Post # 33 # Too Much Love Will Kill You

All along the years I have been building up a thought that work is a curse we have got for our existence. But lately, as the number of boring days increases so much in the last month, I have changed my mind. Work, any kind of work in personal and professional terms, saves us from the tiresome drudgery of life. Imagine a life in which all of we have to do is just sit and watch the sun and the moon and stars, all day, all night. It would be the ultimate disaster. However this does not mean we have to work to live our life.

Basically, I'm worried about too less of work as much as I'm about too much of it. It sounds good that the best way is to make the right balance between work and leisure, though it is easier said than done. In any case, we cannot love too much work or too much free time. Otherwise Brian May may entangle us in his long curly hairs and sing us Too Much Love Will You.

I want to break free from all the sticky cages of work and free time and make the most of my time in the most productive and cheerful way. We live only once, why should we waste it only in working our arses off to pay the bills and the rent and save for the future? Why should we spend it away doing nothing?     

Post # 31 # Graveyard Stalking: Killing on the First Night Shift

FYI, this is not me! I got the pic from a Google search
on the bloody graveyard shift!

Nothing is work
unless you'd rather
be doing something else.

So the unknown man continues his rants against work and anything that is related to these things called professional duties. But frankly, after all is said and done -- being put into the graveyard shift against all personal requests and squeaks is like selling away the million dreams every night, while keeping the shoulder to the wheel. Livelihood, seriously, should have a lot of options like a supermarket store that caters to whimsical teenage girls, otherwise it is a real pain in the ass.

Apart from the professional allergy, here is a credible excerpt from Wikipedia, why the graveyard shift is in fact more than a pain in the ass:

UCSF neurologist Louis Ptacek, who studies circadian rhythms, genes and sleep behaviors, has been quoted: "It's not surprising, we have evolved on a planet that is rotating every 24 hours. Our internal clock is more than just when we sleep and wake. It's related to cell division and it regulates our immune systems. When we battle our internal clock, that has complications."

Only ranting on the blog cannot cure the complications. Correct. Resignation is the best option now and i have already decided about it. But it will be quite unethical to google for sample resignation letters, after spending half of the work time on an idiotic blog and Facebook. Still the problem is far from over. Quite truly, I have heard people saying that being our own boss is only thing we can do to get the most satisfaction out of our profession. Am I too idiot to be my own boss? The night is very late, I cannot find any answer to this question.

Post # 26 # Night Warriors Never Whine

Outsourcing is a one of the mantra driving the Indian economy. Business.mapsofindia.com mentions, “India, since the past few years, has experienced a paradigm shift due to its competitive stand in the business world. Being a huge market itself, as well as the home to cheap and skilled labors in abundance, India became the favorite hunting ground for the companies to explore the market and grow their business.”

Well the above paragraph is too hard for this blog, but I can’t help taking help of a reference. In the last decade, we were as kids only happy stomping our foot to Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and their ilk for two reason: firstly, we were too young to care for the mundane things like jobs or economy of a country, and secondly, as far as we know life was all about thinking and acting local though our lives were tinctured with rock n’ roll. Then Bob Dylan re-sing, The Times They Are a-Changin’. Now the tincture is gone as I’m tracing a way back to my roots, reading poetry, researching the stuffs from all over and imbibing the ethos of our time. I have also changed my slogan to thinking global and acting local.

Now back to the issue that matters. Outsourcing has made us richer, has turned me from a small-town nonentity to an Error Checker, ready to check any error committed by anyone across the world. But we need a boring, uncommon calibration that we can find nowhere else: Time Adjustment. For example, the guys on the other side will always be sleeping while we are working, and we will be sleeping when they are working — a real case study for the needs of proper and meaningful communication an without which business will be doomed. As a means of synchronization, we do a monthly rotation of day and night shifts.

PC World predicts India's revenue from outsourcing could be $225 billion in 2020. I need no billion or million but a real nice sleep. What the heck? Why are the old men and women so fond of jogging in the morning? Good night. 

Post # 25 # On Life and Work

Some recent posts on work and job, here and there, lighted a bulb on my mind. For every week, 40–48 hours of my most ‘productive’ time is spent in the workplace. My employer and manager’s views are quite obvious than the dawn of sunlight at the end of the night: to ever increase my productivity and gel along with other people who we clubbed together as colleagues, like chipping in together in our project work like some animals bound by territorial pissing. Working 40–48 hours is quite a long time, isn’t it?

Is livelihood what defines our life? I don’t think so. Financial things and philosophy are strange bed-partners. There are several reasons for this statement. Livelihood is not life. For that matter, no fragmented parts of human existence can define what a life is. No politics. No education. No science. No religion. Not even our beliefs. None of them can explain why we are living. We need to understand the ‘whole’ to know the essence and its parts. So, to put it bluntly, life is not work. To hell to those people who pray work is worship. Forty to forty-eight hours are more than enough, but not enough to give us an essence of life. And what are we without a life?

So reassuring it was when I read Oscar Wilde, when he wrote, “Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.” Why cannot we live without work? Work, I mean, going to office every day — worrying about the salary, running for paying the bills, brooding for the sake of future. I want to go back to the state of nature. But since it is not possible, I would keep searching for the alternatives to find more meaning in our existence. Please don’t tell me it would be hard after ‘killing’ more time at the workplace than where it really matters. Surely, this world is so full of contradiction. Perhaps, the sustenance of life, in or out of 40 hours, is our work even if life is not merely sustenance. 

Post # 24 # Wake me up when September ends

"It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work."
William Faulkner 

Consolation?

What is one of the worst dreams on a Sunday night / Monday morning? !Ping. Being at work! I usually love Charles Lamb's essays, but I love him more when he said that he was always late for work, but that he would make up for it by leaving early. I would not elaborate but somehow I was gladdened, this morning, by the fact that I did get a few hours to read papers and do things like that before getting ready for work. But boy, it was terrible even before I got up, I had already been to my oh-fiss.

Well, I'm not indifferent to my work. I like it, in fact. Perhaps because doing nothing is the hardest work, never knowing when I'm finished. The convention that we have to give our asses eight hours a day, six days a week, however, makes me quite apathetic towards this whole business of work and workplace. Karl Marx and those guys did a commendable job in reducing the working hours, even if America hates his followers like I hate Monday mornings. But what I really want is to further decrease the working hour to, say, four hours; that way, I will start loving my work, I will give my 200% from the usual 100% (I can show you the spreadsheet, though I take a dozen fag breaks a day), I will never complain about my managers in my 'entire' life, and the list will go on.   

On a much lighter note, the weather is getting pleasant with each passing day, as autumn draw the curtain over the intolerable summer heat. The humidity is still here like a shameless cat, but when September ends, the air is going to be a lot nicer and conducive. And maybe, it will also make me less lethargic getting up in the morning, makes me ready getting a bath, and makes retiring on work days so comfortable with occasional drinks and movies. I hope so.

   

Post # 22 # A True-and-False Record

All my life I have been an ordinary, average-ish student. Until I found this task in one of my jobs at office. And I scored 99.99%! What a feat!

There were around 800 true-and-false questions. The only time I scored above 80% was perhaps in my pre-high school days. Oh, well. This 99.99% means no salary increment or an appreciate letter from my boss. The sole satisfaction is that I have completed the job quite well on time. I’ll be getting a new task soon.

But do you know how I did it, scoring on a genius-type level? Let me explain. In this job I'm doing, the subject experts set the questions in simple MS Word. And the computer experts set them on a sophisticated computer program. Then me, as mentioned in my earlier post, I worked as an Error Checker; and I have to check if the correct answers are set properly, clicking on each question. I would have scored a perfect 100 if not for these computer experts who had not been giving in their 100% attention and making the silly mistakes.

I find it quite ironical that I scored highly just in this kind of things. The world is so relative. Leave the world. When you come in early in the office, the boss is not there; and when you are late, you know it: he is there not only early, but waiting for you to hand over some work. Leave office. I want to be 99.99% successful in life.

Post # 16 # Deadening Work Experiences

Going to work is one of the worst things that have ever happened after the creation of life on the earth. There are only moments when I feel really motivated, but these are only lasting as the onset of instances like the excruciating boredom is the last thing I have found in life. Quite painful. But the books of wisdom teach me that there should be a way out, though never easy it is.

It’s always good to see the big picture. There used to be a story of two workers who were employed in a construction firm. When asked about their daily activities, one of them replied he washed bricks, take them to the top floors, brought in the cement, all the nitty-gritty and things like that. The other replied he was building the tallest building in town. Woh-oh, what a food for thought!

Well, as a preface I work as an EC, an Error Checker. When computer experts and their subject experts finished creating their monthly magnum opus, I checked if there are any faults in their great works. Now I got some ideas from the above stories. I see the masterpieces! All of them have to pass through me. It is interesting to find that I’m the one who always give the final touch to the creation that are churned out, not once in a blue moon, but regularly.

But the anonymity is killing me. Who don’t want their names to appear on the front page of newspapers for some achievements? Life would be like a useless underwear if it is all about doing all the boring stuffs in a stuffy cubicle all life along. Every great technological invention will be as futile as a room heater in the Indian summers. I need to go and find more inspiration and motivation.