Of office banters

humour

“Congratulations on your anniversary!” said the email. It was signed by my manager.
In the bygone days, so the elders tell me, when you hit an anniversary at work, your boss’s secretary bought a thoughtful gift and your boss would present it to you in a team gathering. This was probably followed by a lunch with the whole team, a few kind words, and a lot of hand shaking. One felt proud, displayed the gift in a prominent place at work or home, and really felt energised.

But that was then, and this is now! I read through the email, and understood that my boss was happy that I had completed so many years with the company and wished me all the best. But that came from an email id named do-not-reply@mycomp any.com!

A bit disappointed, I broached the subject with my boss… had he send this email? He, amidst hundreds of mostly useless emails that he needs to read through and respond, had no clue what I was asking about! He is hassled by calls way outside of the human waking hours, so he needs to be reminded by an automated system from another part of the world.

That is the source of the email — our “anniversary celebration” portal. Obviously outsourced to a third party for the cheapest price, the portal keeps track of all the anniversaries and sends out reminder emails.

They must have had some fairly unskilled programmers, I must say — because, my work anniversary was February 10. But the reminder showed the date as October 2. It took me only a few seconds to realise that this was the typical date format confusion — anniversary was written as 10/2/2014, the programme interpreted it as “month-date-year”.

I logged into the anniversary portal. I was greeted with a “standard” global list of gifts. Not something that I really wanted. Egged on by my wife, I chose a big serving bowl; nothing else in the list of standard gifts looked interesting.

I was thrilled by the fact that this fairly useless gift was being shipped from halfway across the globe to me, the shipping cost probably higher than the cost of the product.
Days passed as I anxiously waited. An email arrived from the vendor stating that they regretted that the said item was out of stock and they expected to get the item in another two weeks. They were making arrangements to import the item using the ‘rapid shipping’ route so that they received the stock quickly.

After a month’s wait, the gift was shipped from the land of the bald eagle. It travelled by air on an expedited shipping request. After the customary delay with the Customs Department at Bengaluru airport, it finally landed at my doorstep. Imagine my excitement! A fairly large box, with packing stuffing that weighed more than the item it was trying to protect, was delivered.

I opened the box — and there it was! My coveted anniversary gift. As I unpacked, a printed slip fell off from the container. I picked it up. It said, “Made in India”.