DTSD – Desi Traumatic Stress Disorder

Damn, I almost blew my wad on that whole H-1B Pimp of the Month post, but I just couldn’t help myself.

I didn’t think I had any material for today, but the drive home gets the creative juices flowing. So, now I’ll get back to the CLS topic…

Day 9, and still alive in Desiville.

But the Desi Gladiator match is heating up.

Chinaman and I have been having lunch and sharing smokes all week. He finally got his system set up and working on some code. I myself have been getting pulled in all directions for the last two days while three CEWPs try to figure out how they want to me code this damn upload control. Each code review ends up in a Hindi squabble over whether to chuck the file as a BLOB to the database, save it the server, stream it somewhere, whatever. So what should have taken a day is taking two.

And I started to get a bad vibe from the architect, like he was getting impatient.

But he was the one suffering from ADD and overwork, causing him to be unable to make quick design decisions. And I was starting to get a little paranoid.

Did he expect this done in two hours? Why did he change his mind so often?

So when Chinaman started having problems, I was hesitant to help him. First, he was shocked to find out that there is a database, but no tables or objects – he would have to create them. A couple of slumdogs huddled over his shoulder, and told him to open up TOAD .

“Toad? What’s that?” he asked.

Oh shit, you do NOT do that in Desiville. You are expected to be familiar with the tools used to manage the giant black box called the Oracle database, or they will shitcan you ricky-ticky. Never mind that they have a Desi DBA, but no one knows what he does.

I leaned over and got him up and running. Showed him how to connect, use the Schema Browser, and how to create scripts and objects. But I was losing time on my upload control, and I felt that the architect was getting antsy. And I wasn’t about to lose this round of Desi Gladiator.

I took Chinaman outside for a smoke. I’m up to half a pack a day now. That’s life in the salt mines.

“Look, dude, I’ll help you out as much as I can, but I got work to do,” I explained.

“Sure, no problem, I just haven’t worked with Oracle in a while.”

“Yeah, I get it. But you have to understand, I once worked at a consulting company on a massive web project that was way behind schedule, kinda like this place. So they have me do a phone screening of three guys in New Jersey. One was Hispanic, another a white dude, and then some H-1B. The H-1B was sharp, so I told the boss to hire him. The guy they flew in wasn’t the same dude – it was some Pakistani who couldn’t speak English. He couldn’t even open InterDev. He was a dick also – real mean and surly. I spent a week carrying his ass, then got fired for not making my deliverables. That dumbass got stay for a couple of weeks because it was in his contract.”

Chinaman stubbed out his Marlboro Red. “That company should have got some karmic payback,” he said.

“Oh, they did. Went bust in the dot-com crash. But just so you know, I’ll help you out as much as I can, but this is the kind of place that will dump a guy like me if they think I ain’t keeping up.”

That was almost ten years ago, and to this day I haven’t forgotten that experience of getting fucked by some Desi agency and their H-1B whore. I guess I have some form of DTSD - Desi Traumatic Stress Disorder. The symptoms are paranoia, insomnia, and blogging compulsively.

And now it is time for payback.

They have a saying about Marines – No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy.

Thanks to that H-1B pimp and the Paki slumdog years ago, I am now in full combat mode. Sorry if some nice, well-meaning Indians here on legitimate work visas that can code and communicate in English get hurt along the way, but they call that collateral damage. And isn't that, like, what, .04% of all the Desis?

The mission now is to abolish the H-1B program and send the CEWPs home. Phase one of that mission is to destroy the myth that programmers are a commodity and a 25-year old slumdog from Delhi with a phony resume can do the same job as a 15-yr I.T. vet. The rally point for that phase of the operation is here at ITGrunt.com.

Don’t ever get between a Marine and his mission.

Gotta go to bed now -- big day tommorrow. The dumbass Asian PM scheduled a standing meeting of the entire development team (about 15 people, with just four honkies and Chinaman, the rest Hindus) for 4 PM on Friday. What kind if sick fuck schedules a weekly dev meeting at FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON EVERY FRIDAY.

A sick Desi-dicksucker, if you ask me.

To be continued…