Day: October 16, 2009

One Of The Worst Days Ever

- Roshan

This has been one of the worst days of my professional life. I run things with a lot of freedom given to my team, a lot of liberty & a lot of affection and I expect a few things in return. Loyalty, sincerty, decency and results – and if the results don’t come but the effort is 100% then I’ve got their back and I’ll take care of the rest. Today I could not defend the actions of a member of my team as I myself cannot accept what he has done.

This person who moved to my team about a month & a half ago, has been caught trying to cheat the system. It’s a huge integrity issue and I’m surprised that he has had the nerve to do it. I would never have expected that he would do this in a million years. And he tried to cover it and claims that he did not know the severity of what he has done. I know for a fact that many others in the Operations department are doing the same and even worse crimes but they are lucky enough not to get caught.

I don’t care about that but I do care that my team holds a high standard. We are trainers and we have to show the right way and we are there to improve upon performance. Not sit there and do bullshit and then offer the stupidest of excuses. I thought that I had laid the groundrules for a stable foundation but having meetings every week and sometimes twice in a week and reiterating these points. Apparentely one idiot had turned a deaf ear.

And he has been asked to resign. Caught red-handed the bugger did not know what to say when I confronted him. He is misguided but the crime is severe. I spoke to my superiors over the phone and they supported my decision. I was so upset that I raised my voice at him and when I addressed the rest of my team as well. I never do that! I don’t ever want to do that again. It’s not me.

The shame is that I inducted this guy into the company, I was his initial point of contact and I trained him for 5 days in Preprocess. I was quite proud that he had managed to get promoted but now I regret the choice. I just hope that this example will ensure that others don’t do such things.

I Heart Wikipedia

- Roshan

What’s the default page or custom homepage that you, my dear readers, have set on your browser(s) of choice? I know that some keep a site that they visit often and/or which is updated quite a lot, like a news site or a sports site etc. Some keep Google, Bing or Yahoo as their homepage. And some may keep their own website as the default page. I keep Wikipedia as my homepage.

I spend many hours in a week browsing through the pages in Wikipedia, clicking through the links that interests me in each page and ending up on a topic/article that is so far removed from the original search/page that I entered. For example; a search for the plot of a movie, click on one of the actors bio, to another movie, to an actress in that movie, to a hobby that she indulges in, to a list of famous people who also indulge in that hobby, to a musician, to his hometown, to other famous people in that town, to an authour who  lives in that town, to one of his books, to a person mentioned in that book, to the religion/ideal followed by the person, to the person who started that religion/ideal, to a concept of philosphy mentioned in the page, to the theory behind it, to the book that defines this theory! And so on!

An unfortunate thing is that almost on a daily basis, I keep checking the Recent Deaths section that is linked on the homepage in Wikipedia. As most of you in the past few months we’ve had many famous people passing away. And to keep a track of it, one of the easiest ways is to click on this link and get a list of people who have passed away date wise or month wise. I know it’s a bit on the dark side but how else do we get to know?