My First Day

It starts.

My first job. With an MBA under my belt and holding my size-32 trousers up, I’ve done with education for the rest of my life. Or have I?

I’ve got a job. In a company that is very simply called Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. This being so easy for the lay person to pronounce and spell and remember, I felt obliged to make things a little complicated by introducing it to parents and loved ones as The Delight of the Touchy Tomatoes. Dumb. But it worked, so there.

New job. New city. New beard. New floaters. Some new shirts and trousers. New underwear. Am raring to go.

Induction happens everywhere. I’ve been through a pretty extensive one at my internship company, so I expected the day of lectures that we were treated to. But Consulting companies believe in efficiency and Six Sigma and all that jazz, and in the fact that we don’t learn anything from these lectures anyway while it is still their duty to perform ’em, so we got a week’s worth of talk-talk-talk crammed into a single day. Mission accomplished. We remember less than we even knew when we started out. Did I say done with education?

But us grown-up, pseud MBA’s had the distinct privilege of being inducted with the little people – the grown-down, unpseud just-graduated B-Com-mers from all over Hyderabad, Secunderabad and Thirdarabad (aka Cyberabad aka HiTec City aka Madhpur). They have been hired in droves for the largest (I think) practice of this company, Tax. And oh, these little people. They were taking notes too, even when the roll call was in progress. Go figure. Giggly, excited, jumping-up-and-down, miss-miss-he’s-pinching-my-bottom, i-know-the-answer-so-I’m-raising-both-hands-to-prove-it-na-na-na-na-na. Yes, you got it – they TAXED us. And that obvious joke is brought to you courtesy a thinking-out-of-the-box Strategy & Operations consultant who we shall call Sumit.

Man, the annoyance. We sat their sagely shaking our heads in understated disapproval, raising a concerned eyebrow, tapping our foot ever-so-lightly, asserting that we were never like this at their age, oh no.

Here’s a truth for you: If the MBA education adds anything to you, I think it adds the ability to act like other MBA’s. We wear the stiff white collar in two forms – as a halo above our heads and as a stick up our expensive butts.

Anyway, when the schedule for the following days was announced, the good news was that the Tax people would be leaving us to cause some expense for the Taj hotels, leaving us MBA’s to profit from their absence.

There was only one thing the MBA’s wanted to know, and that we learned at the end of the day: how much money do we get in hand after tax (oh, that darned word again!) deductions? The answer, in the words of the company: “Even after 7 years of work, we don’t know.” I think “A LOT” would have to suffice as a suitable answer.

Here’s yet another truth for you: I’m a consultant, and that makes it my job to talk too much but still say nothing and still earn everything.