Some changes !!!

Well it is time to sit back and think what has actually gone wrong ( or right ) with me over the past few months.
I am becoming that which I did not like to be once. Perhaps the system and policies are making me someone else without even my consent.
When I first joined a project I knew to meet people with a genuine smile. I knew to enjoy the project outings and team parties. I knew to enjoy the project and DC initiatives.
Here people are like the bits of colors in a kaleidoscope . The picture keeps changing- people change , work change , problems change. I never had the same people working with me for ever. Initially that was the most difficult part when I found it difficult to part with the people I was comfortable with.
Then it became a practice .
The long 5 years has taught me more to forget than to remember. I was forced to unlearn to fit into new structures and work methods. If I kept all those database and table structure in my head I would get confused with the new ones… So all those I learned for months I had to undo in a week to grasp new things.
As time went I learnt what people spoke and meant were not the same in a corporate world . There are phrases and jargon used over and again for decades to talk when there is nothing to talk. I could hear people talking for hours without making any sense. The group of people whom we could associate and could be friends slowly vanished. They were either moved to far off projects or were married away or went onsite . The immediate crowd became a pool of strangers talking jargon.

Eventually I had to be one among those jargon talkers repeating someone’s phrases when I had nothing to tell or when I did not believe in what I was supposed to talk.
The onsite time put me into a jungle of human species where the rule was to eat or be eaten. I could see people slitting throats and stabbing from behind and still smiling away proud. It is from there that I learnt to kill rather than be killed.
I learnt ‘justice’ was just another word in the dictionary.

By the time I returned I could no longer feel any bonds with any team around me. Office to me was just a space where I spend 9 hours to get my salary. People around became resources with whom I need to deal with daily to ensure the work is done. I don’t give them trouble like how others had given me.. at least not deliberately. But I don’t take any step to seem good to anyone. I have forgotten to smile from my heart to strangers. When I smile now it is the smile I give because I am supposed to smile when I talk to them in X , Y and Z situations.
I don’t feel any emotional bondage when I release one person and bid them good bye for ever. I have purposely toughened my mind not to feel too bad or too good for anything in office. Even those faces whom I have worked for years I can forget the next day as long as their replacement is good enough or even better.

Every time I step into my office I feel I am keeping the humane side of me outside the campus. And then when I walk out of the campus and step into our car , I start living again. I leave the jargon and work behind not wanting them to cling on to me even for a second outside the 9.xx hours I am supposed to live with them.

After all, sacrificing a 9 hours to live the remaining hours happy is a good deal I think .At least i am glad i have a life outside this office. I am just glad.