First of its Kind

I had always wondered why the train that travels from Bangalore to Trichy leaves Bangalore as early as 1900 hrs and reaches Trichy by 0400 hrs. Well, I had always had company whenever I travelled in this train. This happened on Jan 14, 2009 when I had to come for the first ritual. I had to travel alone as Prakash and Anand had left the previous day itself (It was Bhogi and Pongal period). Had a long travel from e-city to the station. Quick dinner at the nearby restaurant. I was in the station well in advance. The train started as usual and to my dismay I was in the side middle :(:(:( MAnaged to sleep around 2300 hrs. Woke up few times before 0200 hrs at various stations. The next time I open my eyes, the train was in a station. Rushed down to see the station name as I did not know the time (As usual the battery in my mobile was so low after long chats the previous evening and so had been promptly switched off). It was some station which I had not heard off before. Looked at the time in the watch and to my shock it was 0500 hrs !!! I was aghast. Not once had I missed the station in my life and here I was in a train much farther from the place that I had to get down. The immeditate thing that I felt was Shame coz the previous night I had complained to a fellow passenger about the odd timings at which the train reaches Trichy and here I was within the train when my station had already been passed. Continued in the train with loads of hopes that the TTE does not turn up from somewhere to check my tickets again. Finally to my relief came Tanjore station at around 0530 hrs. Rushed out of the platform to catch a bus back to Trichy!!!

Certainly, something first of its kind and which I hope I do not repeat ;)

Saathu Miranda

Watched this movie over the week-end with Prakash. Though the movie started off reasonably well, it became complete nonsense as time progressed. All suspense in the movie was lost in the first 30 minutes and there was no motivation except that we had taken the trouble to watch it.

Quite a lengthy climax (alomost one hour) and some petty comedians assisting in bringing humour to the movie was disheartening. Konjam nalla padam varanum endra ethirparpugaludan...

Snow Man

An idea of creating a snow man occured to us when snow actually started in Stockholm. We were waiting for the appropriate amount of snow to accumulate before we could start working on this assignment :). Finally when we were returning home on the Valentine's day, we decided that time had finally come.

New Manager

When I had first come here we had just one Italian guy to whom we had to report both the status of AM and the AD that happened within the account. But, for reasons undisclosed to us, there was a change and we had a new Indian Program Manager who would take care of all the AD related activities. Come 2007, we were introduced to yet another PM who would now take care of all AM related activities for the account. Not sure of the nationality of our new PM. But, its another reporting change that has happened in our account. Am starting to get used to frequent shifts in the reporting hierarchy :).

The biggest part that comes along with such changes, is the KT sessions that we would be handling for her. Keeping my fingers crossed for the change.

My First Sev2!!!

I did not expect so dramatic a new year opening week. I experienced my first Sev 2 case in around 9 months of support activity. It was related to the supply side of the application that I support. The customer had raised a case to my support unit on the afternon of the third of Jan- But, since it was the first week of Jan, all our managers and their senior folks were still on vasation. We did not get the case into our Inbox and neither were we informed by anyone. The next day, I was pinged on my messenger form someone asking if I belonged to the support unit on which the high severity had been raised. I quickly answeded in the affirmative and gave him my contact details. He immediately called me and informed me about the case and that it was in "Pending" state as the proper suppor tunit had not picked it up still. I immediately got into my inbox and saw the category of the case. It was by the same customer with whom I had earlier committed a mistake. I contaced the customer immediately to inform that the appropriate support unit had just received the ticket and that we shall soon start working on it and shall keep updating her. When I started debugging it, I discovered a big hidden hole in the application. The application had been running in the same way for quite some time and that sucha a case had not occured earlier. I quickly made some data changes from the back-end and enabled the customer to continue working with the application. By then. the customer too had seen the difference of data in the master system and in our application. I borrowed some more time and had a detailed look at it with the aide of some senior folks in the account. When finally we discovered the cause of the issue, we were also able to find out that, the case would automatically get solved by the end of this month, when the month end job runs on it. I quickly wrote a lengthy explanatory mail and called the customer as well to explain the case. She was very understanding and confirmed the closure of the case.

Welcome 2007 :)

Extension!!!

I have been asked to extend my stay in Sweden now :( !!! :). Today (Jan 16) I had even sent in my filled in Work Permit documents to offshore for further processing. I am still not very clear if I wanted to extend my stay. But in the interests of the project, I had agreed with my PM to continue to stay here.
The kind of problem I am currently facing is more clear to me now. I am unsure of what I want to do in another 5 years time. It is very unclear. The Road map is not defined. The other day in office, a couple of my colleagues were discussing with our manager about an interview of NRN on BBC. We were discussing on how clear his vision should have been to have created such a big organisation. I was merely trying to compare mine with him and felt a huge gap in the thought process. My vision was more like the kind of patch that we release during our support activities. We tend to fix the issue at hand at the earliest with some minor data clean up, instead of actually looking at the bigger issue at hand. We tend to go for the comfort that we get when we resolve the current issue instead of solving the issue for ever. I am still searching for an answer for the question, "What would I want to do in the next few years?". Hopefully, if I can find a meaningful answer for such a question I can raise to higher levels.

Swiss

Being inspired much by the dance sequence of our Gabtun, I was very much interested to visit Swiss when I reached Sweden. Never expected that I would make two trips to Zurich within a span of 10 days. The first of which was for a certification examination that was sponsored by my organisation. The second was a trip that we had planned quite long back. We had a long weekend with Christmas falling on a Monday. Did not know that the following day of Christmas too would be a holiday and so had planned our trip only for three days.
Started from Arlanda Stockholm in Swiss air on Dec 22 evening. Was impressed with the short haul flight of Swiss air. Reached Zurich airport just after 23 hours. We had actually planned to buy youth pass for three days in the counter but the counter got closed at 23 hrs. So, we had to take tickets to reach Zurich HB and then collected the pass from there. The lady at the counter had so much patience even at such an odd hour that she calculated the prices of the tickets and the pass and finally let us know that Pass would be beneficial for our trip. Took our train to Interlaken from Zurich. It was through Bern. Reached Interlaken at 2 a.m on the 23rd. The station was completely empty except for the security guard. Enquired with him about our hotel and we got a shock when he informed us that it was 5 km from the station. We had booked the hotel "Funny Farm", and in the web site, it was mentioned like, it was around 15 minutes from the station. Were alomost in a deadlock situation wherein we had no way out. The security hinted that we take a taxi as it was too far and too late as well. He even asked us if he could get a taxi for us. But, we with our own doubts, hesitated to answer moved away from him. He suddenly disappeared and reappeared with a set of keys and unlocked his car. He signalled for us to get into the car. We were now in a much worse situation. Though we were stuck at the station with no means to reach the hotel that night, none of us had the courage to get into the car. Finally, relying on fate, we all got into it, and for the relief of everyone, he dropped us exactly at the entrance to the hotel. Three cheers to Swiss security !!!

Reached our hotel at around 3 a.m. Started for the biggest attraction in Switzerland - "The tallest railway station in Europe - Jungfrauch". Spent the entire day on the top. Tried a few stunts as well. We were very eager to go in a dog sledge but as the weather was not too good, we could not make it. We met an Indian couple, who were currently located in London, and who also stayed in the same hotel as we did. Had our dinner in a SriLankan restaurant. Had good Idlis and Dosas after quite a long time. We went to another mountain top - "Schilthorn" the second day. There was a bond movie "On Her Majesty's secret service" shot on this mountain. The top was too good and the revolving restaturant offered excellent food. The vegetarian lunch (swiss style) along with the salads was too good to miss.

On Christmas day, we took an early morning train to Zurich. Reached there around 10 a.m and was really bored when we found that all shops were closed. Got a one day pass and just boarded on and off so many buses. Did not have any place to go and hence just wasted the time. Reached Flughafen (Zurich airport) and shopped in a swatch showroom for our watched. Got too engrossed in getting gifts for our known ones that we were very late for our flight. Ran and ran till the gate. Was lucky enough not to have much crowd either in the Passport control or during secutiry check. Boarded our flight and reached Stockholm on Christmas night.

Good trip !!!

Activities 4 the weekend

This weekend could be a little different from the long dull ones that I have been experiencing for the last couple of months. Coz there has been lots of plans to go to a museum and probably to a bar as well with a couple of my friends. On top of it my colleague and room-mate has got the mega-hit movie Dharmapuri. So, expecting an action-packed (and fun-filled) week-end. More updates later.