Business Second

Just 10 minutes before the high stake review with a customer, I receive a message from my project manager. “Please excuse me for the meeting. I have a family emergency”. Later , I come to know that my manager’s 28 year old cousin brother passed away to COVID.

My team’s star performer is down with fever and cough. He calls me to apologize that should he have Corona, the project will be delayed at least by 15 days due to the quarantine period. He is worried how the customer will react to his "unplanned illness". Later during the day he calls me ecstatically. By God’s grace he has influenza and not Corona.

He probably will now be able to recover the delay by a week. We exchange happy emojis in Whatsapp.

I wonder why my team member felt guilty while falling sick. I cannot wash my hands off (hand wash again!) from the situation. Why does someone feel to be excused when his brother dies? Isn’t something else terribly sick in our professional lives?

Today, there are friends and colleagues in the industry that are in panic mode thinking how their bosses, clients and customers will react if they are away from work due to COVID. Will Corona survivor survive the next appraisal?

The pressure of keeping it “business as usual” when it is not is a burden that our generation carries silently. Looking good when we are not is a hypocrisy that our society have enforced on us under the garb of “professionalism”.

Grief and depressions are luxuries that only few can afford and tweet unapologetically.

It is time we learn to accept that business can wait. Life cannot. It is perfectly okay not to be okay. Business comes a distant second to life.  Life is a much bigger deal than any of the other deals we working on right now.