The Job Story - 2

I did the newspaper job when I was in the last year of my diploma. After that whenever I took newspaper from a vendor, I felt a strange sense of familiarity with the person.  If you been in Mumbai and see the vendors near the railway station and footpath. Thousands of people pass them everyday and many take newspaper and magazines from them without casting a second glance to them. Some of these people are sitting there from morning to evening.

Not every vendor has a road side stall to sell newspapers. Most have a regular job too. Many of them can just manage to read and write and barely read the news they sell. Watch them every morning and they are charged men. They have a job to do and deliver the newspaper within the time limit. The procurement, the arrangement and the distribution takes with clockwise precision. Crises are handled in seconds. A meeting if any takes a minute and nothing more. The job is on the edge and fun.

The biggest disadvantage of the job was that it had no holidays. Except the 2n day of diwali (Bhau Beej, Bhai duj) and 26th January (Republic day), newspapers are printed every day. That’s why its 363 days a year in the last part. The newspaper boys had a tradition of asking “bakshish” ( A small monetary gift during the festive season) in Diwali.

My vendor asked me to ask for bakshish from my buildings. I did not. I would feel humiliated or rather embarrassed to ask for gift when I was already being paid for the job. Some people give it happily but the face of others makes you feel small. The amount is not much and it hardly causes any trouble to your pocket. The amount received at the end of the day by each boy is not much but it brings a joy that only a gift can bring. Just before Diwali, the boys would ask how much they collected and it was pure excitement around.  The amount was not much to buy anything significant but its a kind of bonus and everybody loves bonus. Diwali did bring a lot of joy around.

I didn’t ask for the bakshish but I did get one from one person in the building, voluntarily without asking. He gave me 10 rupees and it was surprising because this person was the same one who created the maximum ruckus when his paper was late. He just came, put the money in my pocket and said “Diwali”. Nothing more, nothing less. Nothing to feel embarrassed about.  

I did my Diploma in electronics and after the Diploma, I got a job in an electronic firm that made and serviced electronic typewriter. An electronic typewriter is like a normal manual typewriter where you have a small screen where you do all the typing. It has a built-in word processor. Although not as powerful as Microsoft Word, it still gives flexibility over manual typewriter. You can type the whole letter and then give a final print. It was in fact a low cost computer with minimum word processing and spreadsheet facilities. The year was 1997 and computers were still costly. People and companies could afford many electronic typewriters at the cost of one computer.

I joined with another guy and we were given two-day training on how the type writer worked and the common faults. On the third day, we were sent out in the field. I was asked to attend customer calls. I was a novice then with no prior experience of attending problems or handling customers. Attending technical problem was the easier part, handling customers/users was the difficult one.

The first three days were hell. I had no experience in problem solving and the user would breathe down my neck. I would fumble with the typewriter and then call head office. They would instruct me on the phone. Some time the solution worked and most of the time it didn’t. If it didn’t I would have to give a reason and make an escape from there.

Finally the boss realized that I need more experience to solve the problems rather than throwing me in water and expecting me to swim. So I was pulled out from problem cases and assigned to AMC cases. AMC or Annual Maintenance Contract is frequent care of the device. A kind of prevention is better than cure. It also means that the repair is done free of charge except for the cost of spare parts.

I was sent to big offices in Nariman Point to maintain the Type writers in the big corporations. The maintenance included cleaning the typewriter, changing the cartridge etc. This was my first tryst with corporate culture. Each company had many type writers housed in the same building and then I had to work on them for one day.

I liked this part of the job. The maintenance was easier and I got to visit all these offices in Nariman Point. If you have seen nariman Point, it was the first commercial district in Mumbai and had big corporation head quarters like Union Bank of India, State bank of India, The Shipping Corporation of India (the top part of the building is shaped like a Ship’s upper part, I don’t know what it is called).

I had visited CEO’s office of these companies which were mostly on the top most floor of the building. As you go up, the offices start getting savvier, more beautiful. As most of the offices are near the sea, you get a bird’s eye view of Mumbai. I did the job at the start of monsoon and Mumbai would be wet with rains.

The image of a rain soak Mumbai and watching the same from high above the ground is a treat to watch. The best image I saw was from the 24th floor of IDBI towers near WTC in Colaba. Just beyond the window was the Arabian sea. There was no one in the office and I lingered on with the job in hand. The clouds cast a shadow over the sea and the city. It didn’t rain but the expectation of rain is beautiful.

For days I roamed with a big bag on my shoulder with the different tools. Added to the cost of traveling and food. As I was constantly on the move and without a place to sit and eat my food, eating outside was the only option available. I did try to take food from home but then one day I sat in a park in Ghatkoper and opened my tiffin box and the next moment I felt sad. I failed to understand the very purpose of sitting there. A small park somewhere in the suburbs far away from my house. It was already past 3:00 PM and the few people in the park were having their afternoon siesta. I hurriedly eat the food and left the park. After that I never had the courage to sit in view of everybody and have my lunch.

The job was not fun neither was it paying me much. Although I did not mind the pay but at least I need to have a exciting job. Everyday it was getting up, catching a train to Dadar, then a bus to Worli, take that day sheet of calls and then off to the location. It was getting depressing.

After 12 days, I decide to quite and just 13 days old, I left my first real job. I admit I quit and I am glad I did. I had no plan whatsoever what I would do now but I was sure that I did not want to continue there.

The job had a feeling of suffocation which I had felt in my junior college. I experienced the same freedom which I felt when I left the college. It took a while for me to be back in the job market.

One year to be precise!

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To be continued……..

Note: I thought I could complete this in 2 parts but I guess it will take more.