A day in the life of a corporate

The day a few junior executives were called to attend and be on standby at a leaders’ meeting:

Guptajee, the pervert IT man sauntered into the conference room lazily at 9:50 am. He had the face and mannerisms of a porn star. Shirt fashioned out of pink spandex, camel coloured trousers with horizontal stripes, tight at the crotch. He smiled lustily at the juniors as he went about pulling wires and dialing some numbers on the Polycam audio conferencing equipment. A few voices sputtered on the conference call and some faceless people introduced themselves and confirmed their attendance.

While setting the stage, Guptajee squatted on the pretext of looking for something and tried to peer between the HR executive’s legs. She kicked him noiselessly. Above the conference table, a guttural sound was heard as Guptajee emerged from under, heel imprints on his fluffy cheek.

She-Man, the manly HR head entered the room and gave everyone a fake smile. She had a bulldog's jowl and biceps of Arnold S. She proceeded to summon her team to a corner to ask what the meeting was about, who was attending, what she had to speak and why it had occurred to no one that they needed to make notes for her slides.

She was followed by Bald-Patch, a bespectacled academician-turned-R&D-head who had lost his mane in his academic pursuits and thus suffered from a low self-esteem. He entered meekly, tripped on the carpet, fell flat on his face, laptop, phone and all. A few ‘be careful’ ‘easy-easy’ went around the room. He lay prostrate for a few minutes waiting for someone to help him. His juniors quickly started talking on their phones and looked busy. He got up dusting himself, apologized to everyone, settled in nervously and started making last minute changes to his presentation.

Young, arrogant Business Analyst (BA) strode in next, talking on a contraption that looked like a cross between a Tata Sky remote control and a matte black shoe, size 10. He took a seat close to where he thought the Big-Boss would sit, hardened his jaw and started giving everyone tough looks.

My Lady-Boss, the head of Corporate Social Responsibility entered panting and asked no one in particular if she was late. No one responded. She then proceeded to try various chairs in order to select the one from where she could see the screen best (she had forgotten her distance reading glasses).

The miserly Financial Advisor (FA) from down-south with a deep hatred for people and places north of Deccan came in sulking. 'Bleddy fools wasting the combeny’s money..they should be made to jemb off the building and die,' he muttered under his breath.

At that moment, all ears perked up at the sound of a pig wading in slush, moving slowly towards the conference room. It turned out to be a stuffed overnighter trolley-bag being dragged coarsely over the carpet. The Big-Boss had arrived, after traveling non-stop for the past fortnight to various countries and cities. He entered looking tired and hungry. He adjusted his glasses and started the meeting by saying – Are we ready to start?

Moobs (male-boobs), the Head of creating unprofitable New Businesses by wiping out old profitable ones entered the conference room the last. With his 42 breast size, he was considered by majority as handsome. Tall, dark and handsome, Moobs eyed a couple of ladies keenly and a couple of ladies looked back keenly at him.

She-Man stood up, smoothed her man-pants, flashed her canines and began:

“Glad everyone’s made it on time. We have a long day today and a lot of stuff to go over.”

Four people yawned, five others had watery eyes. As people secretly wiped their tears, the meeting began.

She-Man continued, “But first the ground rules. Let’s keep our laptops closed. No checking emails and messages on smartphones either. It shows utter disregard for the presenter.” 

Everyone agreed, promptly acted like they were shutting their laptops, only to keep it open at a 20-degree slant. Lady-Boss spent a few precious minutes balancing her Blackberry strategically on her thigh and started chatting.

She-Man started by talking about talent and skill gap in the labour market, employee engagement scores, our rank in the 'Great Places to Work' Survey (which was in the global top 100, from the bottom) all of which was very encouraging she said, but needed lot of working on.

This was followed by a few presentations where BA spoke strongly about everything that we were doing wrong, which turned out to be everything that we were doing. FA spoke angrily on the urgent need for cost control, austerity, travel freeze and cutting down on wasteful expenditure - at which he looked meaningfully at all of us. He shared with us a forecast of business numbers and gave each team their stretch targets. We thought of heroes from Satyajit Ray movies, broken cheeks, sunken eyes, toiling from dawn till dusk without food or water, a mere loin cloth covering our modesty, getting caned periodically on our emaciated asses, yet not reaching anywhere close to the stated stretch targets. FA finally left us with murderous looks and veiled threats of a year without bonus, increments falling south and office lunch of barley water.

At this point, Candy Bhatia, the 40-something, single, Admin Officer walked in wearing a sleeveless kurta and churidar. She was the office-fantasy. Especially, of the over-fifty, married men from West Delhi who delighted in her swaying of hips, swearing at the office boys and telling them fifty-something-men naughty jokes at lunch. She had an enviable reputation of winning 'Miss Diwali' contest each year for the last 23 years, leaving the young MBA types in their trouser-shouser with no chance of winning-shinning.

Before entering the room, Candy pulled up her assets (that had begun their downward climb since her last birthday), applied a generous dab of an oil coloured lip-gloss and smacked her lips. She entered looking like she had eaten chole-bhature for breakfast. She smiled broadly, excused herself for interrupting and led two office boys carrying coffees, teas, chocolate chip cookies and few plates of potato wafers. Before leaving, she said coquettishly, 

“Lunch to be served at 1. If you need me for enthing als, i will give service happily."

As the distraction swayed sensuously out the room, all eyes focused on the placement of the wafer plates. BA snatched the HR executive's plate. Moobs sat confidently, knowing he would get offers from all sides. Lady boss nudged me and said “Pass me the chips na. I’m staaaaarving.” Big-Boss grabbed a plate and told everyone to focus. Bald-Patch finished his presentation in double-time and raced back to his seat only to find the wafers polished off.

Next was Lady-Boss’ presentation where she exhorted everyone with flared nostrils to participate in the company’s save-the-poor-by-donating-your-salary campaign. We were taken back to the S. Ray frame in which a bare roti was snatched out of our hands to donate to the poor. Those that refused were awarded more welts on the backside.

Suddenly, her presentation and our nightmare was disrupted by a loud chuckle. Assorted giggles erupted into the air-waves. It came from the audio conference line as faceless people miles away seemed to be having a good time. As pin drop silence ensued in the room, someone faceless hushed another one and proceeded to mute the line. She-Man rolled her eyes in exasperation, Big Boss woke up from his shut-eye and FA looked like he would pour kerosene and set fire to the conference room and its contents. 

Thankfully lunch was brought in and everyone attacked the food with a vengeance.

Outside Candy Bhatia was going through a crisis of sorts. She was complaining to the receptionist that the new tailor she was trying had made her armhole bigger. Guptajee misheard armhole, took a few steps back to check Candy Bhatia from behind. At the same time, Moobs called Candy to say his 6-inch (subway sandwich) was oozing mayo and mustard while he had asked for mint and ranch. Simultaneously, FA threatened to go on a hunger strike if he didn’t get his dose of curd-rice. Candy Bhatia hurried to fire the hell out of Subway and scour Haryana for authentic curd-rice.

Post lunch, it was the turn of Moobs to present. He waxed eloquent about value innovation and blue ocean strategy to create an uncontested market space. After 45-min of talking strategy, when no one showed any sign of life, Moobs wrapped up passionately:

“Let's dream of going where we haven’t yet! Let’s DO the Blue Ocean!”

I dreamt of doing the Moobs in a blue ocean. My reverie of silvery beaches and frolicking with Moobs in warm frothy water was rudely interrupted by an elbow in my ribs. Lady-Boss hissed in my ear.

“Why aren’t you paying attention? Check the email I have sent. It is urgent.” She went back to drawing flowers in her diary.

I sneaked a look into my email. As I pressed the send/receive button, I received 33 emails, mostly from the bosses in the room who were playing mail-mail. They were zealously flicking emails to each other, keeping us juniors on cc:

“Please have your team look into this.”

“I await your comments.”

“Please give it a shot.”

“We need to discuss this”

“It has been pending for a while now”

Giving Lady-Boss’ email the first priority, I saw she had forwarded an email from the Big-Boss who had in turn forwarded an email with a complex matrix on employee contributions for CSR activities.

Lady-Boss’ email to me said solemnly, “Does this make sense to you? I need to have figured this out in an hour. Do the needful quickly please.”

I tried to catch Lady-Boss’ attention to demonstrate my ignorance on the subject. She ignored me trying to catch her attention and continued with colouring flowers.

Helplessly I looked at the know-it-all BA for help. He was engrossed in playing Angry Birds in silent mode and happened to be losing. I resignedly launched into copying the matter out of Lady-Boss’ email, entering it in google and pasting the results to make an incomprehensible document. I would stop at nothing short of 2000 words, I encouraged myself.   

Meanwhile Big-Boss had woken up and had begun passionately, “These are difficult times for the organization and the industry. But despite the challenges we have done well. So we need to congratulate ourselves.” He smiled. Everyone looked at each other distrustfully and inspected their nails. “Our consumers are undergoing a metamorphosis. We need to constantly reinvent ourselves, through unconventional thinking, customer-driven innovation and retooling. The world is going 'glocal'. Let’s look at locally relevant product and service innovation. Let's develop winning products for emerging markets.” 

It was a war cry. A cry of distress. Everyone relaxed knowingly and went back to peering into their emails. Few endless hours passed. As Lady-Boss was adding finishing touches to the flower pot, She-Man was finishing up with more fake excitement.

"Hold the date!! We will soon be circulating the detailed agenda for the exciting and thrilling leadership offsite to the hills! However, there’s some pre-work to be done as part of the learning lab.” At this, all the bosses signalled their juniors to take notes. 

Finally, as the meeting ended and everyone weighed down with heavy bladders and heavier eyelids tried to wrestle out the door first, Candy Bhatia came up to the Big-Boss and said in a liquid voice:

“Shall I get you some strrrong coffee and muncchhhies, sir?”

As Big-Boss nodded gratefully, Guptajee while putting back the wires had overpowering thoughts of munching Candy Bhatia.

Meanwhile, the pigs in BA’s Tata-Sky phone who killed the angry birds were having the last laugh. 

Note: This account is exaggerated and fictionalized. It shouldn't be used to stymie any chances of any future employment.