First days at work

Not only are they boring, but they’re damn tiring as well. Especially when you start work after a good period of doing nothing, it’s even more difficult. I think the main reason for this is that you’re not used to sitting in a single position for long, or for that matter, even short periods of time. At home, you’re more accustomed to the comfortable position of lying down horizontally after every 15 minutes of sitting, standing or walking (I won’t even mention running).

Few exciting things happen on first days. Firstly, your boss doesn’t want to dump work on you all at once, and then you also don’t know your co-workers well enough to be too friendly. And going through company manuals or orientation material isn’t my first choice for literature. Probably the most difficult thing is in trying to stay awake. You don’t want to show that you’re lazy, well not on the first day at least, so you battle hard to find something interesting to keep the subduing powers of sleep at bay.

One thing I sometimes do to fight boredom is to try and make different words on a calculator. For some reason I always end up with the same words and I don’t even see the point of trying, but somehow the whole thing gives me a kick every time.

Another thing I like to do on a calculator is to enter the value of pie to the 11th decimal place and then perform weird arithmetic functions on it. Again, it doesn’t really make sense, but I can spend a good 7-10 minutes doing that. Sometimes I also like to see how many calculations the calculator can take before giving an error message. Like for example, I will fill the screen with 9s and then add a 1 to see if the calculator will give an error and if it doesn’t I’ll keep on adding 1 or some other number until it finally succumbs.

If you have a computer without any internet, there’s little that you can do to keep yourself interested for long. But for some of us it can be a good tool for appearing to be busy. MS Excel is probably the most useful amongst the very basic software available to the everyday office worker. Just type in some random words, accompanied with some random numbers in a few columns and you’ve got something going. Writing something in MS Word may arouse the suspicion of your colleagues or your boss as people tend to look at what you’re typing. But no such thing ever happens when working on Excel. The thing is so damn boring that people try to keep themselves away from looking at the screen whenever an Excel spreadsheet is on.

The thing about the office is that when you don’t have any work, you wish you did to make time move faster, but when you do have some work, you wish that you didn’t so that you could just laze around and enjoy the scenery from your window (yes, I have a window). I guess it’s just another one of those things when you just can’t win.

So Mr. Farooki... please tell us a bit about yourself...

I’ve always found job interviews to be an interesting experience. It’s a place for mind games, diplomacy, and an extensive show of personality and knowledge. It’s basically the hour or two where you try not to be yourself.

People say that the key to a good interview is being confident. Not that I disagree but I think it’s more important in trying not to make a fool out of yourself when you finish. Mainly because the people taking the interview are trying their level best to make you look like an idiot. And a fool with poise looks even more silly.

I also get the feeling that HR people think too highly of themselves, especially when taking interviews. They try really hard to give the impression that they’ve done multiple degrees in varying subjects such as psychology, math or history. Of course, they probably have a single degree and took the job because they had little or no talent for anything else. But at that particular time they’re the ones who are in control, and they would waste no opportunity in reminding you so.

There are a number of interview questions that are just plain stupid. If I would have a list, my least favorite one would be where I tell them how I see myself after a certain period of time. Some people say that their main focus is on the way you answer the questions, not the answers themselves. That would more or less explain the presence of these irritable and meaningless questions.

I’d like to see interviewers add a bit of humor to the whole process. Not only would it make the interview more interesting but it will also give an opportunity to see if the interviewee has a sense of humor. You wouldn’t want to hire a person with no sense of humor; that would make the workplace even more boring. You can also tell a lot more about the person by sharing a few jokes or playing some pranks. For example, if you tell a racially distasteful joke and the person laughs uncontrollably, there is a high probability that he/she has racist opinions. Or if you plant a mild stink bomb during an interview and the interviewee (knowing that he wasn’t the one who let off) doesn’t flinch for a second will show that he/she would be more tolerable to different types of people.

Now I’m talking like one of those HR people. Damn.

Going to office...

It’s been well over a year since I last wrote something for my blog. Now that I am once again unemployed and have very little to do, I can write some of my incoherent and pointless commentaries on life.

I remember that when I was little I wanted to become a scientist. There were a few of my mother’s old college books on our bookshelf and I happened to come across one called “Principles of Political Science” by R. N. Gilchrist. Wanting to become a scientist and having the enthusiasm to start early, I picked up the book and started reading, not knowing that political science wasn’t really the science I was looking for. Well, it didn’t really do much harm as I don’t remember going beyond the first page and even what I read probably didn’t register one bit. (For those of you who think that I was being really stupid, may I point out that I was very young… who am I kidding, my blog doesn’t have an audience… hahaa…)

Then came the time when I wanted to become a doctor. The reason that I remember was that I thought doctors were usually very rich and also that I could help some people. Then I took some biology classes and by the time my O’levels had ended, it was over. I think I would need to be at least twice as smart as I am right now to become a good doctor. My father always wanted me to become one, and I really didn’t want to disappoint him but I guess it wasn’t to be. If I could do it all over again, I would like to make a good attempt at it again. I have a lot of respect for doctors; they go through a lot during medical school and then after, during housejobs and what not, before they can actually call themselves doctors. And even when they have the doctor badge on their coats it’s not all that rosy for them, there is a lot of hard work and nightshifts involved. But in the end, I think they’ll get what they truly deserve. God bless them all.

Anyway, after the doctor phase had passed came the time when I wanted to do something in computer sciences. The inspiration came mostly from my elder brother and also from two of my cousins. I used to have an image of the computer guy as the cool dude with the pony tail hacking his way through the pentagon computers, or making cool computer games in a makeshift office while making it big at the same time. But as university passed, it became quite clear to me that I wouldn’t want to do this for the rest of my life.

So what is it that I want to do? That is the million dollar question. Sometimes I think that this isn’t really the way it happens in life. You try to get what you can and then hope it’s the thing you want to do. Sometimes I think that I take so many things for granted. I just hope that I don’t eventually do something that I regret later in life, having so many regrets already.

Ok so there is one thing… but I don’t think people take it too seriously. No, I don’t want to become a sensory deprivation research subject… I was thinking more on the lines of a sports writer / journalist (For those of you who don’t know, I have another blog called “theslogblog”… again I’m assuming that I have an audience). Now that is something I wouldn’t mind doing day in and day out. Imagine, to get paid just to watch cricket all day and then writing about it. That is my dream job.

I guess that’s why they call it a “dream” job. But then again, some dreams do come true…