More of the same

Wednesday 28/02/2007

Well first thing you should notice is that yes i wrote the date in the European format... The past few days have been full of form filling and they required the dates to be set in dd/mm/year format.
So today morning was my screening test, and boy what a doozy. I found out i got a 77/100 which was good compared to the rest of the group so i guess i can say cuse didn't rip me off too badly. Next was more paperwork. Then more paperwork. Honestly the more computer stuff and paperwork we do the more i realize how unorganized this place is. And for computer brilliant people, we are still not on the local system to access our "Sparsh" intranet. BTW Sparsh means "Touch".
I did find out some cool things about Infosys. I finally found out how much room and board is taken from me and that is a whopping 1500 rupees a month! To equate that in US terms, that's a few cents over $1 a day. DAMN! Once i get back to the US I'm going to think everything is so expensive. So onto the next thing... MORE PAPERWORK... you get the idea by now. All this paperwork drains me so once again time to leave campus to go enjoy a few beers.
This time we went to a place a bit close called "The Roost". It looked like a nice restaurant/motel and everything is even cheaper here. I large beer is only 75 rupees and all the food items are each under 100 rupees. So the four of us, Mike, Me, Flowers, Will kicked back a few.

I drank a local brew called "Knock Out". It is quite tasty. I don't think I've commented much on the food around here, but eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner locally on campus is OK. You pack your plate up from the buffet and eat what looks to be a lot but it doesn't fill you up and your hungry in an hour. The meats if any at a meal are 80% bone and 15% fat.... not much left to eat. This hurts my protein input as the rest is all carbs.

Thursday 01/03/2007

Today was a whole day of "Cross Cultural Leadership Training". We get teamed up with a group of Indians and do silly activities that reminded me of something i would do in middle school. We had to go out and get interviews of 5 people that have worked on site with another culture so we did that and then we discussion perceptions of cultures and did some other stuff i have already forgotten. Its not that fun but it beats paperwork for 8 hours a day. Unfortunately this training will go on for about another 3-4 days.... Wooopie.

As a random side note.. I've been practicing my head bobbing. Indians love the bob.

Intro

Hi everyone!
This is my first blog post.. never thought i would be doing an online journal but i figure it would be easier for everyone to know what was going on and not repeating myself 30000000000 times.

For starters....
Current Location: Infosys Mysore Development Center (DC) India
Currency: Indian Rupees 1:42 approx conversion rate to the US Dollar
Time: GMT +5:30. I am 10.5 hours ahead of the East Coast so day for you is night for me and visa versa.
Weather: 75 Degree in the early morning... goes to 90+ by mid-day. Always sunny, never cloudy.

Since this is my second working day evening and my total 4th day at Mysore i will quickly recap my experience so forth.
Pre Days (Chicago)
So we all met in Chicago for a kick-off jam. This was the first time i met another Ilya. He is from Chicago and his mother's name is also Olga... weird. Anyway, met a few other good guys such as Jason Flowers, Alex, Mike.... and others. Flowers and I went to school together and had classes so it was good to have some cuse pride with me. They treated us to some famous "Chicago Style Pizza"... I was unimpressed, NYC pizza is 100000x better and then we went out to the bars. The HR team came with us and we all had a great time and fired it all on the company credit card (I cant wait till i get one of those!). After that was flying.. flew for so long i don't even want to talk about that. Next stop, INDIA!

Day 1 - Saturday
1st day landed in Bangalore airport at 5:30am local time and got my bags... We took this small bus to campus and our bags went into some ghetto truck.

The drive was about 3-4 hours long because of the local craziness of driving and our bus was huffin and puffin up hills. Sights on the way included little children taking shits on the side of the roads like it was nothing. The streets are all dirty and cows though not running around wild, but still abundant.

We arrived on campus at around 11am and checked in out luggage and laptops and immediately went to get our first real Indian food @ the floating restaurant which actually does not float just has a moat around it with live fish... nothing special. I mention real Indian food because the flight food was terrible and the chips that we had on the bus was not Indian... only the price (5 rupees for a snack bag and 20 rupees for a big bag of "American Sour Cream and Onion" and "Ketchup" flavored varieties.

After the meal came the highly anticipated exploration of my room and a badly desired shower. I have also uploaded the video of the room for all to see. My initial reaction to campus or DC as this place is called was that i was at a resort. Afterwards me and a few comrades explored campus. Interesting enough we requested a map but they told us for "security reasons" maps were not made. Fine... So we walked around a bit saw a few of the buildings and cafes and then hopped on a couple of "ladybirds" (sweet bikes with baskets in front) and rode around the 330 acre site. BTW Infosys has about 2500 bikes on campus free for anyone's use, just grab and go. Obviously being obnoxious Americans we chose the pink and purple ladybirds and enjoyed the ride. I will get pictures of the bikes later. By 6pm i was done for the day and went to sleep. Slept for a good 12 hours and was up the next day ready to do anything.

Day 2 - Sunday
Played a bit of ping pong, went swimming, explored some more, went to the gym, ate.... not much but a lot.

Day 3 - Monday
First day of work!
Well not much work was done as most of it was lectures and formalities. HR presentations, India presentations, Infosys presentations and so on. We also had a team building event with the 100 Malaysians that also came on Saturday. So in this big auditorium we all got family last names and the goal was to find your family... so wanting to take charge i yell out my family name and get my family together... we were the Yalamaldala family and i was the "grandfather". So everyone came to me and i elected myself the representative. We had 5 min to get a slogan ready and present on stage so to make the long story short we won for being the most enthusiastic (we chanted our name at the end of the last group to present) and won candy bars. Everyday we get 2 tea/coffee breaks which is good except the coffee and teas come prepared with milk and sugar in it already. I ate lunch and went to another cafe to get coffee cause they don't have coffee at meal time except breakfast. So a regular coffee in a small paper cup costs 3 rupees... CHEAP!! A cappachino costs 12 and an espresso costs 9 and the espresso is the full paper cup. We have 2 Dominoes on campus that also deliver but I'm in NO hurry, not a fan in the US and wont be one here. Unfortunately we do not have a fridge in our rooms but i might get one on the black market if its cheap enough.. i like my water cold.
That reminds me... I get 2 big 1 liter bottles of aquafina water replenished everyday in my room along with housekeeping everyday that cleans my room, does my bed...but no laundry. I bet if i paid them a few rupees they will iron my clothes.
So we finally get our temporary id passes and this mean we can venture out of campus. And a few of us do badly desiring a beer and some local flavor. Since work got out at 5:30 and we were hungry and went to the gym, we left to go into town at 8 and had to return to campus by our curfew of 11 M-Th (12 F,Sat,Sun). So we took a rickshaw to a place called Planet X which has a bar, club, go-karts and an arcade. We began by haggling the driver down from 400 rupees per person to 300 rupees total round trip including him waiting for us for an hour while we enjoyed ourselves. This included a 30 minute drive in each direction as well. And finally there we had our first drinks at India. I had a 750ml of Kingfisher beer. Very tasty i have to say. We only had time for 1 drink each but it was enough. They said they will give us a tour of Mysore on Saturday.

Day 4 - Tuesday (Today)
Today was another day of paperwork and presentations. Worked till 5:30 again. Not much going on today. Tomorrow i will be taking an assessment test at 8:30 to see how much the CS (computer science) group knows so far. There are 2 groups (CS and Non-CS) this only differs that the CS group doesn't take fundamentals in computers and goes to Bangalore 2 weeks earlier to work on real projects. 50 Questions, multiple choice... and doesn't count for a grade. We found out about grade criteria today as well and seems like its pretty hard to fail out. We need a 65 average to pass and this includes group work as well and open resource hands on tests. We also have modules that we need to pass prior to the cumulative tests and we can fail 3 of 9 and still be employed.... so sounds pretty easy as long as you assert yourself. Well time for bed... Still adjusting to the weather and jet lag but getting better at it. Until next time.