IThankMyEmployer Initiative: Report 1
This post is a continuation of my earlier post on LinkedIn,
I am a programmer, to be specific, backend developer. My choice of weapon — Java.
When my employer declared a mandatory work from home, sometime in March, I didn’t understand the depth of the situation. In fact, in my excitement, I went on a grocery shopping spree. Every essential with a long shelf period had a backup in my house, at one point I had to empty a few shelves to occupy these new housemates.
Initial thrills of avoiding the crazy traffic (I live in India), working in Pajamas and extended working hours was something I really enjoyed. I had found a new source of excitement and happiness that was destined to die soon.
A few weeks later news started pouring in from the USA, few of my friends lost their job due to the COVID pandemic. Some of them were lucky to find a new assignment quickly but a few others are still uncertain about their career and future.
The first thing that came to my mind was, there should be a way we could help those who lost their jobs, survive in this situation. Thus was born the idea — IThankMyEmployer.
The idea is simple — Instead of charity and donations, enter into a win-win situation. Hire someone to do something for you. Anything one could think of. I pledged to give 10% of my monthly salary towards this cause but the number is not fixed for everyone, even a 1% could help someone.
In my mind, I was prepared to hire someone to build my website or build an app that I had been thinking of but that’s the point where I had to tweak my plan a little.
There were a few challenges:
1. Indian IT industry was not so badly hit by this pandemic and in fact, more projects were brought offshore than before.
2. People who did reach out to me after my post on Linkedin thought that I was still in the USA(I moved back to India in Aug 2019, more on that later), so converting my 10% of Indian salary to US dollars would mean almost nothing to them.
I started looking for alternatives.
One day my Mom called and said that a family friend who is a taxi driver by profession is about to sell his house. I was shocked and asked why. She said the guy used to make 10k-15k INR every month, from which he used to pay his house loan and car loan, and now that he is completely jobless from 2 months he is not able to pay his dues.
That made me think about self-employed people that I personally know of and can possibly help in these times. My husband and I know a hardworking carpenter who has a shop near our house, he had been out of work too. We knew that for sure because every time we go out to buy groceries we go past his shop and not even once did we see the shop open in the last two months.
My husband and I had been thinking of buying a computer desk and replacing our 6 years old sofa set with a multi-purpose furniture piece from the past few months. Either I don’t agree on the price or we got so busy traveling that this thought stayed in the back of our mind.
This time though, we didn’t think for long and called our carpenter. I don't want to sound dramatic but he sounded happy when we placed the order. When I started this initiative what I had in my mind was to spend 10% of my salary every month but not everything goes as planned so I ended up spending 60–70% on these two pieces of furniture. I have no complaints, both pieces have come out great and are very useful in our daily lives more so due to the lockdown and work from home situation.
Where we initially reached out to help one person, we saw five men actually working in his shop. If somehow we were able to touch 5 lives and that’s not just financial gains I am talking about but the fun to actually work on your craft then somehow we have been able to take one tiny step towards standing together as a community during these tough times.
