Work pressures, last of Lisa project and beaches of Goa

Well, last week i mentioned that 2 of server side programmers were leaving us. Well, one of them left very amicably. The other one probably has made a dash for it but i guess he has just added to the mess of it all. if Ajay reports on time on Monday, all will be well (hopefully) but if he doesn't, it will just add to the pressures. Ajay didn't come on Thursday and there was an open bug for Sit N Go tournaments where in the losers who become observers were not being cleaned up by server. So poor chaps, they lose and on top of that they can't login forever :-) If Ajay would have been around, it should have been fixed by him. But as he wasn't, it came to me and Vijay Simha to turn it around, which we did at 10 PM. Took the whole day in fixing one bug :-) And that has been the story this whole week. Things have not progressed much even after so much slogging. It does bring down the morale and all that bullshit stuff I used to read in the OB course. 3 days of break was something that i really looked forwards to.
On Christmas, we left on a package tour. I was dead against it as I hate these package tours. They promise much but deliver so less that one starts protesting. But Meetu prevailed and so we were in that damned bus. It took 1 hour to reach a temple of Sri Vetaal and then another 30 minutes to reach Mayem Lake. We did boating there which was fun. Then we went to Vagator beach. We just had 1/2 an hour but we went on sea scooter and Kush had a terrific time. Another 20 minutes of bus drive took us to Anjuna beach where we had just 20 minutes. Another 40 mins drive took us to Fort Aguawada (or something like that) and then to Calugate beach where Kush vomited all that he had eaten. By this time I was tired and angry at this whole waste of day. I firmly believe that if you really want to enjoy you have to give time and so no more just covering the points for me. If you decide to go to the beach, at least spend some good time over there. If you want to go to a place, give it some time to explore it. Otherwise it is just plain waste of time. On the plus point, all the 3 beaches were great so may be one of these days we will head over to one of them and spend some time :-)
Today I received an email from Jagdeep that Lisa project is over and done with. It brought back some happy memories and some really bad ones. I do miss the comraderie that we all shared for that project. It was a happy team and we really enjoyed a lot. I left it on a very acrimonious note and I still hate my managers in that team. For me Lisa project was over the day I moved to Motorola.
So, what can i expect next week? more work, of course, but some of it will be managerial. I will be implementing the whole new tracking process for the product team and that will take some time. I will have to learn the poker server code which will be another very challenging activity. Should be fun. The team has accepted me as their own and they have started respecting me. From here, things can proceed in only 1 way - more fun and more comraderie. I hope I can recreate a team like Lisa here. Then it will be really an achievment. Imagine in a short span of 5 years, creating a great bonded team, enjoying their work as well as each other's company. So God help me :-)

good to see the back of this week

One of the most hectic and frenetic week has just passed. It was a week where in there was a lot to do and there was so little time to complete them. Add to that 2 recalcitrant workers who have put in their papers and who don't want to stretch, 1 boss who doesn't want to take a NO for an answer and you have a potboiler, albeit rather common in this part of the world. The target seemed innocuous initially, run the updated shill server and run the tournament on Rounders. Well, the shill server ran fine here and then on the d-day when it was uploaded on the live server, it crashed, froze tables and hung the game. Wow !!!! Then the Rounders tournament... every time we ran it we ran into a new issue. it almost became a joke, well actually a very bad one, reflecting the way earlier people treated this code. Anyways, when the shill server crashed on live server, I presumed there would be trouble, but nothing, not even a whimper. I couldn't figure that out initially, but then i learnt that VijayD and AjayN are both leaving and soooo, there was no point in giving them a dressing down, you see and I am fairly new to this code so giving me a dose won't help the matters either :-)
Well, the good news is that tournament on Rounders worked great. We achieved what LokeshK and his team couldn't. Lokesh had even gone on the records saying the task is unfeasible. Well, so much for that forecast :-)
Meetu has become a fan of Raaz pichle janam ka, where in a volunteer is made to undergo past life regression so that he or she revisits his/her old life and the expert seeks to find answers to questions that the volunteer might have had. To be very frank, most of the stories seem to be conjured up, work of the feverish mind. The volunteer seem to have already crafted the story and he/she just retells it. So far I have not found any observation worth remembering from this show but one has to keep an open mind.

Prodigal employee and fraudulent customers

Well, if the last week was strange, this week started on a very surreal note. Amit, who had been fired last week, walked in at 9:30 along with boss. Well, well, the prodigal employee was back. Or was he? Monday and Tuesday were spent in watching his antics as he started throwing his weight around, shouting at people, intimidating some, browbeating others. It was both hilarious and nauseating simultaneously, comical and infuriating rolled into one. Add to that the drama enacted by Arin when Amit was taking a longggggg break. Arin was seen blabbering, shouting loudly, being obnoxious and once Amit came in, he went straight to enacting the nice persona. Talk about integrity and he is the living epitome of it !!!!! Oh, what surreal fun !!!! But it was too good to last :-) Amit walked out of office on Tue at 4 PM and rode straight into the sunset, never to come back (we all really hoped and prayed for that). The next day was spent in high anticipation. Will he come back? Won't he come in today? What will happen now? Well, Amit hasn't come in as yet and so has been marked as Employee Missing In Action. Anybody who knows anything about him is most welcome to share the news with us here. We just want to believe that he is settled where ever he is and that he won't come back to haunt us again. Oh, you ever elusive mental peace, how I beseech you?
On Friday evening, we discovered a customer who was defrauding us on a pretty regular basis. Of course there is a bug in poker server and this guy just stumbled upon it. And once he figured it out, he started milking in a very frenzied manner. By the time it was discovered that this guy was doing something funny, he had taken out 12K. Once we figured out the modus operandi, the account was requested to be blocked for the time being. Some 2 weeks ago, 3 players had colluded and committed a fraud of Rs 3.1 lakh again on the poker table. So, that's the next high priority item for now. Fix all the bugs related to money asap.

movies, work and long meeting

I watched the movie Ajab Prem ki... recently and I loved the movie. The story is third rate, but the presentation is very very good. Be it the characters, settings, script, actors slipping easily into their characters, or the combination of all these, the movie watching experience was ultimate. some of the scenes were hilarious. And I really really loved Ranbir Kapoor. Amazing screen presence who gives all to the shot being filmed, he should be here for a long time. I also watched Kurbaan and I hated the movie. Apart from the terrorists being hailed as heroes and the movie defending their evil acts, the main actors could not do justice to their roles. I think it was because of director. Sample this. The terrorist gets hit. His estranged wife, who was shown to hate his presence, suddenly becomes caring and then in a bid to appease god, starts praying in a muslim manner while she was shown to be a hindu. bahut hi ghaitya movie :-(
so, watch ajab prem ki gazab kahani and avoid kurbaan.
On work front, I managed to make really really big strides, so that the reconnection thing should be wrapped up in 2-3 days. So much for casino. After Amit left, I was given the charge of poker too. Had 2 meetings with concerned people. Turns out that code changes are almost done. Review has to be done and testing has to be performed. So the next week looks packed. But these projects are moving rapidly towards maintenance mode. Let us see what comes once we reach that stage.
On Friday, I was called in for a meeting. The original purport was to share the estimate of work to be done that Amit was doing. So i assumed 10 minutes at the most. the meeting went on for 3 hours. we touched upon many topics, from the next steps to short term plans, the interest shown by clients. I learnt a lot many things that day about the company and the vision of boss, came out really tired but very very impressed. When you know that the owner has a vision and the commitment to go after that vision, it really puts one's mind at ease. You know that there will be days of struggle ahead, but once you know that there will be someone to back you all the way, you suddenly stop fearing and start believing.

disconnection, reconnection and one firing

This week has been one of the most absurd week that I ever witnessed in my entire career. It all started inconspicuously enough. I had to finish the reconnection related stuff. I had done some changes for handling duplicate login issue which was now clashing with reconnection related changes. On Monday, I was 1/2 an hour late and I was summoned by boss. I later found that boss had reached office at 9:30 and was going thru all the entry records. Amit had walked in at 10 and put in a time of 9:45, which was caught and the perpetrator publicly questioned. On Tuesday, Amit walked in the morning and walked out in another hour or so. Why, you would learn in a little while. On Tuesday, boss walked in at 2 PM to check on who had got late after lunch. I had made it on time :-) But there was no work post lunch. Every one had to lend hands to dismantle and rearrange things. At 5 PM, I was called in for a meeting. I learnt then that Amit has been fired, not because he was incompetent but because he had referred boss as "upparwala" and that he had refused to work unless his salary was paid, which was really strange because the boss had promised to pay salary by 3rd of month. Then I heard a long list of transgressions on how Amit would come late every day, how he has taken a leave of 54 days in 5 months, how he would take leave w/o informing everyone. Basically a nightmare for the manager, who had turned a loose cannon and every one had suffered and how. Anyways, on Wed, my changes were still not working and Uttkarsha told me that it was her last day. Just like that, no inkling about that. Anyways, around lunch hour, someone started howling and there was complete bedlam in the office, with everyone running out the backdoor only to be kicked inside by boss who was handling things over there. What was happening? The case turned out to be a rude answer by Jayesh to Radha's question who got so terrified by Jayesh's threat of escalating things that she started crying and howling. Well, what did I do? I calmly walked out of office and went home for lunch :-0 By the time I returned, normalcy had returned. At 4 PM same day, I got out of office to take a break. Vivek came outside and coolly informed me that he has been given a notice of 15 days to prove himself or to pack things out. I chose not to react at all. On getting no reaction, Vivek got infuriated and informed that in 2-3 months, I will become the target to be fired on first chance. I again chose not to react at all. By the time my break was over, I was calm and composed and I had left a very disgruntled and disoriented Vivek behind. By the time it was 7 PM, I had found the bug and solved it. Thursday is St Francis day so a public holiday in Goa. I took my family to Panjim market and then to Caranzalem Park.
And so there are still 2 days left in the week. Let us see if there would be some more strange events unfolding , some more storms brewing, some more lunacy lighting up things....