Walked Over

I’ve gone for 5 job interviews in my life (counting only the full-time jobs). I’ve been offered the job for every single one of them.

That’s a 100% success rate right there (or very shitty jobs being applied for). I should be a lot more confident than I am right now.

But like a nervous undergrad, I’m losing sleep because of a possible telephone-interview tomorrow (or it could be the copious amounts of tea I had today). Sigh. It never gets easier, does it?

Did a small freelance job to revamp the website www.pin-a-photo.com. It’s a small business based on the idea of taking a large photo of a someone you know and sticking pins into their faces to show them how much you love them.

No, it’s not as sinister as voodoo. Actually, it’s a gift idea more in the vein of a puzzle piece with an incredible number of pieces or a cross stitch. The smallest size they recommend requires you to stick 8,000 pins onto a board, following the color-coded instructions carefully. Supposedly an 11-hour job at minimum.

I suppose it says something about me that I don’t think I’ll ever find anyone I care for enough that I would do this for them? Although I suppose perennial bachelors aren’t quite my client’s target audience. Just spend some more money and go for dinner already. So call me cynical.

A cutesy, rather rotound tiger for your Chinese New Year application. 11 more years and maybe I’ll have done a full set!

(am not responsible for epilepsy resulting from viewing the image above)

Posed a rather innocent question Friday to my colleagues if they’d ever considered purchasing their name-domain-names, which was actually an excuse for me to bring up the evil 3 year-old Alex Huang Jae Huang, whose parents have purchased the domain name till 2011. I usually don’t feel like working very hard the last hour of Fridays.

This ended up in a Google searchfest for all our colleagues’ names, including of course myself.

That turned up this blog.

So my colleagues started reading, as my mind raced to recall if I’d ever posted anything derogatory about any one of them. Because I couldn’t remember, I ended up trying to shut down the whole site, but it turns out Wordpress, for all its development does not have a dooce-prevention button conveniently positioned in its admin interface. I didn’t have FTP access (damned network security at work blocks FTP access), so I did the only thing I though posible – I deliberately screwed up some site settings in a self-destruct-so-the-enemy-gets-nothing mindset and–voila!–all that happened was CSS went haywire, so not only could my colleagues read what I REALLY thought about them, they could read it completely unstyled–the naked truth, as it were.

(TO ANY OF MY COLLEAGUES READING THIS, I LOVE YOU. I HAVE NOTHING AGAINST ANY ONE OF YOU AT ALL. I LOVE YOU VERY MUCH.)

Turns out I needn’t have bothered, though. My laziness to post in recent months due to my dead-end wonderful new job has saved me the embarrassment of having written anything potentially damaging to my career or hurtful about my colleagues. In fact, my Friendster profile turned out to be more damning, where a “friend” of mine had posted some comment about having sex with me (in context it was supposed to have been funny), and had my small-minded, conservative lovely colleagues looking at me with sanctimonious righteous contempt.

Phew. I REALLY dodged a bullet there, not writing how I really felt.

(as an aside, some of my colleagues were more interested in 3-year-old Alex’s website showcasing stomache-curdling pictures of his youthful cuteness rather than my much-more-intellectually-stimulating blog, which should tell you something about how truly evil he is)

If anything good has come of this little incident, I have learnt how to instigate people into Googling their own names. Just try to start a conversation with “Have you ever tried to register your own name as a domain name?” I shall employ said tactic just before performance review, after writing glowing reviews about my boss – maybe something like this.

Alternatively I could post disgustingly graphic slash fiction about myself and any other colleague whom I might potentially be up against with for a promotion and then leer at them curiously once in a while before questioning them on whether they knew their domain name was free. Their resulting Google search for their own names should result in a request for a transfer to another department pretty quickly.

Or possibly a request for my transfer to another department. The department of mental services.

In any case–blogging about work? Never a good idea. You have to be pretty stupid to do it. Which I can be at times, judging from my actions today.

Went down to Junction 8, my local mall, to support the Banana for yet another one of her singing competitions, this one in particular organised by the Science Club. To raise money for the event, they set a 15% of the judging criteria to be audience participation – in the form of 50-cent votes. This, of course, sparked off the somewhat offbeat competitive streak in me and I ended up spending $60 to get the Banana up to second-most popular singer. We just barely beat a Japanese-wannabe singer whose Hokkien-speaking mother and boyfriend bought votes for, and I couldn’t help but laugh a little as I saw nihon-jin-in-training looking at the Banana and then wistfully at the voting panel, where she was just 5 votes short of being second-we had practiced the dirty trick of last-minute voting to prevent a bidding-war.

It was rather tragic, really. Some of the little schoolgirls there were pooling together spare change to buy votes for their friends. I feel a bit lousy for having crushed their innocent delusions of people-power, but I suppose a university-organised-small-time singing competition is as good a time for them to learn about the pecking-order-of-economic-power in Singapore, of which I thought the results of the votes were pretty representative of:

1. First place: rich guy whose parents got him first place (the monied, connected crust of the Singaporean elite)
2. Second: the banana, who just happened to have a crazy friend with money to blow (middle-class working professionals)
3. Third: Kawaii-Hokkien (The Other not-so-well-educated Chinese)
4. Losers: various other minorities and schoolkids (Various minorities and people without certificates-to-prove-usefulness)

So really, I HAD to vote for the Banana, you see, otherwise some schoolgirls might have gone home thinking that they’d managed to make a difference or that together friends could change the world rather than the important life-lesson that they were simply unimportant drones in a largely uncaring society where money was power.

Harsh? I suppose. But important! I am entirely justified in my actions.

And I don’t mind at all having had to spend $60 to spread tough love.

Not at all, not even if the Banana refuses to give me a treat.

Pictures up when I can find time to upload.

Been rushing projects recently, which means I’ve been leaving office late.

Thankfully, my job pays for my late-night taxi rides home.

Unfortunately, recently I’ve been considering the wisdom in making these late-night quick-trips. Taxi drivers on the PIE after 10 always seem to go as fast as they possibly can without crashing, flipping their cars over and killing their passengers in the resulting explosion that ensues.

Today’s driver insisted on hugging cars half-again the size of his Standard Comfort Taxi, and overtook motorcyclists in a manner I can only describe as dangerous (I took to looking out for the bikes’ license plates, in the event I had to play witness). Yesterday’s driver got me home in 10-minutes on a route that normally takes 20. The day before’s looked like he was falling asleep–whilst going at 100kmph on an expressway.

And I can never bring myself to ask them to slow down. Somewhere in the back of my head there’s a part of me that doesn’t want the manly taxi drivers scoffing at me, to think of me as an effeminate woman-thing who, contrary to his god-given testorerone-al urges, refuses to hurtle down highways towards freedom! Freedom!

Freedom!

In reality, though, I think they would just ignore me. If the little shrieks and gasps I make don’t make them drive slower, I doubt asking in a small and frightened voice will.

It’s times like these that I’m grateful for the mandatory safety-belts installed in all Singaporean cars.

4 days to last day of work with Sony!

Well, like the title says–I got the job. Whee.

The second interview was much, much, much better. Evil HR woman wasn’t there.

The tiny font for the old layout hurt my eyes, so I switched to a Kubrick sucessor. It actually looks rather good, I think.

What happens when you rehearse too much, I think.

Went for an interview last week with one of those large IT solutions companies (for the turns-out-not-to-be-in-Dubai job), and was terribly abused by HR.

It was my fault, really. I didn’t REALLY want the job, but to escape the tedium of work, I like to think of myself working somewhere else. Not that the current one is really THAT bad, but I’ve been frisky.

HR woman picked up on that immediately. This particular one belonged to a variety of HR women I’d only heard of, but never come across before–the Recruiter. In my mind, HR people used to be all kindly matronly types who asked if you were hungry, offered you biscuits, sat at the back during the interview and smiled sympathetically as the Project Manager asked technical questions. This one didn’t even bother with the Project Manager–technical questions were the least of her concerns.

The first question she asked me was if I was really interested in the job or if I was just one of those bad bad people who plague HR recruiters like herself and waste their time.

Well, that second part was probably more implied than explicitly stated, but I knew even then that I wasn’t going to get a biscuit this time. I was as unprepared as Ms Teen South Carolina.

The next 45 minutes turned into a nightmare as she whisked out my resume and shredded it in front of me (figuratively speaking)– arching an eyebrow over “Computational Physics” (I’ve never been so ashamed to admit to being a Physics graduate), dismissing my previous work experience as “bits and pieces” and generally making me feel as bad about myself as I ever have professionally. All this she did, whilst doling out advice about career planning and not playing around with employment no matter how good the job market was. I vaguely remember just nodding, or making single-word answers to her questions, all the while wondering how soon it would be before I could run.

I left the interview feeling light-headed and almost ready to cry, partly from the shock of the interview, and also because I hand’t been able to answer anything on Marshaling, nor the intelligent portion of the technical quiz (IT technical proficiency tests always contains a prerequisite out-of-the-box kind of question).

This has been, so far, the worst experience of my professional career.

Today, Scary HR-woman, through one of her underlings, called me back for a second interview. I know it was her because the callback contained strict instructions not to be late THIS TIME (I was a little late the previous time round–shows you how much I want the job).

I’m scared. I think she’s going to force me into submission with a painful wrestling grip before making me sign a contract promising to work in an orange jumpsuit for a year with minimum-wage and no benefits.

In an ironic twist of fate, as my personal blogging life falters, I’ve been asked to contribute to my company’s experimental corporate blogging exercise as a blogger as well as a potential administrator/moderator. One of the first tasks I have been assigned is to modify the standard template to include the Terms of Use, as well as a Report Abuse button for horn-blowing.

I really don’t see writing there more than I do on this one.

Getting none.

My realizations of the importance of my role in this job has descended from Spare-Programmer-in-the-event-Main-Programmers-Go-On-Leave-Or-Die down to Company-Needs-Certain-Quota-of-Singaporeans-to-Satisfy-Manpower-Regulations.

Now in charge of website for a discontinued series of products, in the all-important role of rendering static snapshots of dynamic ASP pages. Whee.

Could kick myself. Forgot my employee pass. Now afraid to even leave the building in case I’m locked out like some chump and have to wait for someone with a pass to let me in.

Twenty years older, and when you forget to bring your homework it still feels the same.

First day! As an official IT Engineer!

… and it was rather boring, too. Perhaps it was because I slept at 2 in the morning the previous night, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d entered the twilight zone as I stepped into my office.

I work in a gigantic “cube farm” (as Gary puts it) with at least a hundred others in the same room. It’s an open office concept, so even the managers are seated in cubicles that look exactly like mine, seperated by waist-higher partitions (”higher than waist-high” seems like such inefficiency of expression). Standing up, one has the impression of an endless stretch of cubicles, each filled with another human being typing industriously away at a computer.

My colleagues, as far as IT people go, seem pretty nice. Which is to say that they’re mostly quiet people who won’t talk unless spoken to. Other than my senior, the HR lady and my direct superior, no one else in the entire room said more than a single line to me today upon introduction. I would have tried to break the ice with the girl beside me, but she seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown about some bug and her boss had to keep coming over to look at her code, so I left her alone.

I am unable to start work, largely because my phone doesn’t work and therefore Helpdesk is unable to assign cases to me. My senior told me it wouldn’t be a problem eventually – Helpdesk has its ways. Funny – seems Helpdesk isn’t very well liked even on the support side.

No wonder people complain of loss of individualism, working in large companies.

Well, I did want to see what working in a large company was like.