A lunch treat for a small group of 5 ladies and a gentleman( I pity the guy).
Infact he is hosting the treat and is more or less a silent spectator.
Five ladies around a table is more than enough to rock the world..
and soon all are pitching in on one topic after the other.
Now i feel i should rightly give a background sketch of the main speakers
Lady A: the classic example of a typical call center customer.
To open an excel sheet she needs clear instructions like :
At the bottom left most corner of the screen, you see a button which
says start. click on that, and you can see a big list-> choose all programs
............. even after such a detailed instruction, she would want someone
to give her a live demo of how to do it.
Lady B : was continuously on the to be thrown out list of employees
for the past 3 -4 years, who by some quirk of fate happens to be still around.
Lady C: rightly labeled as DANGEROUS- being the captain
of the blame game team in office.
Lady D: From a far off land called India
Lady E : (a number one optimist) and Gent G( The host and a true gentleman).
D, E and G are more or less silent onlookers.
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Start of Show
Lady A is pretty dissatisfied with how things are turning out at office.
They have wiped out an entire team of efficient people and replaced
them with an entirely new team.
The Old team while it existed took care of everything - Now the whole team
is new and after so many years in service, Lady A is actually expected to work !!!!!!!
A is right now learning that there is lot more things to actual work other than opening and
closing excel sheets. To Top that the last day she went back home to find her teenage child
waiting for her to prepare dinner....
A : "Oh..All these pressures at work is leaving me stressed.On top of that
last week, when i went home, my child was waiting for me to tell *** what to cook...
All the work in office, and then this at home...I badly need a stress break.."
D thinks of her Indian colleague who had to put in a normal 8 hour shift at work, go home to a baby son who had 105 degree fever, stay up with him the entire night ,cook and clean for the family and then come back to work again the following day, repeating the same schedule for over a week. Being Indian inevitably makes you end up with having another grown up baby for a husband. (For all the men who can take care of themselves-the above line was not meant for you).And unfortunately being a so called Contractor, not being entitled to any of these Stress leaves..... The poor thing apart from the occasional ribbing she did to her other lose female friends, never opened her mouth to spell STRESS...Or may be Stress has a different perspective in Indian terms ????
Lady B is worried about the fact that no one is thanking her for what she does(?????)
B: "After all the work 'we' did, no one ever came back with a Thank you note. Oh already in this difficult circumstances, it is so stressful that no one has the courtesy to tahnk you for what you do to them.."
( Leaves D wondering who the 'we' are ??? )
D: 'Ahem'( all the thoughts run helter skelter through D's mind only)..but no one usualy gets thanked for doing what they are paid to do. D thinks of herself and the lot more nameless faces in India, slogging with not so much a nod of the seniors heads in their directions, and to top that, all the little red circles, on the appraisal sheets for ' additional activities ' not done..When was the last time she got a thank you?...
While D is busy ransacking her brain, C has newer issues and concerns regarding the impending crisis in the banking sector.
C:" The present crisis is pretty bad...If recession goes on like this, will our salaries be cut? What will happen to all the mortgages. I feel 3 months salary as redundancy pay is not enough..Oh I do have sleepless nights thinking of all these.."
D thinks of the millions or rather billions of people in the great country called India, who have never had the umbrella of the government to depend on, in times of crisis. The millions of souls who would be having sleepless nights, coz tomorrow if the job is lost, it means they are out on the streets..
Thankfully at this point , lunch is served and the disussion moves on to the mundane daily aspects of life, the kids, partners and offcourse gossips about the managers.
But the conversations still linger on in D's mind long after wards.May be stress has different dimensions across continents . May be stress ,like beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. But somehow D felt, on that day, that her race was better equipped to handle the day's when sky falls down..coz they expect nothing from life..not even Please and thankyou, but continue to slog without ever thinking of taking a single stress leave.
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