All about work......

Written in Nov 2001

When my friend in Boyton beach, Florida calls me every weekend without fail, we talk many things; Our Hostel days, College days, friends, marriage, current affairs, latest happening in India, South Canara, etc - yet the main topic revolves our work!! More I discuss whenever I felt disgusted with my work load. I told him many times about the tension I had and that I was unable to handle that kind of situation. May be 4 years back or so, I remember him telling me over phone that he was in deep tension because of his work pressure. It was the time when he was working for Infosys and I was looking out for jobs. I still smell the sweat it produced from my body sitting inside the telephone booth in the burning summer and looking at the seconds the instrument displayed. It would cost me 2 Rs. more for crossing 180 seconds. 100-150 Rs. that I used to get from the Kannada magazines for publishing a cartoon hardly filled the petrol for my scooter, or tickets for the BTS bus, bills for the local calls or for the resume copies. I then had uttered him over phone with low voice, "some people have tension because they have too much of work, while some have tension because they have no work!!.." That was 4 years ago.., now both of us are standing on the other side of the globe, I asked my friend working in Motorola, "Hey, do you remember that?" Replied he, "Certainly, I do..you were depressed".

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

It was real fun working here in US for few months till I got moved to a different module. More than the new working domain or the environment, I kind of became the victim of the internal clash between my lead and the ex-lead of that module. We two were the new members to join the existing 4 members group. For some reasons, the existing team members started quitting the job one by one. One moved to a small town in Pennsylvania, the other resigned to pursue her studies if she is to be believed, while the rest 2 had already formed a new team as a result of which, was our entry into this team. So, no sooner I realized that I was the only working member of the team for all the problems and complex tickets. I was not even allowed to ask for any assistance from the previous owner of the application. Some tickets were small in nature, but some weren't.. I couldn't concentrate on my regular work. Ruth, who deals with the Logistics had some of her e-commerce Invoices not been rated which makes them unable to approve to go for payment. She was more an intelligent user than she appeared not just a reason or two; Many times she used to guess the reason for the problem she faced before just dumping everything onto us - like when they started getting 15 digit Waybill numbers all of a sudden for Fedex GROUND Invoices, when the total Invoice header amount didn't match with the balance due amount for Airborne..etc.

That was my first dive into Accounts module before I was caught under Reva's strange issue with the EFT stuff. Hispanic origin Laura started creating problems after she moved into the Vendor Bank Account maintenance group. Almost every alternate day if not everyday, we were paged to fix an abend in the batch job. Reason was not so difficult to trace - Whenever Laura or her supervisor Reva created a new Bank account for the vendor for Electronic payment, they somehow didn't realize to close the existing account there by causing the batch program that runs in the evening to make a million dollar decision, "to which account should that amount be transferred to ??"...Yes; it was a million dollar question for the poor batch program because, amount used to be certainly more than a million dollar!! Well..instead of looking at the database every evening to find to which account our ladies wanted really to go to, and closing that account, we finally thought of changing Online Mainframe code to restrict them to make multiple accounts open!! The real trouble started when we discussed this with them; "Oh...that can't happen because we should have 1 cent to pre-note to their account before actually going it live" Claimed Reva. "Vendors can also have multiple accounts when the current date is still less than the EFT date (actual next business date)" added Laura. "We should also be able to re-open the closed account, when the pre-note switch is 'Y',..we can also have multiple accounts when vendor's ABA number is different; but we can't...etc etc". they continued their can's and can't's for a while. Finally I came out of their cubes rubbing my fore-head. Yes!! it was a tough nut to crack..The every time I modify the code and asked them to take a look, they would be coming with new sets of validations followed by the pressure to concentrate on all other production issues. I even had to come out of the MALCO movie theatre once from watching "Lagaan" to fix a bug. Amir won the match, but I had lost... It almost carried for a month to finally take a proper shape. Reva was more than satisfied.. Now it's an easy one whenever she calls me and ask, why did vendor 'x' not receive his Remittance advice either thru e-mail or fax or EFT?.. What's the default check handling code that appears on the check when they just bypass that screen..etc. Meanwhile Tammy who works on Electronic Purchase Order group gets a daily duplicate report if she enters any Invoice twice thru her Online system. She called my lead and reported her problem. "Well..I can't show an example now, but I can call you when I find one" replied she, when I asked for an example. Once she saw me taking printouts in her floor, she dragged me to her desk to show an example. I told her "Hmm..Is this duplicate?? I don't think so.." I checked the program too and couldn't find any possibility. She accepted and said, she would call me again when she finds the actual one. I thanked God and ran back to my seat. I started running away from her whenever she happened to find me somewhere in the corridor, break pad, etc...Tammy never came back. During the same time or may be a month later or so, Tommy joined the Merchandising group taking charge for all the merchandising supervisors. Can you imagine a combination of a newly joined user working with a newly joined programmer? He started calling me once in every half an hour with his 1 liner questions, which always looked simple, but answers weren't. Questions like "How does the EDI, process Vendor direct parts invoices", "Does the PO Variance table has allowances in it?" almost chewed my whole brain for several unaccounted hours. Due to the frequency of his calls, I also guessed may be one day he would call me even for his stomach problems!!. But more than his questions, to me the problem was his accent. He hardly opened his lips while speaking; Concentrating on his 2 degree lip movements, I used to grasp few words like "vendor..invoice..matching..2nd time..EDI..Dorothy..rematch process..PO..undo ..payment" and used my internal processor to frame a sentence this way - " A Vendor number having this invoice is not matching for the second time thru EDI, even though Dorothy tried to re-match that Purchase Order by using the undo process to send it for payment". Ufff..I developed that skill gradually, my next task was to understand the problem and solve it..Once I told him the truth - "I joined this team just couple of months back, I may take sometime..". The soft cornered Tommy looked bit disappointed. But he became my good friend. I started working late in the evening and many times at home to understand the system of EDI matching process, which started getting worse day by day. The reason was simple - Several years back when the system was designed and developed, it was assumed that a vendor was suppose to send only upto max of 5 Invoices per Purchase Order raised, because the quantity of PO's were hardly few hundreds in number. Now that, it has increased ten times and vendor started sending more than 10 invoices for a PO making the system behave madly. In this phenomena, I also realized that we were not just scape goats, but there was one more technical group "Ware house Inventory" who apparently supported this merchandising group, the failure of which used to give us more problems than expected. That was the hardest time I ever had. Many times I was hardly seen by my room-mates though out the day.. The way the system was designed for an EDI process linking with the Unpaid Receivers was more complex than Fourier transformation. Nobody except the ex-lead of this group knew this system. There was no systematic solution for most of the mess-up's done by the Unpaid receiver clerks and supervisors who constitute more than 50 in number. Even now, there is no solution and if we develop something, that's going to be a new one. Laverne asked me once "Veeeeshwesh, do you love this kind of job?"...I took a pause and said, "Yeah...I have to!!" Laverne, Terry, Tiffany and others even today try to reach me with some EDI match failing Invoices and I may have to run some special process to fulfill their request till we come up with a permanent fix. Once while testing something, we accidentally FTP'ed a test file to the Bank. After few hours, they called us and asked about that duplicate file. Oh my God!! We then suddenly understood the consequence and requested them not to process that file. American Express, Visa and Mastercard companies rejected the duplicate file; however next day when Nancy bought the $192,000 rejects report, we realized that Discover card had already processed the file. I started chanting Gayatri Mantra...God save me.. Give me strength to face this... Needless to tell that, I later spent nights to change the database, reverse the journal legder entries, chargebacks, fees etc.. After all, these were all just some of the production day to day issues that I had to deal with, apart from my regular work. Later, when the users started approaching me directly, things weren't as simple as it could've been. My American boss sometimes felt bypassed was not that comfortable...


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Whenever my friend who joins me on Tabla calls me to have a practice session in the weekend, I would rather tell him that I was too tired to have a practice. He would comment "Tired??? Abe, kaunsa kaam karrahe office pe??"...In fact I was the one who tempted him to take his Tabla out of his closet before it could go completely out of tune.. Many a times, I felt returning back to India , till one Friday the fair and the beautiful lady from HR and our lead started murmuring along with my team member and all of a sudden he started packing his stuff within minutes, came to me and said, "Vishy..thanks for all your help man, my company no more needs my service.." I couldn't speak a word. Continued he, "please let me know if you know any openings anywhere..you guys will have more contacts than me" I was just shell shocked at his situation. His wife Tina wasn't working, his 4 year old daughter Tasha had just started attending school. The whole day, I was disturbed and felt so sorry for him. He was just one among the 30 other victims in the list our client had laid off out of their 200 member IT staff. Most of the people started looking at us in a different way; Of course we deserved that.. Were all looked thieves for them - stealing their jobs..aren't we?? I thought for a while. I got answers for all my questions I started asking from the very day I got moved to a new team. Yes!!! tension in work is far better than not having work!! I then thanked all the users Ruth, Reva, Laura, Cathy, Carol, Tommy, Tammy, Dorothy, Laverne, Nancy, Janie, Chaney, Owens and her team, Ray, Dawn, Dave, Bernice, Sandra, Mary Walker and many others for giving me work...the hard work.

Happy Rajyotsava day 2001!