Ab to Aadat si...

Mithun was finding the whole IT thing bizarre. You would have thought with his vesuvisial lava of analytical skills waiting to be tapped, he would get the opportunity to go finger-dancing on his laptop - writing C++ code and give Chopin's Raindrops a half-sister in the programming world. He would code with such ferocity that his grey cells would go into infinite loop and heat generated in his brain would melt his head.

Well, but Mithun soon realised that software is nothing like that. The whole hacking thing is really cruched into 5% of the project life-cycle. Rest of the time goes into planning, waiting for resources, waiting for business requirements, talking to business, talking to PMs, talking to HR (who have been findmucked into believing that they pay the employees' salaries), talking to schizophrenic halfs of the above mentioned folks, and last but not the least you talking to yourselves.

On top of it, there were really some IQ challenged people at work. The worst was this guy who would wash his banana - after it was peeled. The guy was unfortunately his lead. The lead was a difficult one - superficially you would have thought he was a great manager. But scratch the surface, and his failings would ooze through like pus from a wound.

Lead has done absolutely no homework about the design and goes into an important workshop. The project sponsors are there. If you screw the workshop, chances are that project may not go ahead.

Lead opens the meeting- "We are planning to build this using SAS and Oracle database with SAS interfacing the legacy systems and the new Consultant Management System. This is the only viable approach ".

Anybody with half a mind - "But SAS is not the best tool for pure ETL projects. Forget that, it's not within our client's strategic roadmap. And we don't have the licenses."

Lead - "That is not what I was told. (shakes his head and looks at Mithun). Looks like I have been misguided".

Mithun is fuming - Even a moron would understand that Lead is farting. And why is hell is he looking at me.

Mithun - "We are not using SAS, we are using Datastage."

Lead (with facial contortion signifying outrage and betrayal) -"WHY WAS I NOT TOLD".