It's a Sad Day When a 19-year-old Ends Up Supervising Two MBAs

So I just got back from the field work today, and Jesus H. Christ let me tell you this is not a country in which I ever hope to do business. Scratch that, I could certainly do business with the poor women, since they’re motivated and thus work efficiently. It’s the glacial pace and inefficiency of the Middle Management that has me absolutely gobsmacked.

It started yesterday. We (being Coworker #1 and #2, (CW #1 & #2 hereafter) as well as myself) had a meeting with the Professor, to plan the pilot-testing of the Impact Assessment Questionnaire. We had decided to do this pilot-testing last week already and decided on the dates, and in preparation for this I went over the Questionnaire with a fine-tooth comb looking for grammatical and other small mistakes (The professor had also modified it previously). I had handed in this improved Questionnaire for translating. Imagine my surprise then, when we find that the translated Questionnaire wasn’t the copy I had changed, or even the copy the professor had changed, but the format it had had two months ago! So after the meeting I gave CW #1 & #2 (Damn, now I wish I'd called them Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, but that seems a tad harsh) my improved questionnaire as well as some other things the professor wanted to change so they could incorporate it into the translated version, instead of re-translating the improved one (this had been my first suggestions since the formatting had changed drastically, but they were loath to do this). They were to reformat it and bring it to me so I could check it before setting out this morning. No prizes for those who guess that I spent all afternoon waiting in vain for the new version.

This morning they showed up fifteen minutes before we were to leave with a copy for me to “check” – except they’d already printed out fifteen copies (why so many? We were only going to interview two clients!) and there was no time to make any changes. Needless to say it was riddled with errors, from faulty formatting to spelling mistakes to repeated questions etc etc. But oh well.

Then when we got to interviewing, the process slowed down even more. The interviews should ideally take about half an hour to forty-five minutes. We spend two and a quarter hours with the first client. CW #1 would ask a question, translate the answer for the professor and myself, relay it in Hindi to CW #2, who would then begin searching for the area to imput the data, and write it down while CW #1 watched. Then, once CW#1 & #2 were both satisfied that the answer had been recorded (which took a while, since sometimes both would lose the thread and patiently wait five minutes for the other one), CW #1 would start searching for the next question. Also, their unfamiliarity with the questionnaire was incredible. They’d both spent at least as much time on it as I; but couldn’t remember simple things like what areas the questionnaire covered. Also, they would ask questions to which they already knew the answer (Sample: “How many children do you have?” “Two, one five and one three” “Okay, and how old are your children?”), get confused if we pointed out they should record what they’d just been told instead of asking again, and record patently incompatible answers.

What ticked me off the most is that the interview is supposed to be conducted with the client – that is, the woman who receives the loan. In fact, part of the whole idea is to promote women’s empowerment (some of the questions even go in this direction, as in “do you feel more respected etc etc)). This isn’t much of a problem with mature clients (those who’ve gone through several cycles) – they’ve grown confident enough to tell their husbands to eff off while they deal with Generic Microfinance institution. But with the new clients (and we’re interviewing those as a control group, natch) you have to be very clear when dealing with them that you’re there to deal with the wives alone. Get the answers from her, not him, etc. So I got more and more agitated when CW #1 started addressing the questions to the husband and recording his answers, bypassing the new client altogether. I kept on intervening, saying “No, speak to the client only. Do not let him give you the answer” and CW would say “yes, yes!” only to drift back into conversation with him again. Grrrrargh!! Microfinance: UR DOIN IT RONG.

Then on the way back from the field, at around two p.m., CW #2 goes “By the way Professor, I won’t be here from tomorrow, lasting all of next week”. Um. But the Professor (who’s only here for about a week, and who has other things to deal with besides this silly pilot project) came out today especially to train you in dealing with the questionnaire, so you’d be able to do it next week. Why bother coming today if you can’t be part of the team!?! The thing that kills me is that when we were told what dates we were going to run the pilot test, this guy said “I’m on leave these and these days”, and I said “Oh, you’d better tell Mr. T--- or the Professor so we can get someone else”. I also told Mr. T--- that there seemed to be some scheduling conflicts. Since this guy stayed, I assumed he’d figured it out. Obviously not. So we effectively wasted half a day in training this guy for no reason. What. The. Festering. Fuck.

Then when we got back, it took them one and a half hours to give me a working soft copy of the questionnaire so I could fix the stuff we found that morning. Just take that in for a second. ONE AND A HALF HOURS to find the file on their computers, put it on a USB stick and carry it over to me. After an hour I got very pissy and stood next to them while they copied over the files, hoping it’d go quicker if I nagged. It did, marginally.
I then got to spend a delightful two hours doing something I’m not qualified to do. Apart from spelling etc etc changes, a lot of the stuff was formatting (boxes, tables, bullet points), which I’m not brilliant at at the best of times. But this file clearly hadn’t been put together right, it just looked right, if you know what I mean. Instead of using the shift key, there were wonky spaces, boxes of text superimposed on tables instead of integrated, etc. A real mess. I gave them the job of modifying it yesterday, since I’m so bad at that kind of stuff, but since I ended up waiting in vain, I decided “Selbst ist die Frau”, frankly there was no way I’d screw up worse than they would, and then at least it’d be my screw-up and I’d know how to change it back. So now I rock at Microsoft Word.

The downside is that while I was doing that, I had no time to do my actual bloody work, which was the tabulation of the data we received today.
I don’t give a damn what y’all might say about my neurotic time-management, at least shit gets DONE. Fuck me India, there’s no way you’ll be the next USA with a work-ethic like this.

You know what kills me? These people have MBAs. Isn’t People Management fun?
Cheers (or not),
Gitte

P.S. Y'all are chicken. Why has no one answered my poll?