Off late I had to run into many Leeches in my office environment and sometimes I had felt like I had become a host for their breeding too. The leeches that I am talking about are those you can find in your office around you, which sucks your life out of you and leave you for dead. All they care about is themselves and they don’t have anything that ends which is even remotely connected to attributes which you expect at the corporate level like professionalism, ethics, responsibility, accountability and so on.
These people find reasons and excuses at the instant like you did when you were lesser than 10 years old and had to find an excuse every morning to tell to your mom to avoid going to school. They will make sure that no one finds out that they didn’t do anything for the whole day and that is an attribute that you can map to your school days, where you kept a huge grin on our face even though the teacher was asking about the homework which you didn’t do, just to ensure that you don’t get caught.
And another astonishing thing is that the way the execute the things, it like the ruthless hangman or executioner. Nothing like conscience or guilt stops them being them. They don’t seem to be true to themselves and it makes you wonder whether they are human beings or they are SATAN hiding itself under human cloak.
Not just them, even their words won’t give you any commitment and they are those who live in that very moment which is going past us right now. All they want to do is find a reason or excuse which will make them free of the work and they don’t have any brains behind the reason or the excuse they come up with.
They are people who want a job which pays them salary at the end of the month but they are not interested in doing the work that is what they get paid for.
One of my friend used to say that if you listen to MS Dhoni speaking in the press without watching the match you can never make out whether India won the game or lost it. Sometimes you feel MS Dhoni was far better when you listen to these people speak in team meeting because they will say the simplest of things which they did to the extent of writing code for Chandrayan 3 😛
When you try to bind them using responsibility or morale, they will have an explanation which will take you by surprise and their dictionary has different meaning than the understanding you have for words like work, responsibility, ethics and so on. For them coding is copy pasting and their brains are used only to justify a mistake they did.
They don’t have a backbone as like the original leeches, when you corner them out and start to point out their mistakes they will do a jump and say from now onwards we will do things as you say because all we are here is to help you out.
Recently in one of the team meetings one such leech said to me that “The test team is here to help the development team”. I said immediately “No one is doing anyone any favor, as development engineer my job is to fix bugs which are found and your job as a test engineer you job is to find bugs in the build”
What is the whole idea behind trying to portrait that doing your work that too to the most minimal level and boasting to the whole world saying you are doing the world a great favor?
I am not someone who is workaholic, but I am someone who takes work serious when it needs serious attention and I do justice to the salary and there is a conscience that keeps me going and I don’t fool around, I either say I do it or I say I won’t.
I am not the one who goes around saying I will do it from next time but this time, we will just keep it this way.
I had encountered another leech, which thinks that it gets paid for coming to office everyday. All that it does it sits in office from 9 AM to 6 PM checking sensex, researching on horoscopes and asking interview questions to other people in the floor and saying the answers that were printed somewhere else.
One such occasion happens that the project goes into a critical mode and the manager who is supposed to be one of the deadliest one has ever seen tries the best they can to make this leech stay back after 6 PM and this leech takes about MOTHER sentiment and says its mother has to go home and blah blah blah…
This manager tries everything they ever knew like tying this leech by responsibility, how it puts the whole team under risk because of this leech and the answer from the leech was that it clearly understands that and all that it does is in the best interests of the project, the manager says that every time the manager has listened to the leech and has shared its work to others to meet the deadlines and thus overloading everyone else when the leech was busy doing nothing in the same period. the leech says “Exactly madam, I will find someone and pass on the information of what to do and how to do to them?” the manager is shell shocked.
The manager then puts the next weapon attacking the leech psychologically saying ” How can you be so irresponsible and like this when the I have listened to your problems every time and you had put me into critical situations so many times and now you are not ready to bail the team even out once?”, The leech says “Tell me one such occasion where I had put you in a critical situation? Even if you say one such, please bear with me one more time and I will definitely listen to you next time onwards”
The last option the manager tries threatening saying ” Its ok leave today but as discussed in the team meeting please make sure you are there on weekend to support the delivery activities ”
The leech hits the final nail in the coffin saying “That I can let you know only by Friday !?”
Thank god, I was fearing that the leech will say “If you make me stay after six or ask me to come on weekend the WORLD WILL END” 🙂
All I could never understand was, how can someone behave like that? but somethings in life are better left unexplained. Because to understand these leeches you need be the biggest jerk or such a characterless character or the lowlife creature on any universe that can exist.
Probably when someday any of the leeches decide to write an autobiography, we can enlighten our self on being one of them.
I will let you know through by blog, if any of the leeches I know write such a thing. Please return me the favor, if you find any from your side.
Sethumaathavan's Blog 