Appreciate it!! Part 1

The Story and all the characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Scene 1
Day 1 12:30pm
As Bajrang, Sukhi and I were having lunch we were discussing about how our project, though being production support, was never gaining enough visibility with respect to other projects in our area. Day in and day out there were appreciation mails for the other members of our team except for us 3 and the main reason for this was Linda - our team lead. She rarely appreciated out work and whatever we did she felt that we could improve. She never went in detail about the applications which we supported and whenever we faced some issues, we had to contact her and probably that is what she wanted - to be in control and not let us take over. As I had the last piece of Garden Burger I informed Bajrang and Sukhi about my meeting with Linda at 1:00pm and about how again it was another case of going to her with respect to a new issue. Bajrang lamented - "Unlucky souls we are - production support with a tough team lead. We are never going to get any recognition for the work we do."

Scene 3
Day 1 3:00pm
Bajrang just walked into the cube for a coffee break and as I accompanied him, asked him if he would be happy if at least one of us got an appreciation from Linda. He looked at me and said that's impossible and I reminded him impossible means I M possible :-). Its a great feeling to see the expression on the face of the person who does not have an idea of what you are upto. Initially I was planning to tell him but then decided it would be only after the everything went well.

Scene 4
Day 2 7:45am
Click....That was the end of a phone call I had with the offshore team. The screen showed 2H:03M:45S as I was ending the call, phew....have been working on the issue since 5:30am and now its almost time to get ready and go to office. Though its not the ideal way to start your day, at least I was satisfied that the issue was resolved. This is pretty usually for any IT professional working in production support. There are no defined times to work as issues are expected anytime and so you too are expected to be prepared for the same.As I glanced around my room mate Bajrang was still fast asleep unaware of my suffering since morning. Anyways I did not sleep well last night and was looking forward to the day in office :-)

Scene 5
Day 2 9:00am
As I started driving to office, my phone starts ringing again and with a doubt I pick up the phone hoping that it is not another issue. It was Linda, my Team Lead, on the phone to check the status of the issue. Somehow Leads and Manager's are like the Police officers in Indian movies who come into the scene once all the problems are solved. Anyways she was happy that issue was resolved and I continued with my drive to the office. Though I had been working since morning, never had the time to check my mails and just as Outlook connected to the network there were 35 emails waiting for me. Luckily most of them were pertaining to issues faced in the morning with the users, business team trying to find out what exactly happened in the morning. It took me another 30 minutes to reply to all them and let them know what exactly the issue and what we did to resolve the issue. Just as I sent across the last mail, the telephone light started blinking....."unknown number" read the screen and I knew it was the offshore team. "Hello Sai"....said a familiar sound from the other end. It was Ravinder and he wanted to discuss some of the existing Gereprine tickets before he could work on them. With the Offshore call over and nothing outstanding to be looked into, I was catching up with the latest around the world when at the bottom of my screen came the words "soda time?". It was Sukhi, my friend and team mate, and usually after settling into our offices we take this break to refresh ourselves and also share the interesting(of others life) and non-interesting(of our life) happenings in the last 24 hours. We are sometimes joined by Vishesh and Rajan too and by the end of the break we end throwing brick-bats at each other.