup. But this time the installation ended. But when it came up after a reboot, it reached the console screen, unlike usual, wherein it reaches the Netware GUI. The execution of startx loaded the required NLMs but the GUI didn’t start. sheesh!!!!!

As we had a customer request that is to be completed in a week, we decided to manage with the console itself. We had to install the new drivers for our HBAs in the Netware server. We followed the procedure to do it and we had no clue if it went successful or not as the OS didn’t report any thing. So we went and checked the version which was showing 6.9.15. We were supposed to install 6.9o. Now I repented for having made the blunder of not noting the version before starting the upgrade. We thought the upgrade didn’t go well as it was showing 6.9.15 and tried it multiple times. Then we came to know 6.9o is called as 6.9.15 too. Damn!!!! How am I supposed to know when there’s nothing in the server denoting it atleast in brackets?

Another parallel problem which was going on was installation of VMWare ESX 3.5. Our client demanded that it’s to be installed on a 64-bit machine. We had only a few 64’s and choosing a server to do this itself took us about an hour. Once we chose the machine, we put the ESX 3.5 CD in it and rebooted the machine. Started the installation. Suddenly we lost the connection to the server from our KVM and it was displaying “Out of range”. Now what? Then we came to know that the install screen is of mismatching resolution with that of the KVM. So we hooked up a monitor and keyboard to the server and completed the installation. Once the server came up, it wasn’t able to detect the storage. What are we to do with a void system without storage? How am I to create virtual machines without storage? After half-a-day of delving, we found that the SATA in the server is not compatible to hold ESX 3.5. Phew!!!!

Then chose a HP Blade Server 64-bit to install ESX. None had worked on Blade servers in my team and we found it difficult to even boot from the CD. Win2K3 was booting up properly but the ESX didn’t, reporting virtual media not found. :(

We left that as such and migrated to another task of upgrading our multipathing s/w in all the servers. This had a few little hurdles when it came to HPUX like sharing the CDROM, mounting it in HPUX (which initially didn’t auto-detect the drive and I had to do an ioscan followed by insf to install device files) and then access it. The upgrade started and ended pronto, reporting “no space in /opt”. Okayyyyy….Now we had to extend the logical volume of /opt, for which we had to reboot the system to get into single user mode and then extend it. Once it was extended, we again started the upgrade which went on fine this time. The server was rebooted and when it came up, we started mounting the logical volumes from our storages. It failed displaying “no device or address” error. There came the most painful process. We had to delete the /etc/lvmtab and recreate it with new volume groups and lvols. And finally the server was set.

Parallelly, we had to install linux 5. my teammate had requested the lab administrator for the linux 5 CD and the admin had said he had kept it on our lab desks. When we looked for it, we found only one linux 5 CD with a like-license-key written on it. I went and told my teammate satirically that I never knew linux came in a single CD :) When we were speculating what does a license key written over the CD have to do with linux and whether it requires us to register in the redhat site and get the remaining CDs on providing that key, my teammate decided to phone up the admin ask him what it is all about. The reply he got was “you had asked only for CD1 in your email. So I gave you only the CD1”. My team mate, who was confused, told him that he wanted all the CDs and hung up. He went and checked his email to the admin and it read “Can you pls give us the linux 5 update 1 CD?”. Heck!!!! He mistook the “1” for “update” to be for CD. How dumb. Will the “update” stand alone and will it not strike a newbie even that the update would have a number? Uffff…..i asked my teammate who the admin is and he showed me his name in the email. He was a sardarji. LOL. Are all the sardarji jokes true then? Mmmm…..

Wasn’t it a hard time at work? Yeah, I can hear a loud yes.

Attempting to break the jinx. I hope there’s no spell cast on me this week.

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.