Effective Communication?: Aug. 19th
Over the last few weeks I have been increasingly impatient with Jude. Inevitably when I go out onto the street to go to my next appointment, neither car, nor Jude can be found. Grumbling, threatening, and demanding are patiently listened to and politely ignored. I wouldn’t mind it so much, except that in the last few weeks, I’ve often wasted an hour a day waiting for Jude to come back from tea break or wherever.
In a moment of reverie, I was thinking that it would be great if I had a car-phone, which I could call Jude on (Shades of "Watson, come here I need you!"). And then it hit me — why not get Jude a pager?
So Jude is now the first driver we know to have a pager. He is thrilled. We got him a deluxe pager complete with alphanumeric display. He shows off his pager to everyone, pulling up his shirt to reveal it proudly clipped to his belt. I kid him that he’s showing off his appendix scar. He now makes sure to tell all of his brethren guards, drivers, security men, etc., that he is so important that his boss gives him a pager. His status was undiminished when the InfoSys guard showed his pager to Jude — Jude’s pager was alphanumeric, the InfoSys guard’s pager was only numeric. Ergo, Jude was more important. The first night Jude kept asking me to page him so that his family could see his pager in action. I am sure that his sweetheart sends him little messages. Every now and then his pager buzzes, he reads it, and he gets this cute little lovesick grin.
We’ve been doing the usual mass interview for employees. I think Satish and I have now interviewed over 3000 engineers for our 20 positions. We’ve seen arrogant engineers - "Of course my answers were right, who are you to tell me I didn’t do my programming test correctly?" We’ve seen clueless engineers - an engineer handed back his program exam completely blank along with his resume, and asked when he would be informed of the result (Right now, I’m afraid!). We’ve also seen humorless engineers. A particularly nasty engineer, with a common streak of avarice, asked only one question during the interview -
"How much will I be paid?".

Ordinarily, I reply that we decide on that later, but this time I said, "That depends on your experience and talent".

"I’m just a fresher (a fresh graduate), I don’t have any experience".

"Then we won’t pay you anything."

Long, long pause.. After three seconds, I told him that was a joke. He didn’t think it was very funny.
The funniest moment of the day was watching our Marketing Communications head Ujwalla arguing on the phone for some unstated privilege. In her thick accent she was arguing in the classical Southern style, rapidly and loudly, "What makes you think I’m an Indian, I’m not an Indian. What makes you think I’m Indian". To see ourselves as we truly are...