Due to my morning hurry I had missed breakfast and was genuinely feeling hungry by now. But clearly Dufresne has a very business-oriented set-up where consultants spend all their time in the office, focussing on deliverables. This was very commendable, of course, but I really hoped I could get a sandwich.

Finally at 1 p.m. I got up to speak to Shailesh when I was grabbed by the shoulder by a consultant with a balding head, gold half-moon glasses and a shirt and tie. He asked me to accompany him to the boardroom immediately as there was a ‘crisis situation’ and he needed all the ‘bandwidth’ that was available to tackle the ‘firefighting’. He asked if I was allocated and, before I could answer, ran into the room by the coffee machine. Clearly this was a rare opportunity to impress the higher-ups at Dufresne so I rushed into the boardroom with a notebook and pencil from the orientation file.

The next few minutes were a blur and I do not recall everything in complete detail. I will have to refer to my notes.

The man said that the ‘blue team’ had found several ‘data deviates’ in the ‘Maximus flipbook’ and that we had to ‘bridge the needs and wants gaps on a red team priority’. He said that since the entire Maximus team had gone to the Taj for the new recruit sessions he was depending on me to ‘pull in resources and crunch out the slides’ even if it meant ‘checkboxing my timesheets’.

I immediately figured out that there was a mix-up somewhere. I was a new recruit, had no idea what the Maximus flipbook was and had never heard of the red or blue teams. And the gentleman in front of me had no idea of my predicament. I was slowly beginning to regret my eagerness to excel at every possible challenge when Debajit barged in and told ‘Jerry’ that I was a new recruit and knew nothing about anything.

We all had a great big laugh about it and it finally turned out that Jerry was the HEAD OF INDIAN OPERATIONS! And then I was super thrilled to find out that I was the first new recruit he had met this year. He told me to call Yogita about my missing the new recruit sessions at the Taj and then asked me if I wanted to join him for lunch!

It was like a dream come true for me, Diary. Here I had completely messed up my first day at work and already the Country Head was inviting me to join him for lunch.

We took the lift to the building café on the ground floor and I made a point to avoid the aamras. Debajit, who had accompanied us, spoke to Jerry all through lunch and I hardly got a chance to speak. When lunch was over, ‘Deba’—he asked me to call him that!—told me I could go back to my hotel room and take the rest of the day off. He said that this was just my first day at work and things would soon get unbelievably hectic as the ‘pipeline was very robust’; I should use all the free time I could get.