The past few weeks have turned this past time into somewhat of a mild and lasting anxiety attack. It is not so much the ‘what if it never comes,’ it is more of the ‘what after it doesn’t’ bit that has been keeping you up. We are; off course,  still talking of the appraisal letter. And it is imminent,  not by the look of things or via grapevine but by the sheer date on the calendar.

Rumors about the company selling off and half the work force being laid off have stopped amusing people. Latest word out on the street is that this year there won’t be no letters at all. Not in the historical sense of the word anyway. The future has arrived and in the future there are no fits and fights, only bits and bytes. So the condensation of a year’s drudgery, of twelve month’s labour, of four seasons of farming will be a 10 kb pdf file that will quietly pop in to your inbox and set you up for another twelve months of the same.

They will take away from you the one thing you always thought you would have; cribbing. You know cribbing won’t change what is already in print. You know the maths of it only allows a few lucky slaves to beat inflation every year. You know in the larger scheme of things, everyone is expendable. You know the house always wins. But when all else fails, atleast you had the consolation of crying your heart out to Head Slave. Of verbalizing your dissatisfaction. Call it the human touch, if you will. And with Head Slave you can use the word human only lightly.

When you least expect it, HS calls you into his cabin and asks you to have a seat. You are trying to stifle the remainder of hope still bubbling in your gut. What follows is another round of ‘It’s been a tough year for all of us,’ and ‘I really tried…’

At least they did not sink to the new low of sterile e-mail exchange. Even HS is expecting some outburst from you, bracing himself in fact for the one time in the year when you can let unbridled emotion take over forced etiquette.  But you just don’t’ feel up for the dance.

You collect your much-awaited letter, say, ‘Whatever. ..’ to HS and walk out. You do look at the letter afterwards.  You sit down with a calculator hoping the numbers will add up to something that justifies your earthly existence. They don’t, not in this economy. Logic is a stranger to hope. But the two have to catch up sometime. Sometime before you are too old to dream and too young to give up. Sometime before you have more yesterdays to look back upon then tomorrows to look forward to.

And if that time never comes it ain’t your fault. It never is. There is always a market slowdown, office politics or even Karma to blame it on. And if all else fails there is always plain old bad luck. But the loss is only yours.

- J.

You just can’t take any more of this drivel. But you have to. That is what employment is all about. Getting people to do the kind of things that no one would do unless he is paid for it.

If you were a beast of burden you could expect the numbness of repetition to help you as an anaesthetic. But unlike a quarry, a desk job can throw anything your way. The only constant is your compensation, for lack of a better word. Today, this anything is proof-reading. It has landed out of nowhere on your desk. And nowhere is precisely where you are getting with it.

Fellow slaves and Head slave himself reinforce the criticality of the task that has been assigned to you:

‘You know these documents are going to travel half way across the world?’

‘That thing is gonna go aaaaall the way to the top!’

‘It’s all up to you now champ.’

…and a couple of other salvos aimed at you do little to prepare you for the blitz ahead. Sure you can take one for the team. But the word one is oft abused, from ‘it will only take one minute’ to ‘just give me one more chance’.

The onslaught on your senses is overwhelming. It is not only the grammar and syntax but also the who gives a rat’s ass attitude towards alignment and downright lack of imagination that gets to you:

‘…is now available in delicious international taste’

‘…so that you have a sleep at nighttime’

and

‘Say yes to life! Again and again.’

You can’t be paid enough for this. If you had a dime for every time you have said that, you would have taken an early retirement. But unfortunately, dimes are not easy to come by. Only your monthly salary is. And it comes regardless of the amount of brain damage incurred. So it makes sense to get by with minimum cognitive impairment.

It is a big step to take. You have to convince the purist inside you that is ok to let sub-standard work pass from your inbox as long as it is approvable. That the world won’t end if you lower your standards to the level of your remuneration. That pretty much no one might notice. That the only person you need to convince is yourself.

You take a deep breath, say your prayers, ask forgiveness of Dickens, your fifth grade English teacher and the Queen, you hit spell check and call it a day.

Life is definitely for living. It is the means of livelihood that are a killer.

- J.

Learnt, borrowed or forwarded, wisdom is everywhere these days. From a blonde girl’s t-shirt to your boss’s e-mail sign-off, from a coffee mug to a random tweet. Even fellow slaves have caught the message bug, their mundane cubicles proclaiming life’s profound truths. ‘Success always hugs you in private but failure always slaps you in public’ says one. ‘To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people merely exist,’ says another. Then there are the outright rebellious kinds: ‘Silence does not always mean yes. It means…

You have always been suspicious of anything that is in abundance from credit cards to carbohydrates. So you have kept your rowing station practical and without frills. But some wisdom would have helped today, even a tit-bit. For you sure feel stupid today.

You ought not to. Today was a day you got more work than on most days. Concurrently, today also turned out to be a day you questioned your existence the least. It sure took a lot of tunnel vision to finally finish that confidentiality agreement that looked like it would never end. It took that and a lot of saying no. No to taking coffee breaks, no to seeing that funny video everybody has been forwarding and no to answering the perpetually blinking phone. And it would have all been worth it too. All the big effort would have been worth it if you had only pressed one small button. But you didn’t. And now it’s all gone. Into a black hole of disappointments never to return.

Relieved that you had finally wrestled the document to the ground and annoyed at the number of different versions you had created in the process, you go on a deleting spree, saying ‘Do not save’ to anything that pops up, including your day’s work. It takes some time for the stupidity of it all to sink in. When it does, you are so cross you kick everything in sight. You come to close to smashing the computer too. But if you were that impulsive, you wouldn’t have lasted this long in this job.

So you sit back, take deep breaths and try to figure out why you were born. Colleagues drop by, some sympathize with your sob story; others can’t stop laughing, especially after looking at the harrowed look on your face. You know you should sleep over it to keep yourself from killing someone. And if you can’t laugh at yourself, you should at least take some positive out of this guffaw. So you take a size-40 font print-out to finally join the message band-wagon. It says:

Ctrl+S

To err is human, to save is divine

-          J.

So you toiled on, in a race you didn’t want to finish and a match you didn’t want to win. And they graded you, year after year, till you grew indifferent to it. It is all theory you said. In reality, in practical terms, in the outside world, you will do well or well enough.

Well, you are in the outside world now. And guess what, you still get graded. Only now it is called performance appraisal. The same people still seem to win, the nerds, the surds and the herds. And instead of candy, you get money, or less of it.

It is no one’s fault really. Mediocrity exists to serve a very important function that of highlighting what is superior. And it’s all good, nice, clean and impartial through the cold logic of mathematics.

As you know by now, it is that time of the year again. It is that time of the year when all the trials, tribulations and turmoil of the past 365 days will be rewarded. They will be rewarded in full with a single letter. In most cases, this single letter will be B+. Coz you are not slave enough to be awarded an A and not defiant enough to be relieved of your burden.

The rumors have started already. They range from ‘everyone is going to the best damn increment of their life’ to ‘the company is going to shut shop’. The same people who always threaten to leave if they are not adjudged above average are still around and they are threatening to leave again. The same people who always walk away with the cherry are also around. And there are some new fish who still have a glint of something you may call hope.

Then there is you. Right outside Head Slave‘s cabin, trying to ascertain if that flutter in your stomach is a butterfly or reluctance to comply. Walking both worlds, committing to none. Spurned on most counts, hanging by on some. But you tell yourself, this is it! If you know you are meant to do something or rather; something else, then there is no day like today and no time like right now!

HS: Come in sport, it’s been a tough year eh?

You: (an expression that says, ‘Let’s get on with it.’)

HS: (an expression that says, ‘I will ignore that.’)

A couple of measured exchanges later HS leaves you with an A+ in your hand and a dilemma on your mind!

Looks like it is going to be another year’s purgatory before you can think of salvation. But what is one soul’s revulsion in an ocean of woe?

…Only a drop, that is what it is.

- J.

And these are only ordinary Mondays. Special days require an even greater effort at formality. You thought with the appraisal filed away, such days were gone along with best and worst they had to offer. But you had conveniently forgotten that while in employment there is always next year to plan for, to yearn for and earn for.

And this begins with goal setting. You may continue to be as misguided and random in your personal life as possible. But during office hours, everything is planned to manicured perfection. It has taken you five hours already to draft five areas that will serve as your goals. You have weighed your words more painstakingly than a miserly jeweler.  You have redone your script more times than a reclusive author with a drug problem. And you are still not sure.

The sun is about to set now. It is almost time for your alter-ego, Non-Formal Man to moonlight.

You would really like to let go, let your hair down, put your windows down and your speakers up.  But you can’t. Not as a slave. Not during office hours. Not under video surveillance. Not yet.

You have got to get this out of the way. A check with Head Slave’s Sec reveals that he will be leaving in half an hour only to return after a week.

It is now or never. With one last spell check, you are about to hit print when you realize you missed one section altogether:

Personal Goals: ­­­________________________________________________________

You stare at it for some time. Then you tilt your head and stare at it some more. Could this be a joke? Personal? Here? In the galley? Why would they possibly want to know the awfully pedestrian goals of your suburban existence?

These are tough questions. Given the paucity of time, you scribble out the first thing that comes to your mind and head for the HS’ den.

He has almost made it through the printout without as much as a batted eyelid or raised eyebrow. All the obsessing over the wordsmiting seems to have been worth it. Then, HS suddenly stops right at the end and looks up at you in bewilderment. You return the favor.

He reads out:

‘My personal goals are to put the punching bag I bought last X’mas to good use and stay off the carbs.’

And he bursts out laughing. A hideous all absorbing guffaw the likes of which you have never heard before. On several occasions he tries to explain: ‘When we say personal goals we mean…’ but he is too cracked up to finish the sentence.

To think all the obsessive compulsion lead to that blonde moment is in the least bit, bemusing, if not an outright daze. There is a little blonde in all of us. She refuses to go down no matter how hard we try to wise up. And we are all the more human for it.

- J.

You stopped putting up a fight some five minutes ago. But HS seems especially spirited today. You don’t recall having ever had as much face time with him during your entire tenure.

The third time HS asks, you are moved out of your trance.

“What about this Kaizen project sport? I haven’t heard anything about it.”

Neither have you. In fact, the last you heard about it was in last year’s appraisal. You try desperately to remember what your answer was back then. It couldn’t have been anything convincing.

Since you are already two strikes down, you shoot out the following:

“You know boss, the Kaizen project was always on my radar. But looking at our priorities, I had to let it go. I knew it would mess up my KRAs, but it was the right thing to do for the company.”

A few moments of silence follows as HS looks at you with his glasses lowered. That was some inspired hooplah!

“Tell you what sport, we still have a week to go before closing the appraisals. Why don’t you do a quick pilot on Kaizen and we will discuss again?”

Now you look at him with your glasses lowered. This is not exactly a SlavesInc. moment but you decide to go for it for the novelty of it.

The next week is spent looking high and low for anything that can pass off as Kaizen and more importantly, for something that can be rounded up in one working week. You settle for an area you know most about: attendance rolls.

Login sessions reveal that an average Slave spends three to five percent of his official time on checking, plotting and in general obsessing over his attendance records. This is more than the time expected to be allotted to real work including ‘generating new ideas’.

Being a clone of the system yourself, you know that correcting the names of the slaves on payroll can cut down much of this time. It would also mean fewer loop holes for clock-watching colleagues. But you can’t please them all.

Project in bag, it is now time for another appraisal session with HS. For once he likes what he sees:

“Nicely done sport. We are through for this year. What was that line you said…’the right thing to do for the company?’ - Brilliant! I used it myself with the man upstairs. Kaizen was part of my KRAs too you know…”

HS walks out with a pat on your shoulder and a wink in his eye. He leaves you with a higher KRA score and fewer friends than you have ever had before. Whoever said we make our own destiny was never bound by KRAs.

- J.

But that’s you. Natalie is different. She is geographically distant and dispositionally far-off. She is occupied with the person and oblivious to dictionary. She uses more exclamation marks in a week than you would have come across in a life time of reading. Time seems to be treating her well and auto-spell is her bitch.

A routine e-mail from Natalie reads as follows:

hiiiii

how have u been ??!?

Looong taime

Hey, can you send the MoM of last night’s call?

Thanks a million buddy!

C ya soooon!!

:)

What do you say to that? You have never used an exclamation mark in a formal mail and you want to keep it that way. You come close though as you feel compelled to return the rare joviality or at least acknowledge it.

What gets to you is the consistency. You may have bad days, mood swings and paper cuts. Natalie seems to be on one continuous acid trip. The same chirpiness, the same exclamation marks and the same devil may read the dictionary syntax. You have come close to slipping in a smiley in your replies. But you fear straying into an emoticon binge and check yourself.

Other times you come close to sending the following replies:

‘I am doing the same as yesterday, just like you’

‘You don’t like spell check, do you?’

And

‘On Prozac, are we?’

When the day finally arrives to talk to Natalie you are surprised to find yourself looking forward to it. You hold the receiver some distance away from your ear to buffer the sharp cries you are expecting from the other end. Instead, you hear nothing. You bring the receiver closer.

‘Hello, Natalie? Can you hear me?’

‘…yes. He…hello,’ comes a murmur in reply.

‘How are you? Its good to finally talk to you.’

‘Ye…yes. I am…good, I am good.’

What follows is one of the most queasy conversations of your life. You regret having made the call. The world seemed a better place with crazies like Natalie. Now, its just a place where typing a thought is better than living it.

She has gone back to her vibrant e-mails. But in person, she always comes across as a shadow of her inbox avatar. Now that you know the effort that can go into a putting up a smile, you will never ignore a kind word again.

- J.

This particular mail announces change in seating arrangements. No notice, no choice, just a declaration. Your new cubicular location is neatly highlighted in an excel attachment. A boxed existence as it is. Before you have time to let the gravity of this change sink in, the new occupants are already all about you, checking out the real estate they will be inheriting. If only they were this responsive to other e-mails. You suddenly feel like a broke tenant sitting on his eviction notice. The team that is to take your erstwhile place is touching and feeling everything including the chairs and the LAN cables. They only come short of feeling you up.

You realize you have to spring into action. You take a print out of your new jail cell and go about locating it. There is an air of a carnival with a potential for riot all around. Boxes are being overturned, trolleys are being mobilized, there are papers flying everywhere all in a mixture of excitement and anxiety. You know what this is. This is a mass migration. An Exodus. And if history is anything to go by, such displacements do not end well. Though this migration will happen in an air-conditioned environment with the average migrant being at least a high-school grad, crowds anywhere have the same personality, that of a crowd. And creatures everywhere are territorial, biped or otherwise.

You spot Head Slave standing by where your new rowing station seems to be. He is already swamped by a swarm of grieving migrants. You are too late. The losses are many and varied. A comfy chair, a raised partition, a wall facing your screen, a fleeting view of a rare window. Things that slaves took for granted till today, snatched away by the vagaries of company policy. Though in the modern open planar office, all work stations are the same, many external factors define the neighbor’s envy and the owner’s pride. Proximity to the pantry, the exits, the printer and distance from HS’ cabin, the washroom and the security camera decide the covetousness of a cubicle. Just like in real estate, it is all about location.

Your new place is nothing special. It seems to have a little bit of all the undesirable factors. But you fail to voice your grievance to the boss. You call it your sense of decency; others would call it a lack of fighting spirit.

Life is going to be that much more difficult now. You feel like you are on the waiting list for a train that is never going to arrive. This too shall pass though. If you stay there long enough, you can get used to hell. You have to remember that: Salvation lies within.

- J.

Enduring is just the start of it. Each year brings with it a realization of the pedestrian nature of things and the Olympian effort needed to break free of it. It is like the beginning of a sequel where what you thought was the climax turns out to be just foreplay. And like all sequels, you don’t want to have one too many, lest it starts to stink.

Between Superstorms and superstyles, the world almost ended. At least it was fun to think for a while that it would. But the best we could get was Omnishambles.

2013 will hold similar promise for both the mundane and the magnificent. There will be rickety printers, pointless meetings and machine coffee to keep you busy. There will be Mondays, multi-tasking and motivation (sic) to keep you distracted. You will find humor in new places while some of the old stuff won’t even seem funny anymore.

Greatness v/s obscurity, Open skies v/s fluorescent lighting, Freedom to fail v/s Stress to succeed. You will feel like an ant that has to move a mountain, a twig that has to resist bending in a storm, a pawn too small to matter in a system too big to fail.

There will be times when you will miss the good old ignorance, the days of clueless pursuit and nights of dreamless sleep. Innocence lost is not a big price to pay. For life begins with awareness.

2012 SlavesInc. Annual Report.

Here’s a patronizing excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 25,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 6 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

- J.

HS confirms the news:
‘Gentlemen, X’mas is upon us. And we haven’t even gotten off the ground yet with our mailers.’

‘Season’s greetings?’

‘Yes, but with coupons. Those stamps don’t come free you know. We estimate that even if 5% of customers use the coupons, the campaign would have paid for itself. Anything beyond that is profit!’

HS is clearly in love with his marketing skills. You are in doubt as to whether 5% would even open the envelope. Since you have not even had your first shot of caffeine yet, you decide to conserve your energy instead.

‘Thousands of coupons need mailing. This is not going to be easy gentlemen,’ he was being unusually honest.

‘But don’t worry. I have a plan,’ he was going quite out of his way here. ‘All of you leave whatever you doing. Whatever you are doing, just drop it. We can’t go home till all the envelopes are dispatched. No matter how late it gets, no matter how messy. The envelopes are our priority from now till X’mas Eve. ‘

And so they are. In fact, the envelopes are the closest you will get to X’mas this year. You and 4 other unfortunate slaves. You arrange yourselves in a mini assembly line: address, personalised message, signing and attaching the coupon being the steps involved. You try to imagine yourselves as little elves working round the clock to bring joy to the world. But the fact that you are peddling coupons for a hand sanitizer reminds you that you are working round the clock only because you have to and it brings you closer to the end of the month.

If targetted TV programs have taught us anything, it is that if miracles are to happen, this is the time. So you leap for a mini-miracle of your own. You urge your fellow slaves to see the envelopes as a stumbling block to holiday bliss. You try to rally them into the fastest way to finish the task at hand. But years of conditionaing gets in the way. You end up quarelling over the nuttitest of things like whether the order in which you sign the envelopes should follow seniority or whether the use of glitter pens conferring an unfair advantage?

Its 8 pm, 500 envelopes still await your attention and there is talk of complaining to HS how Mr. A took up too much space to sign his name and how Mr. B took the top spot that should have been reserved for HS himself. X’mas is pretty much written off. This is when rare inspiration dawns on you. You take the soup you have ordered and empty the contents on to the pending heap of envelopes. You make sure almost every last envelope is smeared hot’n'sour.

Before your fellow inmates find their wits to verbalize their shock you are in HS’ cabin. You tell him you tripped, you spilled the soup, there are no more envelopes left, you apologize and you leave.

You wish them a Merry X’mas and you walk out into the remainder of the evening’s magic.

Seasons are what you see on TV or read in the news. The real tempest is what’s on your mind.

- J.