$$ Software Blues $$

Continued…..

On that very weekend, at one of those “clichéd beach house dos” far away from the city, I was introduced to a short looking fellow. During the course of the conversation, he told me he was a programmer working with a software company. I told him of my current plight, and he said that there were forums which went out of their way to help people with their programming difficulties.

You mean they actually were sites, who would do all the programming for you…

JURANMOOOO!

I went back home, quickly did a search and found a gamut of web sites, which actually helped dejected souls like me, with their programming blues. What’s more, most of these websites were either American or British, which meant you would have programmers from the Western world helping you with you’re coding…

And they said, Outsourcing happened only to India, Welcome to Reverse Outsourcing!!

So, I emailed them explaining to them, what I understood of my project and Mr. Jon Williamson of Texas very kindly replied back with a detailed description of what needed to be done. I tried figuring out and implementing what he spoke about, which I couldn’t , so I then tried asking him an intelligent question to keep the interaction going.

To which he replied,

“The answers I have already provided were not intended to be used in the PowerPoint VBA editor, they were instructions on how to get your macros to work in Visual Basic, which is what you just asked.

If you go back and follow the instructions in the previous posts in this thread then you will find that you can create a VB executable that does everything without the user having to open Powerpoint or any other interaction”

Amazingly helpful, wasn’t it. To which consumer forum do I complain about the poor quality of outsourcing in this scenario?

The entire interaction can be followed on

http://www.developerfusion.co.uk/forums/topic-25702

There was now only about a month left to go, the only day to look forward to was Friday which was the apparent casual dress code day in the company .On this day, even the senior 50+ people would try their best to fit into jeans and tight pants.At most times, I must confess this wasn’t a very pretty sight. However, the one sure pretty sight in my wing was this pretty lass named Shaayanass, and boy did she have a fine…well, you get the drift.

All it would take was a sms to my fellow droog who would be chilling in his house. (Remember the same droog who had had his project finished by the oily person)

And before I knew it, he would appear before me…

“It was worth the journey dude, I love Fridays, Its Friday night Live!!”

The lady in question Shayanazz or Shayanass, was the only bright spark in our software world. Every day during the breakfast break, post breakfast break, pre lunch break, lunch break, post lunch break, pre tea break, tea break and post tea break, there would be a hoard of wannabe geeks surrounding her offering her Tea, Biscuits, Tea and Biscuits. Not surprisingly, me and my fellow droog would be amongst those wannabe geeks. One fine day, in our conversations with her, she mentioned.

“ I love Kerala, I love the coconuts , the boat races, the food.”, We agreed (Nodding our heads vehemently in unison) “ Last year, I went there on a holiday with my husband, and we had a great time”

WHATTTTTTTTTTTT??? HUSSSBBANNNNDDDDD?

This brought to an end, amongst other things my fellow droog’s visits to the software company. The pre-breakfast to post-tea breaks were now decidedly more lonely for Shayanzz, I’m sure she is still trying to figure out why.

I now had, exactly 1 week to go for my submission date, and had to do the documentation for the same. How does one do documentation for a project which hasn’t even been half created..?

Somehow, using the same bull shitting method, which I had become quite adept at I managed to fill up around 80 pages of the Project document.

In the mean time, my fellow droog acquired his “Project completion certificate”, and close in behind, I managed to acquire mine as well. My project, I explained was 95% completed, and all it needed was some fine tuning. In about a week, I convinced them, I would have a software which amongst other things would change the world.

All I needed now was a working project…

And then it happened….

I noticed at the bottom of one of the documents…

“All subject matter and content in this document, is strictly confidential and none of it can be shown or used for unofficial purposes without the prior permission of the company”

Now, if the documents were confidential, it wouldn’t quite be an incorrect assumption, to assume that the software I was going to create would be well, confidential as well…

I came up with a cunning plan…..

During my project presentation, if the examiner were to ask me for my working model..

Pat would come my reply, “Well sorry sir, It’s highly confidential; the company will not allow me to show it unofficially.”

If he asked me, some complicated questions about my project.

My reply again, “Sorry sir, Its confidential as well. I am legally bound. I cannot reveal too many details about its working.”

It went to plan.

He smiled. I smiled back.

My marks in the project, well they are confidential. But, I can tell you I did reasonably well.

As for my project, well 6 months have passed. I haven’t heard from them, nor have they from me.

Long live the Software Industry! Long live confidentiality clauses!