9^th Jan, 2008

First working day of my life. It was the day I started my career with one of the emerging IT companies in India.

There were 5 more guys who had joined along with me on the same day. They were: Kiran, Ashwin, Rakesh, Chari, and Ramana.

Out of those 5 guys, Rakesh, Chari, and Ramana were into my team where Kiran and Ashwin were IT recruiters.

Kiran was taken into domestic recruitment operations and Ashwin was into international recruitment operations for which he had to work in night shifts.

We became good friends within no time. As we were all freshers who had just completed our education, we were not affected by the corporate dude culture and used to behave as if we were in a college but not a corporate facility J.

Our work mainly involved in supporting our client’s applications and for that we (me and my team) were asked to work in shifts.

After 10 days of my joining date, my manager came to me and told that myself and Ramana fall into same shift and Rakesh and Chari would be in another shift.

We agreed readily and we started our shifts from the next day.

For each month, we were supposed to work in night shifts for 2 weeks and after that we have to work in day shifts for 2 consecutive weeks.

As it was purely support work, we had to be attentive for the emails we get and the SLAs for response and resolutions.

Internally in our team, we had an agreement that one person should monitor the jobs and emails where the other person could go for a break or sleep during night shifts J.

Time was simply passing like that and I shifted to a hostel in Ameerpet which was convenient for me to commute to office…

As I was new to Hyderabad, I did not feel comfortable in the nonworking hours. Though I tried to talk to my hostel roommates but none of them had shown interest to make friendship with me. 🙁

Later my friends joined the same hostel and we became roommates again 🙂 (earlier we used to stay together in a shared accommodation)

I used to go my hometown for twice in a month… while coming back I used to bring some eatables which my mother used to prepare for me and I used to share with my friends.

In the working days, I used to have lunch with my colleagues Ramana and Kiran in the day shifts and when I was in night shifts I, Ramana, and Ashwin used to have dinner together in the food court.

One day I heard that Rakesh was having tough time handling support as Chari would always be away from his seat :). After that week’s status meeting, Rakesh asked me to come into his shift and I asked my manager to change my shift to be in sync with Rakesh’s timings. My manager was not ready to swap the shifts of mine and Chari because he wanted me to take up 2 more applications for which Ramana and I were supposed to work together.

Rakesh continued to complain to me about Chari and I talked to Chari regarding the same. Chari did not pay much attention to that job as he was looking for another job. Soon he got another job with a good salary and he left our company.

It is true that even I wanted to quit the job as I was not at all interested to work in shifts. But I did not get through any of the interviews that I attended at that period.

I decided to leave it to God and continued with my routine work.

The most depressing part was… no girl in our team and there were many good looking girls in all other teams.

 Daily we used to pray to the God to send at least one beautiful girl as our team member J. But God had his own plans 🙂