February 2, 2024

 Another short Friday, but had some meetings scheduled in the morning. I was a bit agitated about the sale of my Audi Q7. I settled for.a very low sale price, but somehow it still wasn't closing the sale in a timely manner. More inspections, the end-user complaining of some noise form the engine and so on.  My car, thus, was not on my person anymore . But there was no transfer of title yet. Which means I haven't even begun to get paid for the car. In this state of limbo, my mind was unsettled and this made it difficult to concentrate on work matters. There were also so many other matters to concentrate on. the boys upcoming school excursions, the house party on Feb 10 which required that I get a bit gig ready on 5 songs at least. Not to mention the work out the catering aspects. Then there was the issue of my ICICI debit card which still has not made it to my Jamshedpur residence. I am waiting for my parents to return following which I will make yet another call to the bank's hotline to schedule delivery. I owe money to Aveek Chatterjee for the Vinyl he sold me. Rs 2600 or AED 120 or so. It was not cheap- but I still needed to pay him. Maybe I should set him up on my DBS payee list and just transfer money directly from my Singapore account? 

Just about this time, the boss's secretary called me and said that the boss wanted to see me. I sensed it may not be good news. And it wasn't. He was in foul mood because Clobbi wasn't working. A little background on Clobbi. This was a software program that we implemented company-wide to manage the cable manufacturing process digitally. It put together several pieces of live data from other existing systems like Salesforce, SAP etc and combined it with machine and factory data. Let's just say the implementation of this system was sophomoric to say the least. And as it happens, we had now announced to the world ( meaning our private shareholders) that we had gone live with this. The reality is that we switched something on and it had led to utter disaster.  Things were not working. Data was showing massive overconsumption, which was affecting the January month-end closing.  Someone had told my boss that warehousing was a huge problem because we were releasing materials to the factory without booking them out in SAP.  We were doing this at a later stage to clean up the system- but with the advent of Clobbi this was not going to work as it was a real-time expert system. Physical workarounds outside th system had to be prohibited because reporting was real time and based  real time systems data. Now even if this was true, this was the least of all the problems. I could just make the warehouse not release material until the physical material was booked, It would delay production a bit, but was not the end of the world. I could see that there were far larger problems and he was singling me out unfairly based on some soundbite he had heard. And this is the way things work here. People don't do a professional collaborative implementation, then when things go wrong they try to pin the blame somewhere- and that too casually and by pulling rank, instead of having an adult conversation about it. It so happened that all his direct reports were soon pulled into the boardroom for a come-to-jesus. Lot osf shouting from the boss, some push back from the CFO, some form the CEO of Cables saying we should have done a better implementation. I just said let's put our heads together and see how we can get it to work- whomever needs to make the necessary changes will do so- as we all wanted it to work. If we get to a point where we cannot because the fix is not a people-related fix, but rather an asset-related one which will take a longer  time to fix, then we can table those specifically.

I came back to the office and asked my team to look into the matter. I was surprised if it were actually happening as I had made it amply clear to put system discipline on priority. But I am not in the warehouse 24/7 and if my staff is getting bullied into releasing material that is not booked, well then that shall cease right away. I will learn more on Monday, I thought to myself and prepared to leave work with that.

The rest of the day was spent in cooking some paella, drinking some wine and watching some TV. No real action, felt like I had had some extra time and was not running around. It helped massively that Tintin was back to going to Regent School for his badminton extra curriculars. This meant he could bike there and I did not need to pick him up and drop him off which was a real pain and took a lot out of the feel of the weekend.

I was now driving around in a BYD Electric Vehicle, and I made two early observations into this move. The first is that there is no sound. The combustion engine has a roar or at least a whimper ( for a Toyota four-cylinder). The Electric engine is absolutely mute. You don't hear a sound nor any vibration when you switch on the ignition. That takes some getting used to. The second point is that it is unnerving to see how fast charge dissipates. You turn on the radio, it disspates faster. you turn on the A/c it positively plummets. As it stands, I will need to charge it almost everyday overnight. It is not like this is a once in two weeks run to the gas station. This is a daily activity- which needs to be managed into the never ending list of daily activities that make up our incredibly complicated urban lives.