"Sell crazy someplace else, we're all stocked up here."

"Am I crazy?" is a question I remember asking frequently when I was back in the US, mainly when I wondered if my viewpoint on something, which seemed so sane and rational to me, was not as apparent to someone else. They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. After returning to India for a second year with the same company, you’d think I’d know what results to expect, yet it seems that every day they are able to find new and better ways to let inefficiency and incompetence make me miserable.

WARNING: THIS IS SHAPING UP TO BE A VERY NEGATIVE RANT. Therefore, those of you who say that I do nothing but complain might want to ignore the rest of this post. Don’t say you haven’t been warned…

First, as mentioned in my last post, I arrived at work to find out that I had been deactivated in all of the systems, even though I had been in communication with my reporting manager about the delays in receiving my visa. It took two days to get it (mostly) sorted out, although I was marked absent for those two days (though I was assured that it would be fixed at the end of the month). The second week, I had to change my schedule to work days (which requires approval by my reporting manager-the one from the training department, not the program I am currently working with). I sent an email to my reporting manager explaining why I needed my attendance altered, which was promptly ignored. Halfway through the month of May and I’m already looking at a Loss of Pay for four days-not so encouraging for coming back. Then, when I attempted to register with immigration here, I found out that they had not given me the proper documents that I needed to do so. Also, they realized at the end of the month, that I had not had a proper orientation and needed to do so IMMEDIATELY, in the daytime (because HR gets to work days). Guess I didn’t need to sleep or anything!!!!! What they didn’t tell me at the time was that I would again be “deactivated” and reassigned a new employee ID. Imagine how happy I was to arrive at work, minus a couple of hours of sleep, to find that, once again I couldn’t log in or mark my attendance. Two hours of repeated calls to my HR representative finally elicited the new number from him…all to find out that I still didn’t have permission to log into certain sites that I needed for work. Sigh…another two days before that was straightened out.

Supposedly we get paid on the last day of the month. I say supposedly because, as you may already be imagining, I also didn’t get paid on time. (What would I get paid for? According to the company records, I only joined on the 26th, not on the 1st of May.) The worst part is that they knew this would happen, they just didn’t bother to inform me; I didn’t find out until I tried to pick up my paycheck. It took another two weeks for them to issue a special check and open a local bank account for me.

I guess the question remains: Am I crazy?