At the height of the dot.com bubble , they said each quarter was like a year. Given the pace, given the intensity of the experience, you could easily rack up a decades worth of experience in under 3 years. Just like a dog...
Well I've been in India riding the telecom wave for the last 11 quarters. And in the first couple of years each quarter certainly felt like a year. The richness of experiences - the variations, the fluctuations, the changes - before I knew it a full 4 quarters had passed, and the old way of life seemed almost like fiction.
Weekends vanishing in endless errands and chores, days passing by sometimes without seeing another person. Spending the entire day talking to a whole host of people - feeling connected with a large community but just on Sametime - for you non-IBMers that would be Instant Messaging or Yahoo Messenger or AIM . When you actually saw them face to face - you struggled - "uhm - can't we just log on to Sametime - I seem to have forgotten how to look at a person and talk at the same time"..........
Now when I think about it, I wonder if I just had an active imagination - whether the deer grazing around the pond in the backyard were real ? whether planting petunias in the baskets around the deck was real . Did I really paint that deck with my own hands ? Did we really re-seal the driveway that summer ? Did I really ride around my yard on a John Deere tractor cutting grass ? I know I never shoveled snow - well except that one time the blizzard of 96 - do people really move their clocks forward and back with the change of seasons ? Do I really drive a car ? Did I actually drive in the winter from what was that town I lived in NJ to Syracuse and back - all by myself ?
It all sounds like stuff I must have read in the countless books I've read over the course of my life. But that is what I did for 17 years.
And yet it all seems light years away.... The last 10 months in particular have been a blur. And my dream life as the DPE of a single account feels like it was nearly 10 years ago. Contradictory as it may seem - in one moment time seems to stand still - and yet it seems to flash right by.
For example - i was thinking about the latest deal we signed. The first major hurdle is always whether or not the acquired employees got their paychecks on time. And so as I was going through my mental list of things to worry about and I wondered whether or not we had paid everyone (its a difficult job in India - cos we actually want the money to be deposited in their bank accounts - and I must write another item on banks). Then I realized that the deal was only 15 days old. Paychecks aren't due for a whole other 15 days. And yet - so much has been packed into the last 15 that it feels like we've had this account for atleast 6 months !!!
Thank God there haven't been 10 birthdays in the past 10 months !!
Is it good ? is it bad ? I haven't a clue. It just is.
No comments:
Post a Comment