By eleven on Tuesday morning, I had moved a blue rectangle four pixels to the left and billed an American mega corporation for it.
“Much stronger,” said my boss. “Can we make it feel more research-led?”
Really?
I had a doctorate in computer science. Somewhere in a journal nobody read was an optimization algorithm with my name on it. It concerned a restricted class of graphs and had taken twenty four months of my life. My girlfriend had left halfway through. I waited until after submission to call her.
“I can add a dotted border.”
“Exactly.”
Outside, a water tanker had broken down beneath a billboard advertising lake-view apartments. Traffic on the Outer Ring Road hadn’t moved since I’d sat down for this review.
I added the border.
I also maintained a spreadsheet called Research_Value_Tracker_FINAL_v6.xlsx. Column H contained projected business impact. The numbers had been entered by a woman who’d left two years earlier. Nobody knew how she’d arrived at them, but we still used her percentages. We now call it Institutional knowledge.
That afternoon, a delivery manager asked me to increase an efficiency gain from thirty to forty percent.
“Based on what?”
“Leadership expectations.”
I changed the cell. Three charts improved immediately.
My old supervisor called at six.
We met at a bar off Old Airport Road. It smelled of old frying oil, the tables were sticky, and nobody was putting guava in the beer.
His beard had gone mostly white. There were bags under his eyes, and he was wearing the checked shirt I remembered.
He looked at my clothes.
“They finally got you into proper trousers.”
“Khakis.”
“Yes. The uniform.”
My shirt cost more than a month of my old stipend. I’d bought three pairs of those trousers because everybody at my level wore them.
“You wore that shirt to my thesis defense,” I said.
“It still fits.”
It didn’t, it was considerably looser now.
He ordered whisky. I ordered beer. When the drinks came, he picked up his glass, shot a look at me and and emptied it neat. The bags under the eyes did not flinch one bit. Could have been orange juice.
He used to keep an electric kettle in his office and a drawer full of one-rupee instant coffee sachets. After midnight, he’d empty a sachet into a cup, add barely enough hot water to dissolve it, and knock it back. One every hour, until we finished or I gave up.
“Remember when the kettle broke?” I asked.
“You wanted to go home.”
“It was three in the morning.”
“You always wanted to go home when your proof stopped working.”
He waved at the waiter for another whisky.
Then he asked whether my company had any work for him.
His tenure was revoked, and the visiting appointment hadn’t been renewed. His wife needed a carer now. He told me what the agency charged, including weekends.
“I can do twenty hours,” he said. “Mostly from home.”
“You know, most of what we call research isn’t research.”
“Yes. I’ve read your company’s linkedin posts.”
I took a long sip of my beer.
“There’s a proposal I could use a second opinion on.”
“Do you want an opinion, or do you want my name on it?”
“The opinion.”
He held out his hand for my phone.
My wife was still up when I got home.
“How was Professor?”
“You know how he used to down shots of black coffee? I think he’s found the same thing with whisky now.”
“Did you eat?”
“I ordered peanuts.”
“Did he eat them?” I couldn’t remember.
She put dinner on the table. I emailed him the technical appendix and confirmed the fee we’d agreed: fifteen thousand rupees.
He called at eight the next morning.
“Your process scheduler assumes it knows how long every job will take before the job starts.”
“It estimates.”
“Based on what? The quote ends with exact durations. An estimate won’t give you this result. Who checked it?”
It was Column H. I had approved the appendix.
He waited.
“I’ll read it again” I said.
“Read page nine first.”
By noon, he’d sent four pages. I worked through them with a pen. He was right. The promised saving depended on an assumption our system couldn’t meet.
I printed a copy, put in corrections in the margins and had it ready by the time my boss arrived at 1 pm.
“We’ll remove the appendix,” he said.
“We need to remove the forty percent.”
“It’s an indicative figure.”
“It’s on the pricing slide.”
“That’s what the discovery phase is for. And we will have a buffer”
He picked up my printout, glanced at it and put it down, and looked at me straight.
“Don’t make this a problem.”
At 9 pm, we met the client. My boss was on the call. So was the delivery manager. I had the slide open, with its forty percent and the rectangle we’d spent Tuesday improving.
“Can you justify the 40% gains?” Asked the man on the other side of the Zoom call.
I could. I had done it before.
“Yes. Our historical baseline is thirty. The AI accelerators add twenty on top of that. You have the breakdown. Forty is the conservative end. You’d likely see more.”
I said it in the voice we use for American clients - flat vowels, slow and measured.
On his tile, my boss nodded.
Below the camera, on my desk, were the professor’s four pages. I had gone through them with a pen at noon. I thought about the coffee sachets.
Nobody spoke. The client was waiting for the next slide.
“Actually,” I said.
The voice was gone. I just sounded tired.
“Actually what?”
“No. We can’t justify it. The forty percent assumes the scheduler knows how long every job will take before it starts. Ours doesn’t.”
He asked why it was in the proposal.
“I put it there.”
He asked us to take the number off the pricing slide and send it again. I emailed it while we were still on the call.
At 9 am the next day, my boss shut his office door behind me.
He didn’t raise his voice. He sat down and asked what the objective of that exercise had been.
“The numbers were made up.”
“The numbers were directional. We sell capability. We sell roadmaps. You don’t blow up a discovery phase because you want to play peer review.”
I let him finish.
He tapped his phone against the desk. My quarterly incentive was attached to this deal. Two lakhs. He said the amount the way he’d read out a date. His multiplier was attached to it too. He said that part slower.
“Figure out whether you’re an academic or an executive,” he said, turning back to his monitor. “Right now you’re failing at both.”
The meeting had been booked for 25 minutes. It ended on time.
The Accounts team returned the professor’s invoice. No client charge code. My boss had already replied to the thread.
Do not process.
I left it sitting there until six.
Then I transferred fifteen thousand from my own account, attached the receipt to the thread, and changed the subject line.
“Non-billable-but-Payable”