Ø Working continuously for 33 hours
Ø Harassing a women J
Ø Not being allowed to take an international flight; sent back from the airport
Ø Sipping the strongest coffee, ‘Bika’, of my life in Lisbon!
If the above lines sounds interesting, then don’t read any further, the rest of the post is not that happening J
If you have decided to read further, then let me tell you that this post is about a series of screw ups that happened few days back.
Let me first give you a brief background that led to all the screw ups.
The butt of all the screw ups:
It all started when my colleague forwarded me an email, which was sent to him by a lady, who happened to be a colleague and a good friend of my colleague’s wife, when my colleague’s wife was perusing her masters in some reputed college in Germany. Read the previous line again if didn’t understand the relationship, or just chuck it, you don’t really need to understand it. So now coming to the email, essentially, this lady, let’s call her Anna from Lisbon, not quite comfortable using real names, wanted to find out if we could provide some patent strategy consulting, and she sent a request for proposal. And I was asked to make the proposal, and I also love doing it! So I happily made a proposal, which in my opinion was kickass. And this, my friends marked the beginning of all the screw ups.
The first one:
For some reason, I think we Indians get really excited when we get to work for a client who is not based in India, even though many time we just make the same amount of money working for an Indian client. And in this case I was no different, very excited, I made a nice proposal, but with a small assumption, and with this small assumption I would make an ass out of myself and a few others, literally, at a later date. But guess what, as part of this project I would get to go to Portugal.
Now coming to the assumption part, it’s just that I kind of under estimated the number of hours that would be required to complete the project. The extent to which I underestimated is something I prefer keeping it to myself; the true numbers would put me in deep shit, not that I am not used to getting into deep deep shit, but I rather not this time. But when I was preparing the proposal I was really confident that I could complete the project “single headedly” in that many hours. This made up the recipe for the second screw up story!
The second screw up:
My boss kept asking me if I need more people to work on the project, but I said - NO, I can handle it; see, that’s called CONFIDENCE ;-)! Off late, confidence is something that is running a lot in my blood. However, since my boss was offering to help in the project (this is how I would like to put it), I said if he wishes to, he may take a small portion of the project and the rest will be managed by me, and he agreed to it. Later, one fine day when we initiated the project, it didn’t take too many hours for the reality to strike. The project was huge, in my words, it was fuckin huge, but you know what, I was confident! I told my boss not to worry I can still manage to complete the project within deadline “if I stopped working on other projects”. He agreed to it, as asked to just put a big full stop to all other projects and just concentrate on this project. That’s exactly what I did, I scrapped everything else and started working only on this project. And then reality struck again! This time it took a few days for it to happen. My boss (I was still in denial) realized that just the two of us won’t be sufficient to complete the project in time. So my boss asked to pull in a few more people. However, I kind of still believed that we could complete the project in time without taking any additional help (confidence confidence), but since my boss was asking me to include a few more people (this is again how I would like to put it), just to keep him happy, we included two more, Som and Vikram (real names). Poor innocent guys, their life was about to change! And they had no clue :P Now we all started working together, only to be struck by another reality. Working 8 or 9 hour a day would take us nowhere, and by now my confidence gaya that thel leney (confident had gone to get some oil). We had to gear up and we did! We worked non-stop, days after days. I remember there was a day on which we didn’t go back home, worked continuously for some 30 odd hours continuously. Now we knew we were getting closer to completing the project and we did in the end! While all these things were happening there was a parallel screw up that was taking shape.
The parallel screw up
All the countries have a very annoying concept of letting you into their country if you have something called, yes you guessed it right, the “visa”. So, even I had to get one to go to Portugal, and I applied for one through a consultant. In the Portugal embassy website that had informed that it would take some 10 to 15 working days to provide a visa, but when I applied there were some 7 working days left to the day I was supposed to fly. But again, confidence, I know things will always workout for me, so I was pretty confident they would give me a visa in some 5 days. But this belief of mine was about to be tested, two days left to fly and there is no news about my visa from the consultant. So my brother, instead of relying of the consultant called up the embassy, and they said that I have to give some declaration to them before they issue the visa. It meant I had to courier a hard copy of this signed delectation to Delhi, after which they would issue the visa and later courier the visa to me. It implies that I wouldn’t get the visa in time to fly. So this “procedure” of the visa office didn’t quit fit into my plan J. So I had to do something different, I called up the embassy to sort of strike a “deal”, after all they are also human beings and human beings can be convinced. In short, I wanted the embassy to accept a fax copy of the declaration and issue a visa. To convince them I called up, followed up, buttered them up, and used a lot of emotional blackmailing, among other things and got the work done. However, during this episode of convincing, the lady issuing the visa made me listen to a few kind words, I will give a gist of it:
You are harassing me
You can’t tell me what to do
I am not your servant
By the way the embassy closes at 4.30 in the evening I guess, and I was able to convince them to wait till 6.00 for my consultant to collect the visa, they waited and that fact gives me pleasure, SADIST!!! And in the end I collected my visa at the Bangalore airport 3 hrs before my flight.
I was really hoping that this would be the last twist in the tale, however destiny had other plans, yet another parallel screw up was taking shape!
Yet another parallel screw up
I blame the fuckin Brits for this screw up, they think too highly of themselves, even though they have not been able to win a world cup in a sport they invented :P Well, some would say I am wholly responsible for this screw up, but I would like blame the Brits for this. To give you a background, this screw up has to do with the tickets to Lisbon. The office wanted to book tickets, but like any smart ass I had other plans. I wanted to complete work in Lisbon and travel around for some more days. Hence, I informed that I will book the tickets on my own and they could reimburse me later. But I had not booked the ticket till the nth moment. The catch was, I was not sure for how many days they would issue me the visa, and I had wanted to book the tickets after receiving my visa. But as it turned out, I received the visa the day I was supposed to fly. So, I basically decided to take risk, and assumed that they would issue the visa for more number of days than what I had initially asked for, and they did! I booked the tickets before receiving the visa - Schengen visa (valid in the whole of Europe) in British airways – Bangalore – London – Lisbon – London – Bangalore. With this ticket booked, I went to the airport with my visa. I showed my passport and the ticket to the lady at the British Airways check-in counter. She nicely handed over a sheet of paper, it appeared to have some law related stuff. Essentially, it was a print out that essentially said that England doesn’t consider Schengen visa even though these buggers are part of the European union, that’s crazy in my opinion! Nevertheless I was sent back. But in the end my boss felt that it was important for me to come to Lisbon and asked to not worry about the money and book the next available flight, and I did, thinking (in kannada) yaar appandhu yeenu hoogbeku (Crude English translation – Whose father what goes) I took a flight to Lisbon via Frankfurt. Finally landed in Lisbon and got introduced to my new addiction – BIKA – the bomb (A Portuguese coffee that is really really really strong!)
After Bika strangely life became normal J
