Memoirs of ONMS Saga (Part 3)

Well, then all good things come to an end. The time came for me to return offshore too. The last men standing (well before that) moved on to a Paying Guest apartment near the Holmdel Office.

It was like walking distance from the Office. This paying guest apartment (owned by a Chinese named Joy !!) was then host to self (for a few weeks), Anjan, Gopi, Suyog. We can say that Gopi took the full advantage of staying Paying Guest apartment, and Joy's favourite was Gopi !! Aaah..The Gopi-Joy saga is a different story altogether. This was to be followed by the arrival of Murali Malepati, Prasad Pillai and Abinesh Raghavan - and the return to the once beloved locality 'Eatoncrest Apartments, Eatontown'.

Well, returned to Offshore and met all the folks/pillars who had started the Project. Additionally Client employees were also induced, and the TCS and Alcatel-Lucent (then it was called Lucent) folks - all used to operate from ITPL. Still remember the day when, 50 Dell Latitude D610 laptops arrived from Singapore and were dumped on our floor (it said To: Partha !!) for follow-up allocation to the OMS team at ITPL.

That was one heck of an allocation, ensuring that all the folks who were supposed to get the laptops were assigned one, doing a stock inventory and off-course marking the laptop Tag IDs assigned to the folks. Then to have a Lucent employee sign-off on the allocation...cause at the end of the day, we are still Contractors. Huh !

Then came the expected news....we (some part of ONMS was OMS team) were moving to wilderness. The wilderness (well this was the year 2003) was Bannerghatta Road (very close to Bannerghatta National Park known for its elephant, gaur, leopard, jackal, fox, wild pig, sloth bear, sambar, spotted deer, barking deer, common langur, bonnet macaque, porcupine and the hare !!). The Office was nicknamed - LBC - Lucent Bannerghatta Campus. So the move did happen.....and then started the cross-country travel from as far as K.R. Puram (we were lucky..we were near Kemp Fort, Airport Rd) to Bannerghatta Road.

Travel was treacherous...there were Taxi shuttles that one person used to initiate and pick up folks en route. On our route the starter was KNP. He would start from Ulsoor, and on way pick up self, Rammohan (from Kemp Fort, Airport Road) and Barnali (from BTM).

That reminds me...one of the female associates in our project was then code-named 'Mafia' - know why ? The female associate was well know in arranging parties and ensuring sponsors were enrolled and more in extracting the funds/contribution for the party. Parties were never a problem when our 'Mafia' was around.

Then came a project called - Migration. It started as a two page concept of migrating a Legacy system to a new product and became a huge beast that will go on for the years to come (actually still going on !!) involving at least "n"-folks [Self, Gopi, Suyog, Bharat, Sushma, Kishore, Srabani, Supriya, Divya, KB Siva, Rohit, Hugar, Tarun, Vishal ...too name a few]. Had to travel again for Migration support.Well, to keep it short lets say Migration support from Onsite was a test of patience - as Offshore migration folks kept dropping off the radar (business calls it attrition) or were moved to support other projects.

Finally, returned back to home sweet home and met a 'almost' completely new team. Many of the start-up "pillars" had fallen to the word attrition/transfer etc. etc. and only a few remained. It was like me being a new joiner walking into the ITPL floor :-) Met new folks of the current ONMS team.

Saw that the PP (Party primes) had gone into hibernation ! It was work-work-and-work all day.

Thus started (actually re-initiated) the Project Parties, Account Potluck, Project Outings and off course the on-floor celebrations/fun. Not to miss, taking over the reins of the ONMS project too. All that next time.

To be continued.....