Leaving a Job

2011

(Date not known)

            It’s supposed to be a trauma, and the leaver is supposed to grieve, like after a divorce or a death.

            One might leave because of ‘better prospects’, another phrase for more money or because of retirement (inevitable) or retrenchment.

            I remember how I howled when I left my job about ten years ago. I walked all over the hotel where I’d been working for five years, convinced that every tile was precious. I gazed out at the sea liked I’d never see it again. Lots of crappy emotions. I say crappy because the real ones happen when people’s lives are involved, like in the Defence Forces. Hanging up the uniform is a real pain in the heart. Years of camaraderie, a closed and secure society, the passion of serving the country, are wrenched away. Like when teachers retire after a fifty year innings, having moulded three generations under their canes (that would be politically and psychologically incorrect these days, but my generation would understand), knowing that now they’re being put out to graze; private tuitions somehow don’t match the sentiments of a class teacher. Like when a doctor sells off his dispensary because the nursing home down the road has killed his practice. In each of these, other people’s lives are involved in one’s job. In the corporate sector, whether hotel or bank or airlines, it’s the colleagues and the routine that takes priority over customers when it comes to ‘missing’.

            I began working at a regular job rather late in life, in middle age, actually. So there’s no way I can be working anywhere for forty years before retirement. Before these regular jobs, I’d taken locum jobs in different fields: three times I was a teacher, once in a private coaching class; once I sold greeting cards to raise funds for the UNICEF; for two years I worked on the editorial teams of two periodicals…. I knew each was temporary and the parting was inevitable. My first ‘proper’ job in Goa had me working alongside colleagues half my age. Kept me on my toes, kept me up-to-date with what was happening in the industry.

            Our move to Mumbai, and my joining a multi-speciality tertiary care hospital catapulted me into a world of technology, systems, training, frenzy. My face contact was with people who had extremely high IQs, rare qualifications and skills and unbelievable humility and hunger to learn, learn, learn more. I also saw sly greed and wiliness amongst those very same educated lot. Literature has taught me that human nature doesn’t change. Experience has proved it.

            When other hospitals and healthcare providers began to spring up, many of my junior (in age) colleagues began to step out to advance upwards on their career graphs. That was when I discovered that post giving in a resignation, even with a notice period intact, the leaving was kept under wraps. It made the exit ugly, for it prompted rumours to float. Why was the person going? Where? Who instigated him? Who ‘stole’ him? competitors are considered evil enemies. I’m told that soft drink companies and banks used to severely ‘punish’ employees who left one to join another by making their life miserable by making them run around for gratuity, reference letters, etc. Now they request the latter to not join a competitor for a six or twelve months, but which time the memory of whatever valuable information they want to carry in their brains apparently gets ‘diluted’ or perhaps the business itself changes in that much time.

            The recent recession and subsequent loss of jobs has spouted a lot of ‘how to leave’ pop ups on google. The internet now teaches us how to write resignation letters, ask for retirement benefits, get along with ex-colleagues, not to bad-mouth unpleasant bosses and so forth. It tells you how to get fired without stress and how to retire with grace. Who writes and posts these things? Do they get paid for them? Not all have advertisements alongside. The advent of the internet has also meant a lot of people have quit jobs to do their own thing without having to rent an office, or maintained parallel sources of income from the comfort of their homes. One generation before mine, a job was held for a lifetime. My generation has quitted and flitted a bit. The next generation is shifting not just jobs, but careers, too. Leaving a job is no longer as traumatic as… divorce used to be, I guess. It’s an opportunity to do better things and move ahead. Farewell parties now don’t say goodbye, they raise a toast and shout Cheers!!          

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The P Place, Department of Accounts, Panaji.

            Opposite the Capt of Ports, across the road where the new Patto bridge descends to an always crowded 24-hour petrol pump is lovely (but very untidy inside) old building that houses the Treasury and Pension sections of the Government of Goa. I’ve been visiting it often, to help a very old relative restore the pension due to her. It had not been claimed since 2004 because going there wasn’t worth it to collect the Rs 60. That was before two pay commissions increased the amount drastically.

            On my first trip to the department on a very hot April afternoon, I was amazed/amused to find an entire floor of people comatose. The air indicated much indigestion happening amongst them. Indeed, I thought, India should harvest the gas produced in such offices, good fuel it might make, and lots of it. To be fair, the clerks who were awake were helpful. The file I wanted was tracked even before I submitted the application. I returned impressed.

            By the first week of May, a letter was despatched to me via Post. It didn’t reach me, and one of the behind-the-benchers told another that this ‘not reaching’ was happening often. I’m not surprised, because my village, Sangolda, had no postman for several weeks and even now I have a feeling it’s a badli that’s doing the rounds. I got a photocopy of the letter concerned. The relevant Deputy Director requested me to meet the Treasury people on the ground floor. I know every tile of that sweeping staircase because I’ve avoided slipping and tripping on more than five occasions.

            My visits to the Treasury have put everyone in a tizzy, because I very sweetly refuse to leave the premises unless they do something spelled w-o-r-k. Very sweetly. My weekly visits have made them search their cupboards downside up and confidently inform me that no records exist for such and such person. For how many years do you store records? I ask. Ten, I’m told. It isn’t ten years yet, I inform them, hence the records should be there. They agree, then politely tell me that they’ve been around for two/seven/nine and a half years and that’s why they don’t know where the records are. They mumble something, I think it’s a mantra to make me disappear. Doesn’t happen, I’m still there. I ask a matronly woman staffer who looks like she’s about to retire whether she’s been around for ten years. I ask her in Konkani, Marathi, English and Hindi. Like the mantra, this doesn’t work either. She throws sad glances at the cobwebs on the ceiling, tattered papers in the trash-bin, stains of spit and the rain outside. Will someone give me in writing that my records have been destroyed, lost? Nope, now the voices are confident: they haven’t received anything in writing, see? The letter that I have from the Dep Director doesn’t have a cc marked to them, see? How can they give me anything in writing? I pen in duplicate yet another application and run to the despatch clerk to get in inward-stamped-and-dated before the minute is up, for if the shift ends, I’ll have to make another trip.

            I notice a pensioner walking in with drooping shoulders, his fingers clasped in front of his chest like he’s approaching the sanctum sanctorum of a holy place. The young male clerk who helped me in the first instance and the peon are the only ones who make any effort to approach him. The sariwali madam with the diamond ear-studs thinks yawning and stretching takes too much effort, so she just sits without moving at all. At all. It’s fascinating that a fellow human being can thus just ‘be’ day after day after day. The Art of Living guys must take a lesson in this meditation technique from her. They can earn some more millions.

            Coming back to my story: I’ve booked every Wednesday in my diary for the year for a trip to the pension office. I’ve set aside a budget for pilot ride to and from ferry (sixty bucks, equal to the amount of the original pension), chips, sandwiches, a tetra-pack of fruit juice and paper napkins. Might as well make a picnic of it. One problem though: the taxes I pay the government don’t ensure me a clean loo in that office.