Work has started in full swing in the bank. And the biggest challenge is to make the bank users enter all the BPD data into the system. One can imagine the plight of the users when we ourselves have to encounter n no. errors and server restarts while entering data into Finacle. Add to the fact the language problem and the dependence on the translators. At times even I do not understand what I am explaining so God only knows what the translator explains to the user regarding an accounting entry or functionality. Miraculously it has worked so far for Infosys and Uralsib bank for more than 2 years now.

An interesting observation I made in office is that 70% of the staff is female. And Russian women are always known all over the world as mirror-cracking material though in our case most of the users would have been such 10-15 years back. And even more interesting is that out of that female population, 70% have the name ‘Nataliya’. I have 3 users for the Liability module and all three of them are ‘Nataliya’. And to add to the confusion ‘Nataliya’ is pronounced as ‘Natasha’. Of the remaining 30% the most common name is ‘Elena’ and the rest comprise of the Marinas, Marias and the Svetlanas. Surprisingly, none of the Russian girls making waves in the WTA tour have the name ‘Nataliya’ (Long back I remember a player Nataliya Zvereva who was most famous for losing a grand slam final 0-6, 0-6 to Steffi Graf).

From what I have seen so far, the users are not part of an IT team and hence definitely not experts on the product. Since it’s our own product, the experts and the SMEs were all from our side. This is a major difference from my previous experience with clients where I was a part was on the service side and the product was owned by the client who had their own tech SME (Used to get hammered by Yvonne Hammerseley and others in GE Money, Melbourne).

On the home front, kitchen has almost completely shifted to Govind’s room. Raj and Govind are completely in the driver’s seat as far as cooking is concerned even though after a while Raj would disappear into his room and be on google talk and finally sleep off while still logged it. A few more teammates have joined us from India – Sujit, Venu, Mathew and Akshay. Whatever VCD/DVDs we had of hindi films have all been seen at least twice so we decided to move to other forms of entertainment namely cricket – the cricket pitch being right in front of the kitchen where the cooking team is busy frying the dal and the veggies. Rules are very simple – you are out on a one-drop catch or if you hit the wall directly with a chair acting as a stump. It’s been the bowlers who have done all the damage so far (with me picking 5 wickets off 5 balls) but we also saw some spirited batting displays from Alan and Akshay (Typical stodgy 5th day batting on a turner to save the match). Thanks to Raj, vodka is always available and it’s no different to water over here. I am unable to avoid a peg if orange juice is available.

PS. As I am about to post this write-up, I think I have resolved that Nataliya-Natasha debate. Natasha is just the alias for Nataliya just like Ted is for Edward; Bill is for William and Bob is for Robert.