The joys of work life

At the turn of the millennium, I landed a job at a dotcom. Much like the now ubiquitous artificial intelligence (AI), dotcom was the buzzword two decades ago. A wide-eyed newbie, just out of college, nothing prepared me for the diversity of experiences I would have here or elsewhere at work. 

The dotcom was probably the first and last place I would hear folks playing music on their personal speakers (those tiny ones with volume control knobs). Imagine being greeted with a medley of music, from ghazals to rap, as you walked in on your first day. We even got to experiment with Napster, probably the first of its kind file sharing service then, before it was banned, managing to download just a few songs on the slow Internet those days.

My exacting, temperamental news editor taught us the importance of reading widely and would be very pleased when we came up with smart, witty headlines—she would have a smile on her face the entire day. Ctrl+S and Alt+T+W became my most-used short cuts.

There was a separate desktop to monitor news agency feeds, while a tiny TV buzzed all day to scan for important news—because we wanted to get it first, even if it meant a linkless headline of breaking news on the portal Home page before our competitors. It was sudden and surreal how one day in September 2001 we watched aghast as the World Trade Centre twin towers blew up to smithereens. The full impact of that event kicked in months, may be even years later.

While the dotcom bubble burst soon enough, it was my senior colleagues who helped me deal with the sudden changes. They were mentors long before mentoring was an official term in corporate jargon. 

At another software company, we had the team raconteur ‘V’. He could make even the most uptight new members open up and laugh out loud. Absolutely everyone would warm up to him and eventually start cracking jokes themselves. While our manager was away on long leave, the team adopted a natural self-managing style with not a slip in deadlines, all while having loads of fun and potlucks.

As we deal with new work paradigms and cultures, I look back fondly to these days and the mentors and colleagues who made our work life so joyful. It didn’t take much effort on their part but made such a lot of difference to newcomers.

Of course, I moved jobs several times and didn’t always have great experiences, but the places I loved going back to day-after-day always had great camaraderie, team spirit, and laughter.