Saturday, August 6, 2011

TRAINING TRAVAILS

Considering that the majority of my readers are/were commerce students, I guess I’ll have to do the honours of introducing the NOVEL concept of INPLANT TRAINING. Well, at INDIA’S NO 1 PRIVATE UNIVERSITY we are advised (‘forced’ rather) to finish 2 weeks each of inplant(or is it implant? O.O) training(or in their words, HANDS ON INDUSTRIAL EXPERIENCE) before the commencement of the 3rd and 4th years.

As far as the workers in the company are concerned, the last thing they would want when they are trying to finish making 2000 jobs a day is a bunch of over enthusiastic students pestering you with questions. So what do they do, they ask us to OBSERVE. Which, actually means “go sit in that corner and pls, for heaven’s sake, leave us alone!” so 7 hours a day, u go and sit there in a corner of the factory ‘observing’ what is going on.

If you are lucky, you get to go for 4 or 5 days but still get the 15 days certificate required. But when lady luck isn’t exactly on your side, you get to travel 2 hrs to a factory just to sit for an additional 7 hours on all 15 days in a factory.

Now at SRM, we aren’t required to maintain a record of day to day training. So what normally happens is that people enjoy for 13 days, attend 2 days of training and submit the report. Which is quite sufficient because truth be told, 45 mins is enough to understand the entire working of the factory. But Veltech Dr. RR and SR technical institute have this custom of torturing people with useless paper work. I was a victim once. And I just got screwed by the same people again.

The company me and my friends went to had these old dilapidated buildings housing offices on one side and the factory with huge, I mean HUGE machines on the other. It was a reputed company having once supplied parts to DAIMLER-CHRYSLER (Mercedes to the common folk) but then the people running the company never bothered to upgrade the machinery and hence the orders started declining. But that’s another story.

About the people in the company, well we had no trouble with them really. All of them seemed to be pretty happy to let us wander about on the company’s huge green campus, only requiring us to report to them once in a while. All but ONE. We decided to call him ANNIYAN THATHA cos with his glasses on he was strict, mean and always shouting. But without his glasses, he would literally like cajole and spoonfeed us! Very ANNIYAN like, so ya the name kind of stuck on. But the only problem was that whenever we happened to meet him for something important, he always had his glasses ON! :S we weren’t spared even on the day we went to collect our ‘completion of training’ certificates!

As for me, life was hell there. But I’ve become so accustomed to the difficulties of a cricketer pursuing engineering that it seemed like a walk in the park for me, albeit a long and difficult one. B) wake up at 5.30. get to the ground at 6.30. team practice till. 10. Get back home by 10.15. shower and eat. Get to the company by 10.45. go there get shouted at by anniyan thatha for coming late daily. Report to our allotted section incharge at 11. While away time till 4 pm. And ya, since this was a manufacturing plant and not an IT company, we didn’t really have a place to sit also! :S

Anyways, this continued for 15 days. Eventually, we decided to cut short the time we spent in the factory. I got permission from the DGM, HR about my practice timing woes and thus didn’t have to get scolded by thatha everyday. The others decided to reach just before thatha arrived (which was usually 1 hr after the usual company timings, very punctual on his part :/) just as to look punctual. We would leave for lunch early and get back late. And towards the end of the training, we would normally leave the place by 2.30 itself.

The 15 days kind of sped by. We took turns bunking, we got caught by anniyan thatha on occasions more than one. We took pics in the factory and uploaded them on fb. We had the worst canteen food anyone could ever think of. We broke rules. We became friends with the junior engineers there. And to some extent, we did learn a thing or two as well. But eventually, when we did walk out of the factory with our certificates in hand though, we had only one thing in mind. Even if it was the last thing on earth, we resolved never to come back to this factory. Be it for training or for work! :D

Until next time,

Keep smiling,

ADIOS!

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