A Lifetime Experience

Although it has been only 4 days in my New MBA college but thanks to the tight and busy schedule, a week seems to be as long as a month.The drilling sessions and the business exercises during the Orientation period can be compared to the 'ragda' of NDA!!!

Today, I got up in the morning at 7 with a lot of anticipation of what was going to come ahead in the day.The time table only said that there is going to be a business exercise and that we had to report at 8:30.As the time went by and as the sun grew even brighter, my MBA section- a batch of 60 students, got our first Business Exercise. The professor gave a task to go to Lakshmi Market and ask for a job for 1 day.This sounded good to me .Anybody could have given me a job for one day.And being a lady always adds an advantage ;) So I was pretty confident of myself that I would be enjoying a very smooth day wherein I will not be required to study and just do a job. But suddenly,the professor gave me a big blow by his next statements.His conditions were to earn a minimum wage of 150 bucks and not waste a single penny in commutation!! My mind started racing and then it occured to me that who will give me a job for a day and pay me a minimum of 150 bucks. And to top it all, I am not even supposed to spend any money while going or coming back. We were supposed to work till 5:30 and meet the professor at a temple called Parvati at 6 for his further instructions. This entire meeting seemed like an adventure for whichI was looking forward too with great zeal.

We were a team of 3 people and we got set to leave the campus by 10:10 - The Happy Face in the clock! As we were not supposed to spend any money, so we started asking for lifts from the passers by.One by one cars came and went till a gentleman stopped his grey santro right in front of us.We were quite lucky as the gentleman was going the same way as we were.Very happy with the start of the day, my enthusiasm reached even greater heights.It took us about half an hour to reach there and we were bang on Lakshmi road right at 10:40.Because we were a group of three and only 2 of us had cell phones, hence we decided to split up in two and start looking for jobs.We went from one shop to the other all of different kinds from being sari shop,shoe shops, watch showrooms,travels and ticketing.We even went to printing press for some job but we got treated either rudely or indifferently.Many asked for our biodata as they wanted to confirm whether we are cheats or not.In such situation, we could only tell them to trust our innocent faces!Many wanted to get the the job done for FREE! Are bhai, yeh Indians kabhi nahi sudhrenge.Some gave lame excuses like the Owner has not yet come in the shop and that they are not in a position to employ us :( . The branded showrooms like Woodland, Samsonite got out of scope as the employees in those shops said that they themselves were salaried people and that they could not employ us.As the time passed by, the entire scene became sadder and sadder as most of the shops had rejected us and the others had already employed our other batchmates.
The Management jargons of "Right Timimg","Public Relations","Being the first to capture the market","Never Say Die attitute" were all coming to my mind. We were also in touch with the third friend who was exploring a different route.Poor guy also didnt have any luck.
Over a period of time, we learned to take references of shops from the shops where we were going which would be interested in employing us.I would call this utilization of resources :)
Finally, we came across a Chareterd Accountant who had opened up his small firm.We went to him and spoke in utmost sophosticated manner and tried to tell him how desperately we wanted the job! Lucky for us, he did have a lot of work like making the data entry for balance sheets and other data entry stuff.
So, after an hour long searching for jobs, we finally got one at 11:45. I got a sense of pride and utmost satisfaction with myself and my hard work.The "Kind CA" even got the job for our third friend arranged in his friend's Electrical shop. We worked for about 5 hours and got paid a total of 300 bucks.It was a pleasant experience.Coming from an engineering background, it was an even bigger learning experience.