Day 13: Work Adventures

“Write about a weird day in your workplace.” 

Wow, what a prompt!  I mean, I could write about the day when I called in sick to work to <cough cough> drink champagne on Pebble Beach or where I needed to take a mental health day and sit my apartment building’s lovely pool during the summer.  But no, I think we’ll talk about the day where the New Yorker met the Indian (as in South Asian, not Native American). 

My first job out of college was working for Oracle Corporation, the computer software people who bought out Sun Microsystems and PeopleSoft.  I was in their federal contracts administration department, which meant I was a glorified paper pusher.  Sure I stamped my name on official documents, but mostly it was sitting around waiting for someone to get a specific approval or piece of paper with some specific language on it so I could then send off my stack of papers to someone else.  That someone else was our revenue accounting department which was located in southern India at the time.  I quickly learned that the best method of communication for us was through AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) because their English wasn’t exactly amazing and if I needed to get a quick answer from one of their team, this was just the best way.  It worked for me, but apparently not for everyone on my team.

Meet Sharon, the resident den mother for our team of ten or so.  She had teenage daughters, so she was already used to screaming/loving on her brood at the same time, so it really didn’t change much when she came to work.  She also had had an accounting background in a former life, so she was already used to looking at numbers/figures/details and the like so she was generally a good person to go to when you had a question outside your realm of knowledge.  Sharon was from Long Island, which I figured out pretty quickly because she liked to yell at people.  Not yell in the sense that she was screaming, but yell in the sense that she wanted to make sure her point-of-view was heard and that you knew she was going to do it her way.  Unfortunately, our Indian friends in Revenue Accounting didn’t really get it.

One day Sharon is yelling at “Christina” on the phone (as in “hello, my name is “Bob,” how can I help you with your technical problem?)  Christina, in my opinion, was a lovely and capable girl—she just didn’t need some New Yorker screaming at her to get her job done.  Because I was an International Affairs major as an undergrad, this generally meant that I had worked with people from different cultures before.  Essentially, I became the liaison between Christina and Sharon because they had both gotten so worked up that they couldn’t calmly talk to each other on the phone.

Sharon worked with different people than I did, so I didn’t know exactly what the issue was.  I ultimately called Christina on my phone, asked her what she needed from Sharon (and vice versa), and got the problem resolved.  Because I spoke both parties’ languages, so to speak, we were able to rather easily resolve the issue.  What made is so weird is that it was perfectly natural to talk to both of them, yet they couldn’t talk to each other.