This is one amusing real story. The project manager (lets say he is Mr. X) on the project which I am working on currently, was given another project to handle from the same client. Our client is based in Netherlands and at the start of every such project, they invite all the lead engineers and designers on the job to their office to their office in netherlands for a kick off meeting. The main part of the work of this particular project was offloaded to a regional office. The leads from this regional office knew the project manager’s name, but had not actually met him and were going to travel to the Netherlands with him. They team was going to meet the team for the first time on the international airport of Mumbai. , The members of this team were told that ‘The project workshare co-ordinator’ would be travelling with them.
Here I must say that Mr. X would be the ‘Overall workshare co-ordinator’ for all the projects of this client in due course of time (although he was the project manager for the time being) and the new job would eventually be handled by a newly appointed project manager in the regional office.
These ‘functional designation definitions’ gave rise to one of the most amusing incidents which I have heard !!
The first time they all met Mr. X was at the international airport, starting from where the whole team was going to travel together. Mr. X introduced himself to all others and exchanged niceties.
I will introduce my readers to Mr. X…..This gentleman is parsi and he has the typical fair and polished looks of the people in the parsi community. Although not very tall, he is quite well built. He wears spectacles and speaks English with a good accent. Also his name is quite uncommon (It could be common in Parsis, of course !!). This speaks nothing of his professional capabilities, but I can tell you that he is a good project manager…a good co-ordinator….but for this post….describing his looks is more important as you read on……
Coming back to our story, the people of the team were all together checking in their luggage, passing immigration and security checks. They were all talking to each other but kept a sort of ‘shy’ distance from X. Members of the team kept chatting to each other in Hindi but when X asked them something, they answered in English. This kept on happening. X initially felt that because these people had met him for the first time, they were being very formal with him and speaking to him in nothing but English. However after some time, he started feeling that something was not quite right. He asked some of the people straight away…..’Tumlog itna formal kyun ho yaar? Mee tumchach manus aahe’ (Why are you being so formal ? I am one of you only.). It was then that people’s faces turned towards him in surprise !!!
The reason for this surprise was that they had mistaken him as one of the men from the client’s side and were under the impression that he is dutch !! His fair looks, unusual name and good English had led them to that belief……and then people were initially bewildered when he uttered a sentence in Hindi and later absolutely flabbergasted when he spoke marathi !!
When people realized this, they laughed their heads off!! They told us this incident and we laughed !! And to this day we laugh heartily and take our hats off ……to the dutchman with an Indian tongue !!
