Hi, this is Linga writing another new story. If you like this, you can message me or get in touch with me at . I hope you all liked my earlier story about me, my wife and my sister-in-law. Without any further ado, here is my next story.
Kindly, note that this is a long story in multiple parts and would contain many details. It needs enough contexts to make it interesting. Lingeshwaran, affectionately called Linga (after Lord Shiva), is a strongly technical guy with hands on experience in software. He considers himself a developer even though he is a technical architect by designation as he still prefers to write code along with his team members. His passion for writing code crosses boundaries as he is comfortable with various programming languages like assembly, C, C++, Java, VB, VB.NET, C# and even Lisp. He is a fairly handsome guy married and was divorced because of internal strife. Although he has gotten over his broken marriage, he continues his live with his hobbies as a passion. His hobbies are varied and include trekking, reading, photography etc.
This is about his sudden encounter with a colleague of his when she joined his team. He had been given a separate budgetary allocation based on an idea he submitted to his manager. His manager, being a very friendly man, was impressed by his idea and approved the budget for developing the product of his idea. Introducing his team, which comprises of 3 members – Pratheek, Savitha and Sanjana (all names changed due to privacy reasons).
Savitha was the senior most member of the team, both in terms of experience and in terms of age. She was reporting to Linga directly. Pratheek was reporting to Savitha. Sanjana was a new addition to the team. She joined the team after 1 month of the project starting. She was also made to report to Savitha.
Pratheek and Savitha were often seen together. Linga took this as normal because this happens a lot in IT companies. Seeing each other does not mean that they get actually married to each other. It’s just a relationship that is maintained till both get married. Yes, of course, there are cases where the people who see each other do get married. But, forgive the digression. Even though Pratheek and Savitha were seeing each other, it did not mean that their eyes were roving, though it was more of Pratheek’s than Savitha’s. But this tale is not about Pratheek and Savitha, but it is about Linga and Sanjana.
Sanjana was recently married and had given birth to a child. She joined the work when the child became 11 months old, and she joined Linga’s team. Her husband was in Gulf and he left when she was 6 months pregnant. He was unable to take his wife to gulf. Visa processing was getting delayed unnecessarily and also her husband preferred his child to grow up in India. So Sanjana was living with her mother (her father was working in Ahmadabad in a car manufacturing company while her mother was with her in Chennai). They were staying enroute Linga’s house to the office, which was about 8 km.
When Sanjana joined the team, she started to get comfortable pretty quickly and started to even better Pratheek in many ways. This made Savitha a little uncomfortable as she felt that she may end up losing Pratheek during the appraisal times. For this reason, she always belittled Sanjana whenever she was reporting her status reports to Linga. As far as Linga was concerned, he was more interested in the project and wanted to make sure that his project is appreciated by the senior management. So he decided to have a chat with Sanjana. He setup a meeting with Savitha, Sanjana and himself the following morning.
As the meeting progressed, Linga was able to discern that there was no problem with the work done by Sanjana but there was some mismatch in the equation between Savitha and Sanjana. He therefore decided to resolve this issue by making Sanjana report to him instead of Savitha. Savitha saw this as a bigger hit. But Linga assured her that nothing will be amiss and everything will be alright. There was an implicit faith in Linga by anyone working in his team. Such was the case with Savitha as well. She trusted her manager and went about her tasks to Pratheek and reporting the status of the project to Linga. She did interact with Sanjana to get the status of her work and report it to Linga. This was going on till the end of the project. The interesting part was how Linga brought about a smoother equation between his team members. That is what we will see now.
As soon as Sanjana was asked to report to Linga, he took it upon himself to know about her. She told him about her, her kid and her mom and where they were staying. As the project progressed there was pressure on everyone to deliver. This started to translate into late nights and early morning. One day, after an arduous night with all in the project and a partial delivery completed, the team retired. Since Pratheek and Savitha were close to each other, Pratheek offered to give lift to Savitha. Sanjana wanted lift from Linga and he offered her as her house was en-route to his house. As they got into the car, Sanjana started opening up. (This was after about 4 months of Sanjana joining the team). Linga was a good listener and often empathized with her as the right spots. Linga often used to empathize with his team and that was one of the reasons why many folks wanted to join his team. He was a great team lead and a good friend to all in his team.
As Sanjana got talking, she started to talk about her married life and how she wanted to go to Gulf to join her husband but because of visa issues she was left sad. Nevertheless, she did not really realize what she mean. Soon Linga dropped her at her house. It was 9:45am on Friday. As soon as she climbed down from the car, Linga got a call from one of his friend. So he parked his car aside and picked up the phone and was conversing.