Saturday, August 9, 2008

The Cabbie

Sleeping routine takes a little hit when you are working in a BPO & I know it for a fact coz since last 3 weeks I've been in 3 different shifts. Sometimes I don't even remember when I went to sleep & when I wake up. These days my shift starts at 8:30am but I've still got a hangover of 7:00 am shift so today also I woke up at 4:30am, called transport office & asked them about my pick up time- "Yours is last pick up so cab will come around 7:30am, cabbie will give you a call" someone from the transport informed me. There was plenty of time to catch on my worthless rest, so I again went to sleep & woke up at 6:45am. Then around 7:30am cab came, saw this cabbie first time, his name was Ali( saw his ID hanging at Cab's Rear Mirror). He was in a busy conversation with the rest of staff (2 guys & 1 girl). "Madam Ji, when a cabbie leaves his home every morning, he don't know if he'll come back or not" said The Cabbie. "Oh man, now the whole route I've to heard his boasting" I thought, but before the moment I would have asked him to play the FM or started laughing at his Film Dialogue, everyone else in the cab started chatting & it didn't took me long to figure out that some mishap has occurred. Today at around 3am in the morning, one of my office cab while coming to Delhi from Noida via toll Bridge, got crushed by a truck which was coming from opposite side. Toll Bridge has separate routes for both Delhi to Noida & Noida to Delhi, but that idiot truck driver decided to come to noida via noida to delhi route & that too with his truck's head lights off.... I still can't understand from where he took the U-turn, whatever may be the case, his foolishness resulted in the death of 3 people including cab driver & rest of the staff were also severely injured. Ali told me all this & also that he was coming behind that cab & he took the injured people to the hospital in the same cab in which we were traveling. While talking we reached Toll Bridge, Ali asked- "Should we go through this route?". The Girl in the cab asked him to go ahead without realizing the condition of a person who has just lost a friend at that bridge just a few hours ago. Almost every media channel was present there to sell their story and the cab driver who takes it as an insult to drive slower than 100km/hr on toll bridge was today driving at 30km/hr. We reached office, went to production floor with our trainer around 9:00am (Training period is the only time in BPO when you can enjoy & take the liberty to come late). Manager at production floor was shouting at all advisors to increase the productivity & also saying that the only way to do this is to take OWNERSHIP. The word Ownership reminded me of only one person- Ali, who first took all the injured people to the hospital, then came to do his duty & then sincerely followed staff's order to go via route where just few hours ago he has seen one of the worst day of his life.