All work and no pay....off

Summer internship, an introduction to the life that is to be for the next 40 odd years at least, I knew this was not going to be a walk in the park , that it would probably be a tough harrowing experience but what I and a few of my mates have been through in the past couple of weeks may have left us all scarred,badly, for the rest of our lives.

Going to a real estate company was never my first choice but we were forcefully placed into that company even though our interview sucked ass, so with bated breath the first day came, which ended up with us spending time with the Hr madam who was chatting with us the entire day but made us sit from 10 AM to 6 PM with nothing constructive done in between barring us learning about her and us learning more about each other, 6 other students were doing their SIP from the company as well.

The office however is bloody small and the 6 of us are forced into a cubile which is no more than 6X8 feet , maybe even smaller, we can barely move about and also the AC does not work well and makes the place stuffy.

The next day we got our project briefing, to understand the project we needed around 5 tries , we thought we were to find out why some flats weren't selling, then we were to find out the positives and negative points of the flats, then we were supposed to actually make the marketing strategy of the said plots and now it seems we have to generate leads to sell the flats.

While this might seem alright the biggest problem has been the fact that all 6 of us have been given individual projects with some of us barely having any knowledge of the area, geography and road map of Calcutta, especially ME, so while i got a brilliant set of projects near the Nayabad, Naredrapur area( which is a village is most senses). I had no idea of how to get these, well frankly I had never heard of these places before as well, thankfully we students on our own decided that each one of us would accompany the other to reach the said destination, when I reached mine, with absolutely no help from the company I had to find and locate my place, which meant traveling in the metro which took me another 30 minutes from my office , then it took me a total of 30 minutes more via walking and auto to find my place, a shoddy desolate place with barely anything worth talking , why anyone would want to shift here is beyond me and what would I be able to glorify and present here would be a real challenge for God , let alone a mortal like me.

While these site visits weren't fun but it was a part of the job which most of us were, in fact all of us were doing everyday,the traveling does at a price, monetarily and physically,I have spent nearly 1000 Rs in a week to cover so much distance also I have gotten massively sunburnt and gone 2-3 shades darker, then recently,yesterday in fact, while we all planned to go to another site visit we were told to stay in office so that our MD would brief us, the HR lady told us to eat our lunch and come back.
She even went to an extent of scaring us, when the briefing started he said
"I am very disappointed with the way you have worked and if you continue like this I will have no hesitation to sack you, if you make a mistake in the next 15 days you will get the sack"

We were thinking WTF is going on?
while the boss had a real go at glorifying himself as to how he helped LG recover its sales, how he built a telecom giant, how he knows what each one of us is thinking, why all the cell phones have rounded edges, how he got a corolla for free, how his salary was aournd 20 crore plus and he still gave up the job, etc etc etc.

After the bashing we were asked to leave the office and come back on a saturday, a day when we have no work in a real estate company because everyone is busy chatting away to clients or taking them to site visits, oh and I remember we were also asked now by the MD to find clients for the flats which means scoping and surveying the area within a radius of 10-15 kms of my location. Its a freaking village no one has 20 lakhs to buy any flat. Back to the point, now that we leave the office and are waiting outside worried that we may not get our clearance certificate, the MD's wife comes out and shouts at us while we are standing on the street as to "what are you people doing here?", like she owns the place, that was the last straw.

Called a cab, the 5 of us, off we went to our college and started hammering away at our cell which got us placed and all the teachers present there, after an hour of crying and shouting foul we understand that nothing can be done and that we are stuck here for a good while,2 months to be exact, nothing can be done and we must somehow survive. Every teacher was saying "this is part and parcel of life, don't worry this too shall pass" and all of em crummy lines which we hear again and again.

Cut to today,saturday, all of us are pissed to say the least the HR comes up today like nothing has happened and she tells us that the boss is like that and nothing can be done, everyone gets a lashing almost on a daily basis and that we shouldn't worry about it and that we would all be there right until the end of the 2 months.

While people told me that this SIP would be a learning experience, all I have learned is how to burn a hole in my pocket and travel to remote desolate areas of the city.

All work and no pay/play makes Adeem a very pissed off man.