السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته،

الحمد لله والصلاة والسلام على رسول الله وعلى آله وأصحابه ومن تبعهم إلى يوم الدين وبعد

Back in the day I used to work at Siemens in the Siemens Information Systems department. There were about 15 employees in a small room each having his or her (there was only 1 girl) computer. I’d never worked for a big company before this, so when I first walked in after having two interviews where I impressed the managers I had felt a feeling of uneasiness. I saw the small “cozy” looking room, a narrow small room near the cafeteria and I felt that this might be a nice place to work.

“We need to put him on training for the first week” my manager says to the staff. “Put him with foolaan” replied the majority of the staff. I look at this guy innocently smiling at me, I thought that he seemed like a nice fellow.

“Here just sit with him for today and learn what to do, and tomorrow we’ll have set up your accounts and you can start working“, said my manager.

I sat down with this balding, short, tanned, bulging bellied hispanic guy. Was his description necessary? Yes. Yes it was.

“How are you doing?” He said to which I replied “Good and yourself?“. I picked up a notepad to start taking notes to learn about what to do… it was my first day on the job… I have to learn the tricks of the trade.

The phone rings… the fool looks at me with a serious face, “See the most important thing about this job is the customers, those people who work hard to make this company function and they rely on us to help them when their systems go down. So they are the most important people and this is the most important part of your job… making the customer happy” and he points to the phone “You see an unhappy customer means that you are not doing your job well… it means that the customers are not getting any satisfaction and that’s your fault!” He goes on like this while the phone rings until finally the fool picks up the phone. “Hello, Foolan here from Siemens information systems, please hold” and he mutes the lady and turns back to me “Yes. Like I said. The customer. Hold on a minute“

He gets up and walks our to the coffee room, makes some coffee and comes back 5 minutes later and unmutes the phone, “Sorry about that ma’am, what’s the problem?” As the woman starts to speak, he mutes the phone and takes his headset off and says “So this is your first day on the job… I can’t emphasize this enough… the customer“

This goes on for the rest of the week where all I learned is that I was being trained by an idiot, and that the joke of the week was that they purposely had me train with him.

Analyzing the behavior of this guy, one would begin to realize how the company would have him there for 5 years with no promotion. To exemplify his behavior, let me describe how he’d walk into the room.

The door swings open, and all you hear is the singing of a short, balding man. You then see this character dancing his way to his seat. When I say dancing, I mean he was twirling around and shaking his bulging stomach and actually “dancing his way” to the seat singing. No one seemed to pay him any notice except me.

Hearing how he tortured customers on the phone by toying with their problems and acting like he’s solving it gave me the obvious impression that he did not like his job. One day he yelled “WOOOHOO YOU ALL WONT BE SEEING ME NEXT WEEK! I GOT ME A NEW JOB“. However next week rolls by and he walks back into work. No one said anything, we all knew he didnt get the job.

Thinking back at his tom-foolery I begin to wonder how these people function in their homes and their lives if they behave like this at work. I remember him saying “Yea I have to pick up my kid from school” and I muted a customer and turned around in utter disbelief saying “you’re someones father??“

I wonder whatever happened to him.