That's Life - 6

That’s Life – 6 The Innerview!

The interviewer from NFCL – a No Nonsense guy – asked me exactly five questions.

What is a transformer?

Something that transforms energy.

What is the difference between star and delta connections?

Star is open. Delta is closed.

What is Thevenin's theorem?

Err?

OK.. Tell me Ohm's law

E=CR

What is E?

Electromotive Force.

You are selected.

Thank you.

That’s how I started my wonderful career as a proud electrical maintenance engineer in NFCL Kakinada. It was about six months of climbing prilling towers and cooling towers when realization dawned upon me one dusky evening. I was asked to check a motor on the top of the second prilling tower. This was an eighty feet structure and the elevator was out of order.

At a height of twenty feet: Microprocessors and Microcomputers are lovely. They are God-send.

Forty feet: Computers are the best thing happened to humanity after Edison’s bulb.

Sixty feet: I may be a good Electrical engineer. But I can apply these electrical principles in software and thereby produce software systems of practical use! I should be using the knowledge acquired in B-Tech to help my country progress. I should be writing code for real-time embedded systems. Information Technology is the only channel I should watch!

Eighty feet: Besides I would get a handsome salary!

Two days later, I stared at a Walk-In advertisement by SoftSol. Six of us boarded a bus from Kakinada to Vizag. It was a great experience. We were given about eleven puzzles to solve and fortunately I could solve about three of those puzzles. How I got short listed for the interview remains a mystery to me till date.

Mr. Arinjay Jain, the guy on the interview panel smiled broadly when I walked into the interview room.

“So Venu, I have a question yaar!”

“Yes sir”

“Can you tell me how we can receive a BBC transmission from UK on the radio without any need for an antenna whereas to catch a TV signal transmitted from Madras, we need a big antenna?”

I took a deep breath. I knew it was all over. I told him weakly, “I don’t know. It is a communications question. I am an Electrical and Electronics engineer.”

He was taken aback. “You mean you don’t have any communication systems at all in your syllabus?”

“No”

He didn’t know what else to ask. It was pretty obvious that he didn’t know anything about Electrical systems. So he took one long look at my resume and asked me about Virtual Reality on which I had presented a paper in the prehistoric times.

I told him what Virtual Reality was all about. Dr. Ivan Sutherland would have suffered a real massive heart attack if he were in that room that day. However as a matter of fact, Arinjay Jain knew nothing about this great technology. So he offered me a job gladly because you know! Very few people knew what Virtual Reality was at that time.

To be continued…