I don’t know about you, but it happened to me. Let me share my story. I was working in an American company in Pakistan as a Seismic Surveyor. The company was given a one-year contract to complete a seismic survey in the province of Sind. So, I was also given a one-year contract. Every week I was assigned to complete the survey for a specific number of miles. Sometimes I used to finish in six days, that gave me an extra day to rest and enjoy life in the camp. We had air-conditioned trailers for sleeping, showering, dining and other needs. When the work area became more than two hours away, we had to move the whole camp to the next work zone. The move usually took more than half a day, sometime the whole day, if we had some mechanical issues with the trucks.
We used to work from 6:00 AM – 6:00 PM seven days a week. After three or four weeks we used to get one week off to go back to the family and rest. The camp was managed by a manager, who was always a foreign national. Some other staff were also foreigners.
In the last week of the year-long contract I completed the assigned survey three days earlier. Our new camp manager had was a German and started a week ago. I had nothing to do in the camp, so I went to the office and started chatting with the manager. He had just learnt from our office in Karachi, that the accountant had some family issues and will be coming back for a few days. The manager told me that he does not know anything about the payroll calculation, and the labor’s pay day was tomorrow. Without waiting for the manager to ask me, I volunteered to help him, although I had never done that before.
He gave me the pay register, as in the 70’s there were no personal computers anywhere, leave alone Pakistan. I studied the pay register and figured out the formula. The manager gave me a big box that had all the timecards for the laborers. I spent the whole two days preparing the payroll for the current month. In the evening the manager sat with me to prepare the pay envelopes for the laborers. As the manger was handling the Pakistani currency for the first time, he asked me to count each laborers’ pay and compare with the pay register before putting it in the envelope. As the currency note bundles were new from the bank, sometime the notes would be sticky, and two notes seem like one when counting. So, a number of times I would return the manager a 100 rupee or 500 rupee note as being extra, and he would put that in a box. When we completed the task of paying the laborers, and he counted the “extra” cash that I had returned to him, he was so impressed and said “Syed you could have put the extra currency note in your lap, and I would never have doubted you. You saved me over 10,000 rupees that would have put me in trouble with the auditors in the Karachi Office when we would have returned there after closing the operations”.
I told him, that as a Muslim, I could never keep the money that was not mine. After completing this task, we had dinner and went to bed. I did not treat this honest behavior as anything special, deserving any rewards from the company.
The next day a manager from our company’s office in Karachi asked our camp manager that the camp in Turkey needed a staff who could work as a Seismic Surveyor. Can he recommend anybody? Without asking me if I would be able to do that kind of work, he recommended me. When I went to see him in the office next morning, he asked me if I was able to work the Seismic Survey equipment and would be willing to go to Turkey for 3-4 months, as he has already recommended me for that job.
I was thrilled, and thanked Allah for helping me to take care of my family for another 3-4 months, before I start again looking for another job.
I think it was this act of honesty that prompted the camp manager to recommend me for the job, as being new in the camp he had no idea of my skills.
Rambler's Corner 