FML

I think the reason deadlines are called deadlines is because they turn the people working on deadlines into Zombies. People working on deadlines have no social life. They don’t log in to facebook, don't read newspaper and come to office with a mood to kill their boss. The only thing on the mind of the people working on a deadline is work. This turns the employees working on a deadline temporarily into workaholics which is a good thing for the company and bad for the people interacting with the Zombies in office.

It is a well known rule of management that for better management people must work in teams and for a cheerful atmosphere in office some people who are expert in giving unwanted, irrelevant and stupid comments must be hired and allowed to interact with other employees. The expert commentators being hired to reduce tension in office try to be funny by enlightening the Zombies with their expert comments. This leads to the situation where you will find someone laughing on his own jokes and the other person in the conversation with a look on his face that he wants to jump on the expert, bite him and turn the expert into a Zombie like himself. Don’t blame management for it. It is a well known problem associated with Zombies. They have no sense of humor.

I told you that working on deadlines is a bad thing. However, there is something which is worse that than working on a deadline. It is working on a deadline that doesn’t belong to your team.

For the last two days I am working on a deadline that doesn’t belong to my team. The deadline belongs to a team that is headed by a Very Senior Manager (VSM). The VSM being a Very Senior Manager is working on more than one project and has asked me to do some work that she is supposed to do. Since it is a request from a VSM I cannot say your deadline is not my problem and have to work on the deadline.

Today I received an email from VSM that she has been checking the work done by me. The email started with Hello Abhishek and told me that she is extremely impressed by my work. The quality of my work is awesome and I have done few things which she might have overlooked. I read the email, then read it again, decided that I am taking the print out of this email to my next appraisal meeting and then instead of replying to the email went back to work.

After lunch time I received an email from our COO.  The email was a reply to the email send by the VSM to me. The email didn’t start with Hello Abhishek. In fact, it didn’t even have a single line. It had just one word. The word was ‘Great’. I read the email by the COO and immediately checked the CC field. I found out that the email send by VSM to me was marked to few people in senior management.

If I had read the CC field before I would have replied to the email with a thanks you note, a smiley or just few lines like - it is is my pleasure to work with you and I am always ready to work on deadlines because I am a dedicated employee and also I love being a Zombie. However, now I am an arrogant employee who doesn't have the common courtesy of saying thanks when someone appreciates his work. Don’t blame it me. I am working on a deadline and hence turned into a Zombie and as you would have learnt by watching several Hollywood zombie movies, Zombies don’t reply to emails.

To sum up

Every dog has its day. I had my day and totally ruined it because I was not a dog on that day but a Zombie. Also that, I love the element of surprise in my life. Just when I think things cannot get any worse, I find out they can.