I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.
- Douglas Adams
The Salmon of Doubt
The Salmon of Doubt, of course, is a posthumously made compilation
of stuff from Douglas Adams’ laptop. So, this quote was simply lying around
somewhere on his hard drive, waiting to be found. I have always hated
deadlines. I hated them in school, I despised them in college and I have absolutely
loathed them at work.
But deadlines are the sole reason I got any work done at all
during the past 25 years.
Yes, I have always made my point in a roundabout fashion. All
I am trying to say is that it has been 25 years for me in the workforce, except
for a brief 3-day period when I was between jobs.
In the June of 1996, just after I had finished my masters
project viva-voce, I received a letter at my hostel room asking me to join on
the 1st of July. There were four other classmates. We all landed up
fresh-faced and excited at the brand new building on Trinity Circle.
When I think back at it, I remember the HR person calling my
name out. I turned around to respond and then suddenly it was still the 1st
of July but of 2021 and I was on a MS-Teams call in my home office, with my daughter
watching her Netflix show outside the room!
How did all that happen in a jiffy?
I have stuck to two organizations during this time: one for 16
years and a month and now another for a month short of 9 years, all the while
when – apart from deadlines – people also whooshed past me endlessly from job
to job to job.
That doesn’t mean I was ever stuck on a single piece of work
for more than a year or two. My roles kept changing, briefly getting more
generic and then getting more specialized. I measure growth in terms of
learning and doing new and different things, and by that gauge, I never stopped
growing. It was never learning and doing though. It was always doing, failing
and learning. Somehow, I managed to cling on fast enough during those failures
to convert them into learnings.
I have no doubt I caused varying degrees of heartburn to bosses and subordinates
along the way, but I would like to believe that I came good on a few occasions
as well.
On one hand I ponder about enough being enough. What is this 20th
century concept of a 9-5 job anyway? (SW jobs have been more like 8-11 on
regular days). On the other hand, if I have managed 25 years of each upcoming
deadline inspiring me, what’s a decade more after all?
Onwards and upwards on the procrastination ladder!
I like work, it fascinates me. I
can sit and look at it for hours.
- Jerome K. Jerome
Three Men in a Boat.
No comments:
Post a Comment