Vent1: Catastrophically Wasted Day

Good news, everyone! we just found out that everyone in the US / UK batch is by default placed in the 'project management stream', which means that we will be project managers in about 2 years.
bad news: i don't know if any of us will be able to make it that long.


NOTE: this is all a completely true story, as ridiculous as it may seem.


for those of you who don't know, i had serious visa troubles. our visas were supposed to be for the city of Mysore, since that is where the training campus is, but all our paperwork came from the company headquarters in Bangalore, which apparently caused mass confusion among the consulate. long story short: my visa says 'Bangalore' and they refused to change it to 'Mysore'. however, there are two other US trainees who have the same problem.

anyway, everyone else went to the Mysore foreign registration office, and the HR department told us explicitly several times that the lucky three of us were required to travel into Bangalore to register. fine so far. unfortunately, this involves a 3-hour bus ride both ways and a couple of hours minimum at the office cleaning up the red tape. worse, the office is only open from 10 - 5 on weekdays, with a two-hour-or-so lunch break in the middle somewhere. oh yeah, as trainees, we have a 9:30 curfew after which we will be refused entry to the campus and docked pay for missing the following day, since we won't be allowed back in until after work has already started.

still not too bad, right?

well, i got up this morning at 4 so i had time to meet the 'full formal' dress code requirement, since our fun little trip included a 'short stay' at the Bangalore campus while some paperwork was finalized and notarized. we caught the 5:30 taxi (which showed up at about 5:45, thank you IST [Indian-Stretch-Time] ) and proceded to the main gate, where were refused exiting-rights. apparently trainees aren't allowed to leave during workdays without express permission from HR. oops, looks like NONE OF THE FOUR HR PEOPLE WHO HAD SET UP OUR TRIP had bothered to tell the gate guards. luckily, one of them answered his cell phone after about five or six attempts to call him. so around 6:15, only half an hour late so far, we began our 2 1/2 hour drive to Bangalore. once we were within sight of the campus, we called our incredibly confused contact person. apparently no one had told him of or little adventure until about an hour before we arrived there.

side note: we spent about three hours in the HR office after work the day before filling out our forms and figuring out what we would be doing today (we literally found out when we were leaving eleven hours before our actual departure time). we also scanned our completed forms so that our contact would be able to prepare enough copies of everything and make sure all the paperwork was complete. . . . except no one bothered to email him the forms.

so we arrived and met our contact, who asked us to explain why we were in Bangalore to register in the first place. we explained our story to him, and he told us that the stupid rule requiring us to register in a city separate from where we would be living had been changed about six months back. and he had very clearly mentioned this to the Mysore HR person in charge of visa registration (the guy who had arranged our trip to Bangalore) several times. so basically, our whole trip to Bangalore was entirely unnecessary. great.

we gave our Bangalore contact the paperwork, which he had wanted to have copied and assembled before we arrived; this meant about two hours of waiting around the Bangalore campus with nothing to do. we finally got everything assembled and headed into town for our actual visit to the FRRO office . . . except that by the time we got there, they were closed for lunch. after a lunch of our own from a nearby hotel-restaurant, we found ourselves waiting in line for another hour or so in the shadiest, most run-down, unkempt, nasty little series of buildings ever. after listening to our contact argue with the angry little man behind the big official desk for a while, we learned that foreigners were now required to register in the city where they would be staying. which meant that not only was our trip unnecessary, it was also a complete and total waste, because we would have to lose another day of class to travel to Mysore to register.

another fun piece of information: our visas were now required to match the location at which we would be staying, which ours clearly do not. this means that the company HR people now have to contact the Indian consulate and get his express, written permission for us to live in an area separate from what our visas say; who knows how that will turn out.

so after an incredibly long and worthless day, we drove back through a very . . . interesting . . . location. more on that later, since i am too tired to keep going.

did i mention that today was our first day of actual training, which we missed?

and i should also mention that NONE of this would have happened if the HR people would have made a simple phone call to talk to our Bangalore contact, who happened to be the PERSON IN CHARGE OF THE FOREIGN VISAS OFFICE FOR THIS COMPANY! his job is entirely to know all about the visas and formalities necessary for us to register with whatever countries we may be visiting! WHY DID NO ONE TALK TO HIM IN THE FIRST PLACE!?

this, and several other little things the people of this company have done (or not done), has caused most of our batch to severely lose respect for the company. some of these incidents are beyond simple mistakes or oversights; a lot of these problems are being caused by pure negligence, lack of communication, and a sort of apathy.