Rameez Nooruddin

Big Blue Beginning

Excited, a little nervous and a tad shy (just a little), I arrived in Bangalore on 27th May morning. My cousin’s cousin helped me out by picking me up from the bus stand and dropping me at Le Meridien. We were told to report at this 5-star luxury hotel and I half-expected them to allot us rooms there for the first few days of our stay in Bangalore. But, alas, that wasn’t to be! Too much to ask, eh?

Signed a pile of papers; agreeing to this and that and god-knows-what! Finally, along with 220 others, I “on-boarded” the Big Blue ship called IBM.

I stayed for a couple of days at a lodge in a place known as Majestic. Later on, shifted to a PG accomodation with Sreerag, Rakesh, Renjith & Vivek - all of whom joined IBM along with me. The stay is decent. Close to the office and easy on the pockets.

Anyway, the second and third day at IBM was the YI or Your IBM session where we were given an elaborate, eloquent and beautiful account of the giant’s life, successes and its numerous tentacles. There were more than enough group activities thrown in. I had a blast!

“Campus To Corporate” followed where fun activities galored! I actively participated in the activities. It was a blast again! On the last day of C2C, I had to take a small presentation and I surprised myself with the way I did it. I’m pleased to say that I’m not afraid of the stage anymore! Hurray!

All good things must come to an end. And it did. The fun activities disappeared and were replaced by boring technical training sessions. Software Development Lifecycle, Configuration Management, Unix, Perl Scripting, C++, Java, arrgh… It went on & on & on…

To make matters worse, some of us were inducted into the AT&T account at IBM. We had to undergo a parallel training wherein we were assigned “technology mentors” who would give us regular assignments. Assignment evaluations & mentor feedback were important, they said. Hell! Our mentor was one tough cookie. He also wanted us to take seminars on C++ topics during which he would grill us left, right, center with his questions. The seminars were taken after our classroom training sessions (which ended at 6PM). So our stay at office stretched to 9PM, 9.30, 10 and sometimes 10.30PM!

We are working our asses off out here! This better be rewarding!