This is an article I wrote for the Monthly News Letter of our business group at Cadence.
Some puns/cracks might be lost on non-Cadence folks

The editors of the news letter are called Detonators - as the newsletter is called Ignite. I was the detonator of the month, so pretty much took the liberty to write anything I wanted … Here goes. ..

We all know M.M.C Teria is the most popular and loved employee of Cadence India. We meet her every day, yet all of us know so little about her.

Which is why this time around, the detonators decided to interview her. Here are some excerpts from the great conversation we had with M.M.C Teria - known as the Mirch Masala Café Teria, or just “Cafeteria”

Detonator (D): Teria, thanks for talking to us.  Tell us something about your family

Teria: You know them all very well. My husband, Kit Chen, works 24×7, for CDSI. His work is mission critical for Implementation Group employees because it is his team who ensures that the meals they get is rightly balanced in terms of Dutrition. My daughter - Kofi Mc Chines works all over the CDSI campus, and has constantly received appreciation from all Managers for keeping their teams awake.  My elder son, Sam Wichkiosky, works with me all day and basically earns bread for the family. My youngest son, Count Erlyve has just joined the Cadence community, is already being liked by everybody. Our family owes its salt to CDSI, and vice versa.

D: That is some family dedication. I must appreciate it. But I have a question - You just mentioned that your husband is responsible for Dutrition. I have never heard that word, what does that mean?

Teria: I can understand, especially you - who has the ability to make Microsoft Word crash by just running the spelling checker on your documents.  Dutrition is defined as amount of nutrients in your food which impact your ability to perform your duty. For example, more tasty food would be eaten more. More food is eaten, more lethargy sets in. More the lethargy - less the productivity. Hence it is imperative to ensure that the food is never delicious, but always edible. It is a tough task.

D: You have been around for a long time; tell us more about your career progress here.

Teria: Well, I joined Cadence when I was very young, and could serve only 15 tables at a time. I and my husband both had a leisurely life then. However, with time new buildings and new engineers were made, and the tables turned. I was given the role of Mirch Masala and now had to do much more than just work as a Cafeteria. My job responsibilities now additionally included comms meetings, parties, celebrations and table tennis. With time, table tennis and large scale parties have gone. But my work is as hectic.

But I really enjoy this work.

D: So what is the best part about your work?

Teria: The best thing about working as Mirch Masala is the technical contribution to issues of national and scientific importance. For example my husband’s research on Dutrition is being used by many companies world over. Also the Indian Army had borrowed the Rotis made by our family for creating edible bullet proof vests for the war zone. My daughter Kofi’s work has been cited as the standard for studying true randomness by many universities the world over. You see, you can never predict how strong or light or milky the next cup of coffee would be.

The other enjoyable thing is the daily gossip I get to hear. Even though it is the most non-enclosed area in CDSI, the implementation group employees think of the place as the talking point - the best being something called lunch one on ones.  These are one on one meeting of an employee and his or her busy manager. I say busy, because the poor guy has not other time left in his calendar than the lunch time.

However, the employee attitude in these one on ones is deplorable. The first issue they come up with in these meetings is the quality of the food. Why beat around the bush? Ask for your promotion or salary hike straight away, I see no value in dragging my family into this.

D: So this irks you the most in Cadence?

Teria: No, that one is not a core issue. The core issue is the FM channel they play all day all night. The worst of DJs and RJs and “Ouell Frands” kind of announcers get on my nerves. And nobody even listens to them. The other problem is a certain section of Implementation group employees, who find something very funny with the lunch. I hear loud laughter interspersed with two minute long giggles. These are annoying as well as personal attacks on the contribution of my family to this organization. Also I want to tell all Implementation Group employees and their friends in other groups - the cafeteria food is not bad - it is designed that way to keep your productivity up. You should thank me and my family for all the promotions you get due to good work.

D: You are getting all built up, lets relax and ask you some quick fire questions -

Teria: Okay shoot, but do it quickly (the lunch time is about to start)

Your three favorite movies: Mirch Masala, Roti and very recently Garam Masala

Your three Favorite books: “The Chicken Soup Series”, “Who moved my Cheese” and “Radio Crackling, Radio Gone”

And finally, your favorite sport: Table Tennis, what else?

I come back to my old thread, after battling with huge amounts of work at office and home and other places.

It is one of these reasons that I am writing a post on Coffee breaks today.

So the thing number four, that I have learnt in my 10 years of work experience is that the number of coffee breaks you have in a day are decided by the environ at office. It is a crucial number that you need to recalculate every month and a slight mistake could either land you in the list of  FOCIO (Freeloaders Of Coffee In Office) or in the list of WACO People  (Without Any Coffee at Office People).   A small disclaimer here - none of the acronyms  were purposefully designed  to sound like what they sound.

Before going into the details of the formula , we first need to understand why Coffee is so important at office. And to understand Coffee , we need to visit the coffee hole at office -

The Coffee Hole
The Coffee Hole starts where Gandhi, Lenin, Marx and and of course Ambedkar left. A coffee Hole is almost like an age old Madhya Pradesh Chitkubra Tribe Temple (If you don’t know about the Chitkubra Tribes of Madhya Pradesh or their temples, don’t worry, nobody does). Apart from the main deity - the coffee machines, these places typically house a number of scratched, bruised, broken coffee mugs waiting for their one-on-one with the God herself.  Mugs are often absent in temples where the bhakjanas have attained a higher level of bhakti. In these places there are white paper cups, all looking the same… all waiting for the day when coffee is poured into them, and they attain nirvana.

There is typically a water cooler for the converts, and you could see Gandhi’s tolerance in the packs of teabags kept for non believers. In this temple of modern world, all are equal, and that is why the coffee hole is so important for office politics. And I can illustrate this with an example.

Lets assume you want a raise, which is not a bad assumption at all. There is only one person who can get you the much needed raise, and that is your manager. Yes, the same guy who sits in one corner of the building with a cabin of his own. If you ask him for a raise in his  cabin, you will probably get a raise only when the recession is over. Ask any decently educated economist about when that happens, and you will know exactly what time frame I am talking about. In his cabin there so many  escape routes, the caller id phone, the beeping laptop, and the important and confidential work managers generally do. But when he is at the coffee machine, you know he is unguarded, except for the hot coffee in his hand. Catch him at the coffee machine and tell you that you drink so much coffee in office because you don’t have enough money to buy an Italian Espresso machine at home. Tell him that if your salary is raised, the coffee supply costs will come down. If your cube is on the way back for him, make sure that office boy does not clear your cups, so that your manager gets the point after looking at the amount of coffee you have ingurgirated since  morning.

The Number of Coffee Breaks in a Day
As I said earlier, it is very important to know how many coffee breaks should one take. Here are the rules -

• You should spend one-eighth of you work hours. If you work (in office) 8 hours a day, then you should spend 1 hour in coffee breaks. This 1 hour is the sum of all the coffee breaks you have in the entire day. Mathematically,

If the number is more than1 hour, you would be caught wasting time (FOCIO) and if it is less then people would keep loading with you work, as they know that you work 1 hour more than they do, in short you would be one of the WACO people.

• Your and your managers coffee breaks should almost never collide.  They can collide if you have an alternative agenda, as discussed in the example above. If you have no agenda, your manager will talk to you about work, hence spoiling what was meant to be y0ur break.
• If you have a team that you manage, then your break should collide with your team members. You can always talk to them about work, hence spoiling what was meant to be his or her break.
• Never have more than 2 breaks in the day with the same set of people.  If you do that, then the complete group’s image can be tarnished for loathing away and wasting time in breaks. This could be tough to defend later, because the acquisition would be true.
• Whatever you discuss in the break should  be kept for the break. When you start walking towards the cube you should talk about only work -at least whatever you talk about should sound like work. For example, in the following conversation you would know when the speaker entered the work area, he has smoothly transitioned to the right topics -

“Yaar ! Yesterday I saw this advertisement of Pizza, Lara Dutta was looking so hot man … I am pretty sure she never had the pizza herself , what a figure man. I mean the figure was flawless, and of course as I said earlier, we are going to meet all our figures this year. We are on target for getting a business of 720 million dollars , all thanks to the hard work which we have put in.”

• Your day should start with coffee and should also end with it. This way everyone knows how stressed out you are with work - which just means you have a lot of work to do. This is a particularly important impression you want to people to have in these times where “lists” are being created every quarter for down/right/re sizing the work force.

After writing such a long post, I need a coffee, so I am ending it here. But you need to revisit this post every month, and analyse and arrive at the number of coffee breaks you take after taking the above rules into account. Remember you are not a WACO and no one calls you FOCIO.