First You Build the Wheel
John arrived in Bangalore and went to one of the addresses provided him to rent a place to live. He took an apartment in a complex built by one of the American companies there. It was very expensive, but came with air conditioning and an Internet connection. Getting a reliable Internet connection in India was more of an obstacle than someone from a first-world country could imagine. All you had to do was look at the mud trails that passed for streets to see hundreds of cables wrapped around a single telephone pole which had two or three other poles propping it up from either side. Power, phone, high-speed Internet, all wrapped in a big bundle at the top of the pole. It looked like one of those massive rubber band collections you see pictures of on the Internet.
Once his computer was set up he immediately set out masking the IP address and then retrieving his email. There were lots of pending messages. He had been gone almost long enough for his mailbox to overflow. He started the deleting and purging jobs and began forwarding the messages to their intended recipients. It took him the better part of the afternoon to get through the existing email.
With the email handled, he went out for a walk past the technology companies to see which had postings out front. He saw a very large building that had been built recently and saw the name of the company. It looked like a massive data center. He went in and found they were looking to hire operations staff, technical support, and just about every other kind of computer job. He dutifully filled out an application giving them his new name and address. His new identity kit came with references and some job history, so he filled that in and handed back the application. The man behind the desk asked him to take a seat and said someone would speak with him in a moment.
John could hear some phone calls being made and some discussions being held. About five minutes later another man came out to greet him and bring him back to an office. He asked a short series of technical questions and John was able to answer all but the mainframe questions. When he was asked why he moved to Bangalore, John responded that he wanted to broaden his IT skills and couldn’t do that where he had been.
The man seemed to accept this response in light of the fact he wasn’t going to have to pay a buyout fee to obtain John. Competition for low-paid workers was fierce in India. Not fierce enough that any company was actually raising wages, but fierce with lawyers and lawsuits. The standard practice now was that you had to pay a year’s wages to a company when you stole one of their employees. You see, the upper class in India keeps everything to themselves. They couldn’t care less whether the lower classes lived or died as long as they made money at it.
The man interviewing him would also be his boss. He told John he was joining the company at a very opportune time. His company had just won a contract to offshore four sets of data centers into this building and another building just like it in a different location. The additional generators and UPS equipment were being installed even as they spoke. Another building was being built on this campus to hold programmers.
It would be a few weeks before the new machines arrived and were installed. The company had managed to obtain some books and training documentation on the mainframe and midrange systems that were arriving shortly. Their U.S. Partner was flying over a small team to handle the installation and configuration. John’s job would initially be computer operator and network monitor. His first assignment would be to read through all of the documentation they had obtained and get fluent on the systems.
John asked the man if he had some links to sites with the documentation so he could continue reading on his own. The man took his email address and emailed him the links to the online training. They then finished the paperwork to get John on the payroll. John didn’t negotiate salary with the man and the man was all too happy to avoid an argument about the low pay. They had been seeing a lot of push-back about the pathetic wages they were offering. The main reason they hadn’t already staffed up for this (or any) contract was that few would take their pathetic wages and the owners were too cheap to raise the salary. John would be making twelve dollars per day. Some days would be eight hours and some would be fourteen, but he would always make twelve dollars per day.
Several busy, yet uneventful, weeks passed for John. He established a bank account under his new identity so he could cash his paycheck. Every day he went into work and spent most of it reading manuals. A flurry of people went in and out of the data center installing computers and giving John some instructions on how to start and stop them. The team from Big Four Consulting landed with the first set of backup media to install on the machines. John had even more documentation to read with respect to the starting, stopping and troubleshooting of the bank applications. He spent quite a bit of time on the phone in training conference calls.
John’s boss managed to hire several other people who knew less than John about computers. He was supposed to train them as best he could. John was promoted to lead operator simply because someone had to be lead operator and he had been there the longest. It was odd to be at a place only a few weeks and receive a promotion. Of course the promotion came only with a title, not any money or extra benefits. It did come with one intangible benefit for someone with John’s sideline: He was allowed to read up more on the banking systems and he received administrator passwords on the systems. In his reading John learned that once the data center migrations were complete, roughly one-third of the world’s money supply would pass through the systems he controlled every day.
Margret sat looking at the pile of paper on her desk, the triple booked meetings on her schedule and then back to the email from Kent which had been copied to Kathryn.
Margret,
I will be traveling to our other locations over the course of the next four weeks having meetings with the IT teams in place there. I’m assigning you the data center migration project. You will be the liaison between Big Four Consulting and the business.
Kent
“The son of a bitch should be castrated with a rusty spoon,” Margret said aloud. He had done nothing on the project or work-related for the past three months. His entire day consisted of hobnobbing with higher-ups to get a lunch appointment set up each day, then spending the afternoon coordinating foursomes for Saturday golf. He wouldn’t even attend a meeting unless someone above him was going to be there.
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