A Knight in a Shining Armor and the Day Dreaming

A Story of common man who is facing hardships and difficulty in his career path and started day dream of Knight who will come to rescue him!

Have you ever heard a story with a title like “A knight in a Shining Armor”?

Obviously, you must have heard such stories. Those stories used to start with a king on a gallantry expedition, either to rescue a damsel in distress or save his people. My story is a bit different; let me tell you my story. From last few months I was feeling pathetic and exhausted as I worked almost 10 hours a day in my office. My life was like hell and I repeatedly made silly mistakes. At times I forgot the most important tasks too, which were supposed to be my first priority. Yes, you are thinking right. I was tired, sleepy and gruesome.  Oh look! I forgot to introduce myself. Well I am Joshua Greene, Human Resource Manager at Craven Shipping Company. When I joined my company it had only 10 employees, but now we have more than 100 employees.

Managing that much employees took its toll, I got depressed and soon felt stressed. As a Human Resource Manager, I have to identify and analyze the problems and provide their solutions according the company’s policy. I have to follow all the processes related to hiring, recruitment of employees and have to meet the occasional demands of the CEO as well. Earlier, I enjoyed such tasks, but now it was too much. The attendance tracking was becoming a real time nightmare.

For me, attendance tracking is the worst work. Well, I had my reasons. It was too hectic, boring and time consuming. Imagine a person who used to mark the attendance manually of every single employee of the company. It was like spending 2 productive hours to complete waste. I also had to fetch up all the record in the end of a month to calculate absences, late time in, and early time out, along with a lot of rectifications. Of course all this practice was for the payroll.

I have to do these tasks for around hundred employees; you can understand now how much time I needed for that. With each passing day I was getting irritated. Every month I had conflicts over payroll and I couldn’t get enough time for my other HR responsibilities. Pending problems and issue were piling up. I started to sit late in the office which added to the frustration. After few months my CEO called and asked me:

“What happened to you Mr. Greene? Your performance is deteriorating. You are not paying attention to the recruitment processes and I am receiving grievances almost every month about the payroll”.

That was the time when I got so frustrated that I started to believe in a fantasy, a fantasy about a knight in a shiny armor. I believed that a knight in a shining armor will come and will solve my attendance tracking problems. I wished for that miracle.

Well, to be honest it was quite childish of me, but things were changing from bad to worst. I couldn’t find any solution. I decided to take a holiday and went to my best friend Richard. He is very fond of latest technology. I told him about all my worries and problems. He said nothing to me and just asked me to get some fresh air and don’t think about work.

After a couple of days, he came to me with several attendance tracking apps. I could not believe my luck, the apps were awesome. If I use any one of the apps, I wouldn’t have to do a thing about attendance anymore. All I will be doing is tapping or clicking on a smartphone or a computer to access all the records. These apps are a great help in generating payroll too, as they record the overtime and late time-in too. I was over the moon.

I presented the idea and my CEO agreed to use it. Now, I have regained my efficiency and I am really happy. Over time, late coming, holidays, everything is updated automatically. At the end of month I don’t even have to fetch a single record. I even got a summary of each month’s attendances and a payroll without a single conflict. In the end, I cannot decide who is the real knight in the shining armor? The app or my friend Richard, perhaps you can help me here.