Sometimes, Rules Can Set Everything Right - The Biometry Blues

The day was 18th July 2014. I remember the date precisely, as it was me who got the letter from our HOD signed and sealed at the college office. A copy of the letter was also forwarded to the director of our institution. After all, it is the director who takes the final call for implementing or discontinuing any administrative move. The letter was the hard copy of an idea from the head of our department, Department of Community Medicine. He says he traced the origin of this idea to the days of his erstwhile service as the in-charge director of Shimoga Institute of Medical Sciences. The idea sprung from thinking about a corrective action for ensuring punctuality in the staff, both teaching and non-teaching, following a report in an allegedly-local newspaper about allegedly-irregular allegedly-staff who allegedly do not report at the allegedly prescribed duty timings. The idea was to introduce biometry attendance for the post-graduate students. For the post-graduate population of our institution, that was a pill too bitter and too huge to swallow. Spitting it out would mean discontinuing the course. So, naturally, we had no other option than to abide by the rules of biometry attendance, which, as many of us perceived, marked the commencement of a new phase in our lives. Personally, I'm that type of an individual who classifies the five minutes of sleep you get after pleading to your mom or dad when they try waking you up, and the five minutes before you step into your classroom under the heading of 'Highly Precious'. It was more than disastrous to know that biometry timing was between 8:30 AM and 9:00 AM to mark your attendance in the morning. For people like me who find it so much painful to reach the department by 9, the new rules were nothing short of an impending catastrophe. Since the thirty minutes of biometry was pre-9AM, a second after 9 could get your one big day counted as half, or even zero (absent) in the biometry attendance feed. Our fingerprint impressions were recorded in the device by the office clerk and the mandate on biometry for post-graduate students was in action from August 1. With an initial grudge, we abided by the rules and everybody started marking their biometry attendance within 9 AM. After one month of regular expression of administration-directed anger on the digital biometry authenticating device, on September 1, we got our stipends credited. This was a matter of astonishment for us as we have never received our pay before 5th of the running month. We were told later that, with attendance extracts being processed from the daily biometry feed, the money would get into our accounts on the last day of the month worked. That did sound professional. Biometry was not a bitter pill after all.