Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Born Again Workaholic

I see dead people. err.. I mean i see deadlines. Although with the accounts department that I am in, the earlier one applies too. I have always hated deadlines. The name itself is like a threat. So when my boss said that I have to finish the reports with in 2 days, I was, well, threatened...and pissed off.

Working in accounts department is like playing with money. Minus the fun. I used to sit and work with the same enthusiasm i had when i was studying trigonometry. I still dont understand whats so fucking complicated about the triangle that you have to have so many equations and formulas. An equation for me is as simple as 1=1. Although in accounts this 1 could equal .5,1,2,3 or whatever u want it to be. Thats the fun of it, but only when u look from the outside. You can twist it around, tweak the numbers and make it so damn confusing that nobody will understand anything. Including the ones who made it. It can give anyone such a strong headache that any person with a sane mind will refuse to take a look at it again. But auditors are not sane people. And they demand an explanation to everything that is on the books including the page numbers and dead flies . They devour the account books like the highschoolers read debonair. And when they find something that doesnt tally, they will point it out to you with a "gotcha"smile, which hardly qualifies as a smile.

So when the deadline was given, i thought its another random auditing coming up. But no. It wasnt about auditing. It was just about being up to date. My boss was suddenly aware of the possible positives of an update books of accounts like easy report generation, easy solutions and a few accountants in mental asylum.

Now usually my deadlines moved so much that they didnt really look dead. But the instruction this time was clear. No extensions. No excuses. The reports where lagging by about a week. I checked again just to be sure, meanwhile hoping like anything that i read it wrong. Oh. I did. I was wrong. Its lagging by 9 days. Anybodys got a gun ?

The accounts department has 4 people who love eachother like cats and dogs do. There was no personal hatred there. Just a proffessional one. Because a mistake made by one of them may cause the whole thing to go wrong. But in times of emergencies and clamities like a deadline, we join hands together. Everyday we throw all kinds of accusations at eachother, and occassionaly tea cups and paper weights. and very occassionaly we just throw eahother. But a common enemy has united us. We have to fight against death itself. I mean deadline. Ah, its all the same anyway.

So we think up of a lot of plans ranging from resigning to taking the whole workforce at our office as hostages and demand that deadlines must be banned all over the world. Although the idea appealed to all of us , we were not sure to whom we should demand. Finally we gave up. This had to come. This is why we were hired.To work. And to keep books up to date is but a reasonable and fair demand (yea , i missed un twice...)

So we took a decision.... to work our ass off. To meet the challenge instead of running away from it. To face it like a man.. and a woman(if i dont add that my colleague is going to sue me for sexual discrimination.) We decided to declare ourself bron again workaholics and finish the damn books. So deadline, u dont scare us anymore. We are staring down at you and laughing. The last laugh before we finish the work and kill you. Oh . But u are already dead.

3 comments:

Reeholio said...

Hi Manu,

Thanks for leaving me your comment at Wild New Zealand. Sure I would like to swap links. Sorry but someone else has already taken the India spot at A World of Bloggers, but I have added your link to the "Blogs that link here" on the sidebar of that page. Please be sure to do the same.

Regards,

Reeholio

Shalabh said...

lol

btw its fuckin without the g
:)

Gayatri Bhadran said...

deadline, u dont scare us anymore.. We are staring down at you and laughing..

luved tis line..

all of us are on d same boat mate.. meeting deadlines.. its not pretty.. :/ but to keep up wid d rat race we hv to push ourselves to our breakin point.. sigh..