CHAPTER 28 - A Life to Die For - II

Life in the Cubicles

Revs and Rafs were deputed to a new project and they were to move away from the roaming division. But it was a saving grace (we were a little perturbed about it because they were leaving us to the daily dreadful drudgery of GG-controlled daily tasks) to know that they were to remain within the 5th-floor precinct in the East Flank of the building where our spacious cabin/cubicle was located, and not to move away to any other locations of Satyam’s numerous offices within or outside of the city. That bit was good news because interacting with them came as a welcoming respite at times when we felt we needed fair-minded individuals like them – former colleagues now though – to be there for us when we needed them – to just be there for reasons motivational. Balzie Gigamorthy was in any way present to take everyone forward.

Revanthi and Raufia were undoubtedly two conservatively beautiful souls. (Sometimes we used to call them by the nicknames I and Manpreet had given them: Hi Revs and Hello Rafs). Yes, GG was totally a different matter; handicapped as ever he was in matters of one’s personal charm, goodness, and cordiality! Guess they don’t make fine bosses/supervisors anymore, just the ones that sound and look like GG turn up in unfailing regularity and get to be managers! Good heavens! To be perfectly honest, Mr. GG Howdy was not so much an awful boss or administrator; he was assuredly the screwy one!

Within the East Flank which predominantly comprised of a large square-shaped hall chock-a-block with endless rows of comfortable box-like cubicles for every software engineer’s soul to park in, there were glass cabins lined on the far left side and on the right side, restrooms or toilets (John – Oh what a word to describe them!) on the far right corner, and the entryway to two spare halls crammed with an array of computer terminals and other glossy electronics. The spare halls – which were roomier by any standards – were located one each on the Northside and Southside corners of the big common hall facing each other, a swiveling glass door of the East Flank enclosure leads to the famed hallway where the Nescafe coffee vending machine and a water disperser are parked. I couldn’t view this arrangement of workstations in any other way excepting that our enlarged cabin, open to the sweeping view of the main hall (East Flank), was the most attractive star of the whole firmament!

After you enter through the glass door on the left, which is beside the Nescafe machine in the corridor, our cubicle was located on the northern left side of the hall of the East Flank enclosure. It was a delight to come to the office every day… only if you can just blot out Chichcha out of the charming beauty of our roaming division.

Balzie Gigamorthy sat at a premium distance away from our cubicle. His cubicle on the 5th floor’s East flank resembled a veritable Scotland Yard department! Ballpoint Pens and freshly-cut pencils – all nestled inside a flashy yellow Archies mug, double-earpiece Headphones (probably to use it when making international calls which he did once or twice a day), two landline phones with numerous press buttons flashing tiny red, yellow and green dots on them, and other electronic paraphernalia such as a scientific calculator, an investigative number cruncher, photo albums placed at strategic corners of his cubicle, snaps of various sizes and endless yellow post-it’s scrawled with countless shapeless scribbling pinned to the message board, and of course his stately IBM computer which had post-it’s on the top, on the side, and at the base! A yellow garland of post-its! Much credit ought to be given to this man of peaceful nature and mindset that he wisely preferred a healthy distance away from GG – who occupied one of the West Flank cabins – and us at the roaming division, both a safe kilometer away!

The letter ‘V’ portrays our individual seating positions. At the base of the inverted V sat Balzie (at his Scotland Yard of a desk!) and on one end of the tip of V sat Arinvan Maliek, Manpreet Singh, and Savitha Tandavi (roaming division specialists) while on the other tip sat GG (our boss with perennial schizophrenia!), including Sexy Devee and TD Suraj (financial settlement wizards!). One couldn’t help but be mindfully aware of the fact that the letter ‘V’ was actually lucky for all of us. ‘V’ signified Victory. (Yup, it’s also a sign for Villain, which was, who else, GG of course!).

For me, the entire length and breadth of the 5th-floor precinct (of the balsam-brown building of Tesser Towers) including the pastel-toned corridor, sand-papered lobby, Nescafe coffee dispenser parked on a pedestal in the passageway, the smallish meeting rooms on the left side of the corridor, and beyond to the West Flank housing Mrs. Sheila Rheddi’s cabin filled almost wall-to-wall with exclusive HR accouterments, followed by cabins after cabins occupied by the peripatetic Top Guns of Satyam, the grandly designed Conference Room, Tania Bhatroy’s, Pavan’s, Neetu Scootywali’s perfumed cubicles on the right, and Sexy Devee and TD Suraj’s bare cubicles in the middle of the huge hall, down to even the bulbous-nosed, human-hawk GG’s uninspiring boxy slot – formed my globe of life, my colleagues, my career, my professional world for nearly three great eventful years at the Tesser Towers. I couldn’t have asked for more.

Many a time when Arinvan Maliek was at the helm of managing daily operations, Manpreet Singh came in on a general stretch and took to preparing complex data-based marketing reports and sent them all out to the clients by E.O.D. (End of Day).

By the time when we began this new value-addition of sending out marketing reports to the clients based on raw and unprocessed data (relocated from TD Suraj’s clunky computer with cc copies to Sexy Devee and probably bcc copies to Gudumba Gongura Howdy, the Croc) procured from CybreNett, London and Dann Natte, Denmark became prevalent, Savitha Tandavi was long gone. She would never know how much fun it had been for the person coming in on a general shift to generate the client-specific marketing reports and send them out via emails! How sad!

END OF PART 2 of 'CHAPTER 28 - A Life to Die For - II'.

(To be continued...)

By Arindam Moulick

Click here for PART I of the story.

Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction. All incidences, places, and characters portrayed in the story are fictional and entirely imaginary. Any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental. No similarity to any person either living or dead is intended or should be inferred.