Dear Abby,
I am an honest and hardworking man, but somehow I am not being recognized in my workplace and my boss totally ignores me. Let me tell you my story and then you can advise what more do I need to do.
It was September 2013, right before my 27th birthday, when I decided that the hair around my temples had sufficiently greyed out to make it as a measure of my dedication to work. I had been grinning and looking sideways at my team member Naveen and his jet black hair for days, slowly working on my conversation starter with my boss that how office stress has prematurely greyed my hair, because I care about my job so much. I rolled in early to office for my birthday to prove that I don’t put my one special day in a year before my work and in fact I was going to work extra-long hours on my birthday. But as soon as I entered, I saw everyone was gathered around Naveen’s desk and there were people on their toes trying to look over other’s shoulder. Worried, I rushed to his desk to see that Naveen was standing there completely bald, apparently that man had lost his hair in the first year of his working and was wearing a wig till now. He proudly proclaimed that his work stress caused Telogen Effluvium, thus total hair loss. He announced pretty loudly that any man or woman working here with hair is not really serious about his job. The boss entered the circle, patted him on his bald head and asked to put that in his yearly achievement, they are looking for more people like him in the senior positions. That year on Diwali late in the night when we were all waiting for someone else to leave first, the email came in, Naveen was being promoted and moving out of team.
Things started looking up when a new guy Satvinder who asked everyone to call him Sandy, was just hired to replace Naveen. That guy was thin, had lots of hair and didn’t understand office politics. That guy definitely would have been chewed and spit out in a few months. But this time I did not want to take any chances, I wanted to clearly look like the harder working of the two. So I started eating only junk food, not doing any exercise and worrying even more. All this work was paying off, I was 13 Kgs overweight and my blood pressure was 145/95. I just wanted it to hit the magic number of 150/100 before starting talking to everyone around and maybe even pin a print out of my BP on my work desk. But that bastard Sandy got lucky first! He had a heart attack and died. Apparently he preferred his butter chicken with extra butter, used to have a samosa every time he went for tea, which was 5 times in a working day, was popping gulab jamun like tic tacs and was worried even more than me to impress the boss. And the boss was clearly impressed; Sandy was mentioned in the quarterly town hall in the young achievers list and was named employee of the year posthumously.
I realized that I cannot cut it in a such a dynamic and high achieving work place so I switched jobs. And as my luck would have it, the new place was even worse. They had what the boss used to call a ‘start up culture’, even though it just meant very long hours and working on weekends and holidays just like my previous office but here they did on standing desks while wearing casual clothes. The place was full of fat twenty-five somethings, we had chai latte instead of tea in our in-house cafe and every week we had to compulsorily do a holistic wellness class after we finish work, which usually meant staying past midnight on Friday.
In one of this wellness class they took away my first bragging point, that Diabetes was genetically passed. After that whenever I talked about it, people very rudely pointed out that my high blood sugar is not something I achieved but passed on to me from my parents. Things got even worse after that, I was used to the old skipping lunch routine or eating at your desk to show that you are saving time. But the new kids were taking it to next level, they would proudly say before lunch that they were going to miss dinner as they were pulling all-nighters or just “crunching” as they would like to call it. One guy even advertised that how he came up with some sort of protein kale quinoa shake, of which if you drink one, it is enough to go through the day without any food, and to top, that no bathroom breaks either. These new kids were even impinging on the long standing gentleman’s code that the last person to leave the office is clearly the hardest worker and thus needs to be valued by the boss. They were now sending emails at 3 AM in the night from their homes, setting up meetings on Sunday morning from their phone’s Outlook and suggesting boss to add everyone in a Whatsapp group so no one can ever be offline.
I would have been glad, if these invasive technologies which let’s work permeate every aspect of our life was the worst thing these new kids brought. But they brought something else, something worse, THE DIVORCE CULTURE! It was a long standing culture of our country that you have to stay with the person you married till death or immolation for dowry does you apart. Every hard working man and woman was ignoring their spouses and kids, this was a given, nobody talked about it, nobody needed a document from a court to prove it.
I still remember that Monday when I was sitting in cafeteria abusing my juniors who had asked for leaves. I had taken out my laptop and fished out the email from my appreciation email folder, where HR had said that 18 out of my 20 leaves are lapsing and had copied my boss. My boss, being my boss had replied “great job team, next year let’s aim for all 20”. As I was looking at my dumb founded sub-ordinates I saw Vijay Prakash or VP as he asked everyone to call him, taking a selfie with an official looking document in his hand. I jeered at him asking if that this was one of those worthless certification and was he going to change his name to PMP VP in his Linkedin profile. He stormed to my table and slammed his divorce file on the table. He challenged the entire crowd in the cafeteria to spend so much time in office that their spouse decides that even going through the Indian legal system and hearing the taunts of Indian society for a lifetime is better than their marriage. Needless to say, VP just had to put “Divorced due to workalholism” in his yearly self-review and he got the highest rating that year.
Abby, time and time again I have tried to show I am the best worker in office by being fat and grey haired, panting when they make you take the stairs in the fire drill, by missing Holi, Diwali and all festivals because of being in office, counting calendar days instead of working days for deadlines, by generally ignoring my family life for years, by sending needless status emails to everyone copying my boss after midnight, never participating in any of team activities, always leaving after the boss, using the latest jargon and lastly being exhausted all the time. But I have failed miserably. What more do I need to do?
Your truly,
Unlucky hard worker.
Dear Unlucky hard worker,
Have you tried to produce good work instead? So you would be judged on that and nothing else.
With love,
Abby
While this is clearly satire. There is nothing funny about the Indian workplace situations. More than 50% people are stressed and 8% people are downright suicidal. Google it if you think I’m exaggerating. There is no study which has shown that stressing people or pressuring them to work harder has resulted in growth. When forced to work longer people will either find ways to kill time in office or take time off later faking sickness or personal emergencies. There is no secret on why so many of us fall sick on Mondays. We (most people in my social group) have started moving to junior management positions, we are in a position to make a change. Don’t follow the sick culture of staying late and working on weekends and don’t make your juniors do it. Don’t mistake having a life outside work as lack of passion for work. Encourage the gym goers. Don’t say shit to freshers like “this is your time to learn, don’t go home so early”, “Where are you going so soon? You don’t even have a family”. Don’t do shitty things like making them wait whole day for an input and they give that at 7 PM and expect them to finish the work the same day. Remember how this shit felt like when you were in their position. Don’t get into the ragging mindset – “It was done to me, so I will do it to others”. That is what child sex abusers do! Remember how you first went abroad and appreciated their work culture? That everyone leaves office at 6 sharp, that no one calls on cellphones for work, that no one expects you to work on weekends? We can have it here in India. Don’t say: “Oh this will never work in India”. It will, the only thing not making it work are the asshole people like us.
Oh yes, the picture above is Flipkart's promotion photo of their sale, where they are proudly displaying that they are going to make their employees sleep on rented uncomfortable mattresses, of course as India has no overtime so probably they are getting nothing out of it. Cheers to India Inc!
