Infinite Improbability in Florida : Working at it

Well Uncle Sam's is just that Uncle Sam's. Its not India and when I say that I am stating the obvious. Let me start with somethng that I havent touched base upon with yet. My office and work.

I have always been a part of the development teams at Kanbay. Essentially, I see the requirements and see what all needs to be done with the code so that it works as desired. My job has always been inside the code, inside the programs, and see if that program is doing whats it doing or not. That was when I was in the GWT team. Now its GDT team wherein I see that if this is the requirement of the business, then which program do we pick up and schedule it where so that, the requirement is finished. I have shifted from development to implementation. Now being a development person gives you an amazing insight into why things go wrong when they are not quite working as desired. My being there for 2 yrs has given me lots of insight into that. And I am safely leveraging that in my current work. My immediate client our here knows less of technology than I do so its easier to deal with him. But my team is like the core central team of implementation and we have lots of support groups which look into us and depend on us for their activities. Hence I get an amazing amount of exposure. I am generally part of the calls where all of these support groups discuss their strategies and then they let us know what they intend to do.

The HSBC office is essentially a ground floor building, with several wings where my wing is segregated into two huge halls and the third hall is the cafeteria. There are 4 types of offices, the cubicles, the cubes, the corner office and the closed doors - in the order of ascendancy. Most of Kanbay guys sit in cubicles and someof HSBC staff too. There you just abut have enough space for your computer and a chair. Your screen is visible from across a mile because there are no screens between adjacent cubicles. The cubes have large screening on all 4 sides with a door shaped opening in the one of the sides. Its like a room with no roof and a part of 1 wall opened. There is a long table along two walls and two chairs, one for the guy who sits and the other for a visitor. Most of HSBC staff sits in cubes. The corner office is not necessarily in the corner, its just cube with the window instead of one of the walls. Theere are certain corner offices with closed doors which make the 4th category.

I sit in a cube. Not for any other reason except that my predecessor also used to sit in their and I just took it over from him - the work and the office.

The best thing out here is that we can work from home too. I mean after and before the office hours. Its just that you can logon to the system from home, connect on to HSBC and have access to everything. So I generally leave from office around 6:00 and if there is still work, carry it on from home. My most important task is to delegate the work to offshore. So I just understand what all needs to be done and then pass it on to offshore. The post is Onsite Co-ordinator and thats what I do, co-ordinate the tasks between offshore and onsite. Its still pretty hectic, because at office I have to get all the requirements answered, and then after office when my offshore enters office, I have to let them know and make sure they understand. Its 10:30 p.m.EST when its 9:00 a.m.IST. So its generally around 11:00 p.m. EST that I start on with my call to offshore and then its may stretch until any time. If there are issues,as there were earlier, it could even stretch uptil 2:00 a.m. EST. But for all the exposure that I am getting, its pretty much worth it.

So thats what it was at the office... Next in line would be the trip to Fort Desoto...