The Yahoo! Story

I'm staying away from the random questions for this post requested by some of my friends from Yahoo!

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If you’re wishing to read a story of make belief, of far far away, of princes and princesses, of legends and kingdoms, I tell you, quit reading now. This is not a tale of once-upon-a-time which we know will always end with they-live-happily-ever-after. This is a story of risks and taking chances, of dreams which never happened. This is a sad story. This is our story, our very sad story.

It all started a few years back. An account aptly called Yahoo!. Seemed fitting for the class and breed of people who prowled it, happy, fun-loving, light-spirited, oh well, blissful. The first ever account of IBM Daksh in the Philippines, from slightly over 10 agents, to nearly ten folds of that, it would probably be more appealing to write down all those names than to pen this story.

Back in the days when the ID numbers of the CCS’s in Yahoo! were single digits, strictly following those of the main top executives of then Daksh, it was simply apparent that the first employees who grazed our PBCom office were the Yahoo! peeps.

And then, there were the first training days. Sitting down on monoblock plastic chairs in front of big boxlike computer monitors, clear enough, no comparison to the kind of facilities IBM Daksh has now, but still the Yahoo! people were there to experience it.

From the first graduation to the first summer company outing, up to the first company Christmas party, it was quite amusing that you could put all the names of your attendees in a single sheet of paper when you needed a complete rim of bond paper to list down all the CCS’s now. The Yahoo! CCS’s didn’t miss single moment of these. Undoubtedly, they really knew how to have fun and party.

Years have gone, 5 more Operation Managers, and a million of e-mails sent, you’ve probably guessed it by now, The Yahoo! Account is moving to IBM Daksh India. It’s a little too sudden, a little surprising, but still a little understated, because Yahoo! as you know, is not just about the first account of IBM Daksh, the first CCS’s, the first training days, the first graduation, the first Christmas Party. To some of us, it is our first job, our first payslip, our first promotion, our first career, our first taste of the corporate world, our first family, our first friends, even, our first love. Yahoo! account is all about the many firsts, and it is a little anti-climatic that I am putting it side-by-side its end!

I told you, this is not a story of happy endings, this is a story of dreaming just for the purpose of it, and not having the time to realize it. This is a story of parting and letting go. But we must all remember that the waving of hand always means two things... hello and goodbye. And most of the time, it’s the first that matters.

We are all waving our hands now, bidding good farewell to Yahoo!. But we are also saying “Hi” to our new dreams and challenges up upon us. Because in every story, it is not the ending that determines how good of a tale a story has become, it is on the characters of the people you meet which make a story worth telling.

This is not a sad story after all!