A Dog's life

Sometimes, just sometimes, you feel that there's another soul in the world who shares your views on certain topics. This is one of them.

Desperate measures

Desperate situations are sometimes useful: they help you focus on what's most important to you at the moment, and, aided by a sustained surge of adrenalin, help you achieve them. That's what I hope, at any rate!

Moments after I was informed, rather late I must add, that I have been "released" from my current project - a euphemistic way of saying "you're not wanted here, find another project" - my mind was a swirling pot of emotions. Anger, frustration and a little bit of uncertainty all came to the fore. I reflected on the chain of events that couldn't have ended in any way but this.

He was the new PM. Just one look at him was enough to fill me with foreboding: he was strikingly similar in appearance and manner to the PM in my previous project. As the days rolled by, I realised that the similarities didn't end there, that he behaved very much like him too. Bubbling with nervous energy, his speech sometimes sounding confused because his mind seemed to be racing ahead of his ability to vocalise his thoughts, always thinking about "the customer", not really keeping a tab on what the team members think about him and his seemingly desultory instructions...you know, just the usual symptoms of a bad manager who's extremely eager to prove himself to be worthful to the organization (and his boss, of course!). The kind of guy who quits a company only to join again after a couple of years, and who doesn't even feel that there could be anything wrong with that kind of mentality. I know the lot, yeah!

The way he expected his new team to jump headlong into areas that were as familiar to them as walking on land is to a fish was quite unnerving. And since he expected similar enthusiasm from me, I let him know directly that these were uncharted waters for me, and that I would like to get my feet wet before anything: in other words, I needed to be educated on the basics of the technology that he wanted us to be experts in. He seemed to listen but went on at his own rapid pace, surging forward with new tools, new topics for study everyday! I dropped anchor, so to say, and decided to move at my own convenient pace since he wasn't willing to listen to reason. And now I'm unceremoniously out of the project, his disingenuous and shameless "Oh, were you not aware of it?" notwithstanding.

Soon, though, I relapsed into my usual state of calmness, at least on the surface. (Actually, a few people describe it as coldness.) I realised that this is perhaps destiny's way of forcing my hand, and getting me off my butt! I remember something that I'd read on a card that was on one of my ex-managers' desks:

"Every morning in Africa a deer wakes up. It Knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.

Every morning a lion wakes up.It knows it must run faster than the slowest deer or it will starve to death.

It doesn't matter if you are a lion or deer, when the sun comes up you'd better be running."

I guess it's kind of a wake-up call to me. And you bet I'm now awake! It's time, or so the Gods seem to be telling me, that I started pursuing my career dream in earnest.

P.S. I've not quit the job yet.

P.P.S. But it's going to be soon.