My First Project in MS Excel

Everybody(almost) knows that I am an SAP consultant having an experience of more than 2 years in the IT industry. Even my managers here are cognizant of this fact. My resume speaks volumes about my experience, achievements and abilities. But this darned recession has hit the managers of my current recruiter. When all the big shots are trying to reduce operating costs in this crisis, employing creative and innovative ways of their own, my company is no different. They started off with removing toilet papers and soap. I had to buy half-a-dozen of kerchiefs for office use only. I thought this was the worst cost-cutting measure that any company could ever implement, but in today’s world, where bourses are tumbling down all around, I should have been prepared for the worst.

Since last July, I am on bench. How convenient! I used to go to office for only 30 minutes each day.How fortunate, when everyone else is working so hard to save their jobs. I still am, I thank GOD for that, wondering each day, “Why am I not being fired?” And since last week, I have been assigned to a project, which is worse than being on bench.

One fine morning, my manager called me up, and asked me to report to office in 30 minutes. I was still in bed. But, I said, “Ok Sir, See you in 20 minutes”. My office is just 1km away from my bed (may be a 50 mts less). When I went into his cabin, he smiled and welcomed me. The first thought that came to my mind, “Cool, at-last I got a project”. He asked me to pull a chair, and sit besides him, really really close. While I was handling the chair, he was clicking away his mouse, and 10s of windows were popping up. I thought, “Wow, this project is going to be the project of my lifetime. May be this might turn out to be an onsite opportunity”.

We settled down well, and he turned his laptop towards me and said, “Before we begin, Let me tell you this, this is very confidential. You are not allowed to discuss about this with anyone else.” I thought, “Maan, This is a perfect reward for me to have so much patience, for the 4 months that I was on bench. Bring it on. I am ready to roll.”

And then he explained the whole project in minute detail. By the time he had finished his explanation, I thought to myself, “Yaar….I should have resigned long before.”

There was a site, which gave out information about various tenders, but at a price. My company’s free trial subscription would be expiring soon, and my manager wanted me to extract information about all the tenders available on that site before the subscription expired, into an excel sheet. I was initially so excited about the whole thing when he had mentioned words like “confidential”, “tenders”, “deadline”, “high-level stuff”, but now I wanted to kill that fellow. He had said that he was an IIM graduate, but I never believed him. What the hell, Can’t you register for another free trial with another user name? I asked him the same question. He looked confused, taken aback and after thinking about some time, he said, “I don’t know, but you have to do this by tomorrow evening”.

Wow, I sometimes wonder, how can people who crack CAT and enter into the IIMs, be so dumb. What do the IIMs do to their common sense? When I returned to my seat, the first thing I did was to try to create a free trial subscription for myself, and I was able to. But still, by the end of next day, I sat for hours in-front of my computer screen to compile data from the website, created a 6MB MS Excel file, zipped it and mailed it to my manager. Instantly, I got a thanks mail, but there was a question for me. “Can you please re-send the file with an “xls” extension ?”

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