All In a Day’s Work

My workday starts at night. At 6:30 p.m. to be precise, because that is when I wake up after a long afternoon of sleep. I take a nice hot shower, dress, and go downstairs for breakfast. Well, actually the first meal of my day is dinner, at 7:00 p.m. (See previous message for description of breakfast, see this picture for image of breakfast.)

And something I learned yesterday: one evening I went to open my yogurt (“Fruit and Dahi”) only to find that the foil protective lid was peeled back. Ick, it was open! So I just put it down on my plate and finished breakfast. Then yesterday it happened again, so I brought it to the attention of the maitre d’. “Yes, of course, sir. Our chef does that.” I said incredulously, “He does?” “Why, certainly. He wants to make sure that the yogurt is OK, so he opens it. If it looks good, he folds the lid back down and you get it served to you. But don’t worry, sir, no one has touched your yogurt.” He must have noticed my misgiving look, because he brought me another, fresh and unsealed, yogurt. Such is personal attention to quality control in India!

Another breakfast factoid: the coffee steward always comes with three round pots of coffee: one regular, one decaffeinated, and one with hot milk. I mean, hey, who wants cold cream in their hot coffee?

Well, this work-themed message is turning out to be more about food than it is about work. Just one more food fact: Brian and I ate in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant the other night before work. Very exquisite, including the tea pot that the waitress used to pour our hot tea. It looked exactly like my grandmother’s long-spouted watering can.

Now, back to work. Breakfast/dinner/whatever is over, so I go upstairs to my room to brush my teeth (rinse with bottled water, NOT with tap water) grab my briefcase and ID badges, and get downstairs to be picked up by Osman. (Pictures of my hotel room next week?)

Osman is our driver. At first I had figured, “Driver? What do I need a driver for? I have driven in Paris; I can drive anywhere.” HA! Silly me. I am SO glad we have Osman. He is a Hertz employee and is contracted by BellSouth to drive the American employees to and from the building every day. He has been a driver for nineteen years and is a master at the art of squeezing between trucks and busses and cars and autotaxis and bicycles and people… and the occasional cow. He can maneuver quite well in the craziest of traffic.

He drops us off at the Cyber Pearl building just 20 minutes later. Some evenings I gave out the window of his little car at the passing scenery, and some evenings I lay my head back and try to relax on the way there. It’s amazing, what you can’t see hurtling toward you can’t hurt you!

We are contracted by IBM to work at a BellSouth call center that is managed by Nipuna Services. The employees are all young Indians, 20-30 years old. Few are married, and few are over 40, but all are excellent workers and desire to learn.

We teach eight-hour classes six days a week: Tues/Wed/Thu and Fri/Sat/Sun. The trick is that they run from 9:30 p.m. in the evening until 6:30 a.m. the next day. It is night when we arrive, and the sun is just coming up when we leave. After work, Osman picks us up, we go back to the hotel for breakfast, and then go to bed until it is time to get up in the late afternoon/early evening. Now doesn’t that just make sense?

:)

There are about 35 people in each class, and this message has several pictures of the first three “batches” as they call them. They are the folks who answer the phone when you call the 1-800 toll free number for BellSouth residential DSL problems. Their names are Praveen, Durshyant, Meena, Mukesh, Ram, Roshik, Vashmi, and Raja… but on the phone they use names that Americans can pronounce, like Peter, Bill, Ajax, Mary, Fred, Sherrie, Johnny, and Roger!

Even before the end of Day One we are good friends. We have lots of information to communicate, and do so by lecture, demonstration, hands-on exercises, and group activities. And we give out little prizes for the best answers. Everyone (including the trainers) has a great time.

The call center is on the fifth floor of a modernistic building in HITEC City, a high-tech center here in Hyderabad, a very large city in India that has proudly nicknamed itself “Cyberabad.” There are lots of call center employing lots of young college graduates. They take jobs here and are able to help support their nuclear families and build a better India for tomorrow’s children. And speaking of tomorrow, they just announced plans to build a microchip fabrication plant here, AND a sixty-story building downtown… the tallest in all of India. Hyderabad certainly has something to be proud of.

Well, that is enough for now. Food and work in one posting. What could be better?