A revival attempt!

It has been atleast an era since the last post appeared on this blog. To think of it, I started out by calling this an everyday life journal! Be that as it may, I am going to give this blog another shot. A revival attempt. CPR on my blogger, and on the blogging side of my brain!

When you are a Cost To Company

Maybe it is not as bad as it sounds, or maybe it is. Depends on how you look at it I guess. I once had this awesome colleague Mike, who has an uber-sense of humor. He wasn’t really crazy about the work culture in that company then (and he was not alone). And of course everything that transpired in there was mocked to no end. To quote M, he had termed all of us employees as “paycheck stealers”, because that’s how we were made to feel for a while, under a certain management team. Things worked out for the better there, so we were no longer paycheck stealers and transformed to ummm…well, valuable employees!

Anyway, in the Indian corporate world lingo, you are a cost to company, or CTC when you join them. That’s the esoteric term for your compensation if you hadn’t guessed already. When you join a company here, your compensation is quoted in total CTC. That includes your base comp plus various other whatevers.

Just sounds so weird, no? Just to make it even, maybe we should introduce a CTPL, Cost To Personal Life, to be estimated and put in black and white for every employee. Values could range from angry spouse, stressed out spouse, in some cases not being able to find a spouse (!), kids turning weirdos, estranged family, premature health issues, divorce, to all of the above plus some more. This world is supposedly a two way street, ain’t it?

Now, let’s take a stab at drawing the connection between CTC and CTPL. I think they should be directly proportional to each other; the higher you Cost To Company, higher is the Cost To your Personal Life as well. Fair deal in a mad, mad, mad world!

What’s your take on the term CTC?

New found jazzy jargon

This is going to be a little hard to explain, methinks. Let’s see how I do it. I picked up something from a Kannada movie I accidentally landed upon, while super-fastly channel browsing a couple of days ago. I think, the name of the movie was “Road Romeo” and it had a couple of feckless looking guys (and girls) toiling about on the streets making sundry annoying jokes and conversations.

The next scene I saw (okay, I wasn’t really watching the movie, so just humor me here) was a puny looking funny haired girl slapping a punier looking boy with even funnier hair and a ridiculous beard (and I remember thinking he was dressed like Donald duck), much to the hoo-ha’s of curious onlookers, men and women, who exchanged funny looks and kept shaking their heads and making funny gestures at the slap action. Okay, now that I have set the stage, let me move on to the dialogs. “Laav Sacess”, the girl was saying over and over again while the boy continued to cry like a little school girl (and the onlookers continued their act like a bunch of robots). I tried to grasp the dialog and the context while still wondering about “Laav Sacess” and this phrase continued onto the next couple of scenes. I then realized, Love Success meant that a dating couple landing up tying the knot. The dialog in Kannada goes “namma laav sacess aaaageee agathe”, which means “we will land up marrying”.

Then what does “Laav Unsacess” mean? Well, no marriage happens in the end. Duh!

Are you licensed?

It’s been a while, no? Whatsup? Things have been super hectic around here, but that’s nothing new.

I have been wanting to blog about a varied set of topics, but being so hard pressed for time, just didn’t get to it. But, a phone conversation I had a few minutes ago was so interesting that I had, had, had to write about it.

So a certain broadband provider who gives us access to the holy internet had something “urgent” to do apparently, so they have been calling home when I have been at work. Finally, I called this guy back and he said that they had to install anti-virus software on my home laptop. Go on, I said, because I have a good reliable one already and I didn’t see the point of installing something else. Initially, I wasn’t all that into this conversation because I thought it was some free mandatory thing they had to do. But, no! This dude tells me that I have to pay for it and he has been calling because they have a discount on the software. I tell him that I already have Norton installed and I am quite happy with it and didn’t want to go with something else. His next statement: “but, this will be licensed and yours is pirated.” And I go “WHAT? Why do you think I have a pirated copy of Norton?” and he asks me, “You actually paid for it? What about your OS? Did you pay for it too?”

I’m having so much fun!