There’s Shit on My Outsourced Stair Landing!

There’s a lump of shit on the landing leading to my office in the Vashi Infotech Park, the home to myriad outsourced backoffices of the world. It has been lying there for nearly a week on the expensive marble and nobody bothers to complain or, hmm, wash it away. I see the sweeper everyday sleeping at another landing, exhausted by the life of a sweeper, the malingerer, neglecting his duty. He should have cleared it long ago. What can I do? I don’t like to wake him up and receive a scolding. I am a bit verbally challenged, wide, flabby lips, you know, inherited from father. In most such situations I have become the acquisitioned, rather than the inquisitor.

I don’t know whom approach, or, to complain to. So I hold my nose as I climb the stairs, carefully avoiding the lump, which has turned from yellow, to brown to almost black in a week it has been lying there. There’s a toilet a few meters away from the offending lump. The person who shat there could have used the neat facility we all use to commune with nature, but he (always it’s a “he”, not a “she”) didn’t use it. The need must have been that urgent!

The staircase leading to my office is in the Vashi Infotech Park is owned by the City Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO), and they have outsourced the cleaning to another company. The outsourced company apparently doesn’t care if their employees, eat, sleep, or shit (it could be them, who knows!) when they are on duty. But the problem with finding their office and lodging a complaint is that I could go to CIDCO, who will direct me to another department, and then finally when I have found the work-shirking-malingering nasty fellows, unwittingly the ugly lump would have disappeared. Pfffttt! So everyday I do the “holding nose” bit, though the offending black lump doesn’t smell now, carefully pivot my eyes thereto, and recoil, yech!, the shit is still there. Oh, God!

Outsourcing, you see. Outsourcing is still like the shit on the landing. But whatever is outsourced is difficult to control, as I, a denizen of the outsourced world knows. There are no immediate controls, and a lot of shit gets deposited on consumers’ doorsteps, not to talk of stair landings. And it stinks! There are scarce controls, and scarce responsibility, try any customer support call center and you will know (read my short story Computer-ben). Because they are in a hurry to sell you something, not to give you service. Meaning they are in a hurry to sell space in Infotech Parks, not to clean shit from stair landings.

We, who are the outsourced backoffice of the world, can’t get rid of a lump of excreta from our own Infotech Park’s stair landing? Oh, misery! What’s your excuse, hahn?

Vashi Infotech Park | Outsourcing