May 8, 2023

My first day at my new job. I had fitful sleep- awoke a few times to get a drink of water. This Monday morning was like no other in a very long time. It was one where my wife’s 5 AM alarm was a universal slumber-ender for the entire household. Not just her. She had to leave at 6.50 AM. My boys had to leave for school at 7.15 AM and I- after such a long time- was going to have a normal life- and leave for work at 7.30 AM- by car rather than airplane.

My wife drove off first but had to return shortly thereafter to bring back my set of keys which she had placed in her handbag the evening before and forgotten to take them out. I was going to need these today. I had to lock the Master bedroom and also drive my car to work. I took a shower, got ready, and left.  As I cruised down Sheikh Zayed Road towards Abu Dhabi, I remember the song that was playing on spotify.  It was “California girls”- not the classic Beach boys version but the even better David Lee Roth version. It took all of 20 minutes to pull into the driveway of my new workplace. I picked up a visitor’s pass from the Guardhouse by parking just by the entry gate. Thereafter I drove in , went past the main building and did a U turn to get back into the driveway of the office. I reversed parked into one of several empty Visitor’s Parking slots. I waited for the clock to strike 8 AM- I was 4 minutes early- even after my pause at the gate and my slight detour.  I got out of the car, picked up my laptop bag and headed into the building. There was a guy at the reception- to whom I said I was here to see Sowmya Satheesh from HR as it was my first day at work. “Mr. Dasgupta?”, he inquired pleasantly. And so my day started. I was led into a meeting room on the first floor of the 2 storyed office. Sowmya collected my documents, my passport and two photos. And following that I received several briefings from HR- Talent development, Performance Management, mandatory trainings, Quality and HSSE and so on. Somewhere during this barrage I discovered an office assistant- a Malabari called Altaf. He brought me black coffees- 2 or 3 of them all morning. The office was modern- in many ways reminded me of the Panalpina/ DSV offices near Al Makhtoum Airport. I was still in the meeting room on the first floor. The meeting rooms, I noticed, were named after cities. At some point an HR learning focal was kind enough to give me a plant tour for the Medium and Low Voltage Cables- which was a new experiene- I had been in many factories in my career but can’t say I had any familiarity with a slew of wire-drawing machinery that I saw were planted in linear “train like” clusters across the plant. At the end of the plant was a curious room which had high metallic walls and a funky contraption in the middle to which various Cables were attached- for testing. The room was called a “Faraday Cage”, I learnt. There were various technical standards for Cables and this meant conducting a lot of different tests- both on the metallic conductors as well as the PVC insulating materials. And something about Electrical Testing unsettled me, I pictured a passage of a very high electric current to a set of wires- and a live wire in any location to me is an unsafe situation. I brought this up to my host- but he assured me that there were redundant controls that would all activate before any situation got really unsafe. Thereafter we visited the Central Warehouse which seemed full but organized, But the same could not be said for the years which was almost unending- and had loads of material stored outside even though the materials safety data sheets recommended against it. I was told by my host that we had a dearth of covered warehouse space and this would be something I would beed to address, I told him that I would try- but that based on my experience no one likes to spend on warehousing- so we might need a creative solution here.

We then went to the office canteen which had two counters- a south asian one and an arabic one. I chose the south asian counter and took two chapatis some dal and a pineapple curry with some chopped salad. I realized one could eat somewhat healthy if one so wished. 

Another couple of HR briefings and I was escorted to my office- which rather blew me away. I had not ever had a corner office- and this one was not just that. It had the most amazing natural light and was well appointed with a table for a discussion with 4 or 5 members- a white board, cabinets, phone- the works. I requested to reverse my computer desk so I could face the open office outside where my team was situated. This was discussed at length with the two guys who handled all the facilities management projects.- Savio the experienced and Sean the kiddo- again two Indians (presumably from Goa or Mangalore). They came over to check out the connections to power and figured out a way to do this but asked that I wait until the weekend so that they could get a contractor to do the fit up. This was fine of course with me. I did not do much today but just bask in the corner office for an hour before heading back home. Another easy drive back and amazingly the traffic towards Dubai just happened to start after my exit to Al Nassim road from Sheikh Zayed Road. So I beat it altogether and was home at 5.15. I figured on most days I’d be probably a bit later but should be home by 6 most of the time. The evening was spent with a shortish swim, and a watch of the KKR vs PBKS IPL game , which was an absolute humdinger that resulted in a last ball 4 enabled win courtesy of the new sensation Rinku Singh. A Dinner of all kinds of leftovers- Upma, Paratha, Chicken curry, Vegetable kofta curry and also some freshly made baingan bharta. I was in bed by 10.45 PM- the boys by 9.45. This was all too normal for me,  I cannot really imagine this will be the routine moving forward. But we shall see won’t we.