Dilbert in India [Jim]

As was noted earlier, Friday was my birthday. I spent the day trapped in a Dilbert cartoon. The Human Resource Management program at the school at which I work had a day long seminar organized by the students. They invited me to go, so naturally I went. While there I learned that the goals of the Human Resource Department of a company are 1) to continue to efficiently engineer cutting edge solutions so that the company may endeavor to synergistically customize interdependent sources while promoting personal employee growth; 2) to proactively initiate diverse leadership skills as well as to interactively build long-term high-impact services; and 3) to synergistically coordinate ethical services such that the company may continue to globally engineer inexpensive solutions. And I always thought HR departments just managed the payroll.

None of those are actual quotations from the seminar, by the way, the real versions were much, much, much longer. I almost had a complete breakdown when one young man spent 4 minutes explaining that if you don’t tell employees what they need to know to do a job, then, shockingly enough, they won’t be able to do the job. The program started at 10; the speeches were non-stop until 2. Then lunch. Then an amateur version of Shaw’s Pygmalion (meant to show that HR departments are really important because they can convert anyone to something special); and then an endless quiz competition in which the questions were so esoteric that nobody in the room knew the answer to about 90% of them. Then another speech to summarize all the valuable insights of the day.

Things were much better after I got home--we went out to dinner at a pizza place. There is an interesting (to us, but probably not to you) story about this pizza place. The last time we were in India, we went up to Nepal and the Public Affairs Officer at the Consulate there took us to a pizza place called Fire and Ice, owned by an Italian woman. The owner has opened up another store in Kolkata, and we finally got over there. It was extremely good and the pizza was real pizza, not the Indian version of pizza (e.g., tikka chicken with cumin sauce). Janet read in one of the local papers that when the woman wanted to open a store in Kolkata, she needed a source for Mozzarella cheese. So, she arranged a small loan to some local women to get cows, and then she taught them how to make Mozzarella cheese which they deliver daily to the restaurant.

For my birthday, my family gave me socks, olives, and a 5-volume collection of Jeeves and Wooster stories. The olives were from Lily; Lily likes olives and figured this was a good opportunity to convince Janet to buy some.

Today, I had to go over to the school for a three hour seminar on “Globalization Through Overseas Investment.” The speeches were all as vacuous as the title. Well, expect the Communist guy who was painfully ignorant. The main speaker was the Chief Advisor to the Minster of Finance of the Government of India—he is the equivalent of a Assistant Treasury Secretary or whatever we call these people in the States. He seemed like a sharp guy, but he was clearly trying not to say anything in his speech.

Thanksgiving Dinner was great. It was a good sized crowd, maybe 75 people. Most of the Americans in Kolkata are either Consular Officials or missionaries working in some sort of social service organization. The Consol General has a 5 year old boy who was running around wild in the backyard. At one point Clara tackled him--that’s my girl.

Thank you Noah for an excellent birthday card. For those of you not in the Gould clan, Noah sent me a card with a hand-drawn picture of Dilbert talking to Dogbert. Dilbert says, “According to market research, 99.9 percent of 40 year olds do not shovel snow in their shorts.” [The inside reads “Happy birthday to one of a kind.”] I feel bad for those 99.9% of 40 year olds. And thanks Carol and Sam for your cards too—and Sam, when we get back, you can put on a pair of shorts and come over to help me with the snow.

It is weird to think about snow.