Onsite travel is not a big thing in IT industry. Daily hundreds of IT professional fly overseas on various roles for various projects. This is so common that there is nothing special to write a complete blog on that. But this story is different. This is the story of an IT professional travelling onsite to Denmark and a refrigerator. Yes a refrigerator. You must be wondering what a refrigerator has to do with onsite travel. We can understand a role of visa, passport, airline tickets, and hotel bookings but a refrigerator. Believe me; here role of refrigerator is far more important than any other thing.

The main actor of this story is a normal IT professional like millions in this world. He is working in Chennai with one of India’s top IT service provider since last 5 years. In these five years he wished only one thing, an onsite opportunity. He resigned three times and every time he was retained by his current employer with a promise of onsite opportunity. His third resignation didn’t go waste like the previous two and he got an onsite opportunity for a client in Denmark. With full of happiness and satisfaction, he came Hyderabad for visa processing and his first overseas travel. He reached Hyderabad mid March and he was supposed to fly early April. He got visa stamped on time and everything was going smooth until that disastrous day.

One morning he found his bag wet and then he realized his passport is in that bag only. He quickly checked his passport condition but it was too late by then. His passport was all wet and front page was completely destroyed. We were looking for source of this damage and we found that water was coming from the refrigerator. One of his roommates (that’s me) had kept that on defrost. He shown his passport to company immigration department and they declared that it’s a damaged passport and he can’t travel on that. He immediately went Chennai to apply for a fresh copy of passport. With lots of effort and some 20,000 INR, he got his new passport in three weeks. But then Denmark consulate refused to transfer his visa on new passport and advised to re-apply for a fresh visa on fresh passport.

He did exactly the same and put application for issue of new visa. Finally his application was approved and he got a fresh copy of visa and he was all set to fly. Then he faced some issue in forex and ticket bookings and this delayed his first ever overseas travel by another three days. Then the day came when he had everything to fly. He got forex, tickets, hotel bookings and most importantly visa. His flight was scheduled to fly first Hyderabad to New Delhi and then New Delhi to Copenhagen. He got formal farewell and best wishes from his officemates and he left for home to pick baggage and from there to airport at 6:00 PM on 10^th of June as his New Delhi flight was at 7:50 PM. He reached home in next 10 minutes and pressed button to call lift, then he got a call from his project manager.

“Hey! It seems some issue with your visa. Come back to office” – Manager Said.

He immediately returned back. His manager shown him the scanned copy of visa and told him that embassy has stamped visa again on his old passport only not on re-issued one. So he can’t fly on that and he need to wait another couple of days. It is embassy mistake and it should not take more than a couple of days to get visa on new passport. Also his manager advised him fly as soon as he get new visa without considering the time. Finally he got the fresh visa on Saturday 12^th June and flew for his first onsite travel.

This was true story of an IT professional who bravely faced all possible obstacles in his first overseas travel and came out as a true winner at the end. It feels really nice to see pictures in his orkut album. Enjoy dude your first of many onsite opportunities and I wish him much smooth process in future.

Moral of the story: Never defrost your refrigerator when there is even a remote chance of onsite travel of any of your roommate.

I was supposed to publish this post on 14^th of June and I pressed the publish button as well. But as soon i hit the publish button, my site crashed and it started showing “This website is coming soon” message. Even Godaddy team was not able to find out the problem. They said everything seems fine with your website and hosting account and they escalated this issue to their technical department. It took 6 days and 24 emails to finally resolve the issue. I won’t say that issue was resolved because they have just allocated me a different hosting account and I have to upload all my posts and data again.