cut and paste

08/10/05
It is just minutes away from 12 midnight on Sat as I being this entry. The week has passed. It has not been a easy week but a week filled with man ups and downs. I continue when I left off on Wednesday. Coming into the office, I continued with more data entry and data checking before I opened my email to find some time bombs waiting to explode. First there was joseph’s benchmarking report ppt format, next there was Cynthia wonderful link to about 100 hundred articles on procurement, the critical issues, e-com, best practices, benchmark reports and focused reports. All this seem so much like OM and so much like gibberish to me and I was expected to comb through all this. I was at a lost and didn’t know what to do. Joseph adviced me to print out the articles and read them and so that was what I did. I print some out and started reading and so that was why I spent the rest of the afternoon doing before Joseph called for another meeting with me and Kartzen. Den he helped me with some of the articles I’ve printed out. And soon after, the day has ended. I remembered that I was quite jealous and pissed because Joseph compared me to Darren. He said he had a problem with me because I didn’t ask questions and waited for answers, hoping that the answer will drop out of the sky, well something along those lines. I went home feeling quite drained. But more importantly, emotionally drained.
Not many people really understand how important morale is, seriously I mean when ur morale is high, you can keep going on and on but when it’s low, u just lie down and give up.

Thursday, I went to work, wanting to redeem myself, so I started printing the critical issues report as Joseph said that they were impt articles. So I printed all and started reading. Reading this many articles is not easy especially when you don’t know what you reading it for. I had a real problem with it so by the afternoon when I was suppose to present what I have done to the group, I have onli covered something like 7 over the past two days. And as I present wad I have found, it seemed to have immediately become a summary of what the 6 page articles were about into 3-4 lines and I mean omg. That sucks. Luckily, Joseph helped me a lot and also make them lower their standards of me. I can still remember clearly his words. They were, “guys I think we cannot expect too much from Gregory. Afterall, he is an intern and it is his first time doing this, and he might not be able to extract as much information in the articles as we will do because he does not have the domain to start with”. The only thing I could do was to give out this smiling sigh when I was at a low for word. After being in the forum for about 45 mins, it was over and kinda alrite. It’s really amazing how these people read as compared to me. I mean an article that takes me close to an hour, takes them barely 15 mins to browse to look for relevance. Also, John entered eating cup noodles and love letters. You could imagine how improper that was if it was meeting clients but meeting a bunch of friends or family it would be alrite. After the forum, I got myself invited into another meeting. Remember the huge stack of documents I photocopied for Kartzen. Yeah he actually combed through it with the help of Siang Kiang and they came up with a diagram so show the current system and round for improvement in that system. I mean it was so amazing. John also leaked the amount of money the assignment was worth and also about how much it take to keep the company afloat. It is a huge sum but yeah I should be disclosing it here. Not going to talk about my shi jie.. actually more like shi mu Cynthia(yeah she’s NP)

I guess politics was inevitable as well as it is part of relationship management.

On Friday morning, I decided to make copies and print all the articles. It seemed a easy task but the fucking best practices refuse to print. I mean wtf man. They make up the bulk of the articles and they don’t print. So idiotic. So I copied and read articles the whole day. But I managed only one article before lunch.

Ken was out running errants so Joseph invited me for lunch with him, john, Cynthia, paul and one more lady Chinese name how to remember sorrie. We took joseph car to Henderson to have fish head curry and and few more side dishes. It was so funny the way they tried to make convo. Some of them didn’t make any sense to me but I guess, striking a convo didn’t need to make sense within a bunch of friends. Some the tings they were talking about seem a little NC 16 or higher to me but I mean they’re all older den 21 so alrite I guess. It was amazing to discover that those at the table yet to be married was me and lf( the gal who’s name I can’t remember sadz). You can see the age gap man. They were so gossiping about their in-law. About there should a manuscript or something on In-law management. One of them was saying how she and her husband schemed in such a way that her in-law actually thinks that she earned a higher pay than her son. I mean wow that was genius man. Then part two. The wife gives him to money so that he can give his inlaw and he will do vice versa for his parents. I mean it was so ingenious. I felt really out of place discussing all the things they were talking about. I mean they were talking about things like 10 years too young for me to comprehend. I mean meeting your life partner in a disco is really the place I think I find my soul mate. And secondly, thinking that that person would probably my kind of partner if I wasn’t married. Wa loa eh. Joking about having an affair with the maid or interviewee or even a capable secretacy was kind of funny at first but looking bad, it’s rather distasteful.

After returning to the office, I knew I need to do something to keep me awake cos 1 plus 2 is like the dozing off period. So I decided to make a copy of the book joe has asked me to. And it was quite tedious have to reduce the printing from A3 to A4, den flipping pages to print like 129 pgs den rezapping them to print double before making 4 more copies and binding. All just to make copies of a book. So I spent like 2 hours just doing that and soon I was back trying to print articles that gave me an error msg each time I tried to print. In the end, I ended up chatting while trying to print but the printer refuse to process the article and soon the day was over.

14th Oct Friday

After working for close to a month, you discovered that it makes more sense to do things and organize so that what is actually know doesn’t seem so much like a blur. But it is easier said than done. I’m writing this entry for the like the while week now that it’s Friday but I have to say the past few days has been eventful and boring at the same ting. It was boring because I was stuck at the desk reading articles that were well let’s just say pretty boring after reading for like the past week. Sure, it very good for me because a get more to learn a lot of indepth thing but man I’m really starting to hate supply chain.

I have been doing this since like Monday, but occasionally being tasked to doing some printing here and binding there it almost seem like a boring job. I guess the only making me not give in and continue to work is my pride. Yeah pride, that I will produce good results even if it kills me. Each moment, in my seat, after reading articles that are approximately 10 pgs long compressed onto 5 pages of A4 paper, you can imagine that the words have become fine print. I was almost dozing off after reading every 2 to 3 articles, and the only thing keep me awake is the trips to the toilet. And sometimes, it just makes sense for me to be standing instead of sitting just to get some blood to my head.

Halfway through the week and I lost my handphone again. Yeah this is the third phone I’ve lost in 3 years. Not gonna to bother going into how I lost it. So now I’m without a hp and without the SIM card cos my stupid dad just refuses to go to hello! Collect for me( I sign up under his name wad to do) He intends to go down on Saturday night and I was like er what’s the point of squeezing with the crowd on weekend just to get the card when the fucking card only activates on Monday. I mean I defeated the purpose altogether man. But… He still just gonna retrieve my card onli on sat. Wtf man, so pissed off already not going talk about it anymore. Feel sick talking about it.

Will my life be the same like this always, the person who sits alone on a desserted bus looking out of the window?

Today has been a rather eventful day and I have been able to draw a lot about the meaning to my life. It started out at the office, as I arrived R asked me if I had anything urgent to do. My reply was an immediate ‘no’ and soon we were off together to Ocean Towers in Shenton Way. I didn’t bring a tie, so R grabbed a tie from K for me and we flagged a cab down to Ocean Towers. I spent the time on the cab looking through the tender documents and tying my tie. I guess it’s imperative the we know how to tie and also have a tie at every point of time because we’re in business and we need to meet clients.

At oceans tower, we waited for the suppliers and meet up with our clients and it was very interesting to see how people do business. They began by formalities of a handshake and exchange of business cards, brief introduction and we’re off to the main agenda. After we met everyone, we were off to the roof of Ocean Tower to view the water tanks that they were going to replace. When we reached there, you could all the potential supplier rushing to examine the tanks and location etc etc. It show a lot of passion in what they were doing. Yes it true that it’s for bread but ultimately if u don’t like your job, there is no way you can continue doing this. Some of the suppliers came alone and others came in a delegates, bringing their foreman and subcontractors etc. It was quite an eye opener. The small talk that the customers and the suppliers were having were quite interesting too. Just like how we would gossip about our bosses and the system. In business, I have to say that it still actually kinda hard to seek the kind of level of interaction that I seek with my pals, mainly because we are all so busy doing the numerous number of task. I had to call a few supplier to inform that the visit was over and that we would be leaving some documents with the customer for them to collect. After that, we took a cab back to the office.

On the way back, I found out more about R. Actually he just recently joined the company. He previously worked in S and his home is in M. He talked about the places he worked in a very advisory way. He was sort of smiling when he said all that but you could tell that he has hell lot of experience, and I have to say quite a lot of bad ones. I mean he could tell u that the Chinese are very smart people but they can backstab you in order to survive. It was a world when the fittest survived. Furthermore, because the Chinese dun really trust each others, they actually need accountants, lots of them to audit for them. He commented about Malaysia, his homeland in a way that showed that there a fair bit of unequal treatment. All I could muster was that Malaysia was changing, give it some time and he was like yeah but how long will it take. It was really quite sad for a Malaysian to comment about his country in such a way. Because he has joined trade one for not long, he find every experience a very refreshing and exciting one. I have to comment him for his passion and undying positivity.

Reaching the office, me, Tse Min and Darren went for lunch, we were at Mac eating and Tse Min caught site of this gal. She was the typical cutie. Fair, bespectacled, a pretty good figure, big eyes and a pretty sweet smile to top it off. We were commenting about her and guessing her age. She probably was our age cos we concluded that they were studying and the notes they were studying seem a little too thick to be sec school and promos were like almost over. So we conclude that they were studying for A’lvls. I found her cute too but too bad that I’ll never and probably never would approach a girl for her no. But who knows mayb few years down I would. After that we went back to the office to continue our work. I had a short meeting at the conference room about the benchmark report that I was supposed to help draft. It was really scary to know that all that I’ll be helping will be a pretty minor role in the initial stages but it was taking almost two weeks to do. So that was what it meant by you’re doing less but more at the same time.

After the pretty short meeting, I went back to doing data entry for Raymond and by the time I finished it was almost time to knockoff. Data entry was as easy as it seemed as I had look carefully so as not to have mistakes in the entries.

After work, I went down to meet the 538 for dinner and movie, we ate at Pastamania and then processed to watch “Wait till you’re Older”. I was making a lot of stupid remarks during the show but I have to say that the movie made me think about a lot of stuff. Firstly, there was the scene where the smaller boy was always wishing for freedom and to grow older. I guess, we all wish to be independent at one stage of our life, to be able to do whatever we want with our life. Secondly, it was the scene whereby when he was free, he helped his friends and he went after his crush, who is his teacher. But then he began to age very quickly and so he was frail and about to die. It just like how when you’re doing the things you wanna do, time just seem to past u by den and dere. Thirdly, it was the scene where the guys were playing the arcade and smoking about being unable to do certain things. It struck me like a hammer when he reminded how that there was always two sides to the same coin. We never really look at things from other’s point of view but ourselves. Really this was very meaningful to me when I feel that inability to solve my problems and the inability of other to sympathise with me. I am already like of the older guys in the movie, having a home but not being able to return to as you feel like such a failure there, so you spend time outside with some pals and playing the arcade and lan. And finally, the fact that we only live once and there is no way to turn back time, so we must live each day as it come to the fullest. It seems easy as I say this but it is actually really hard. I struggle to find courage to do the thing I do each day. Each day, I was struggle with the dilemma or whether I should shut everyone out or I should open myself to the outside world.

And on the way home, I sat all alone on this bus and I look around and there was this guys chatting with a gal, a friend. And I was thinking to myself everytime I sit on the bus, the seat next to me is always empty or occupied by a stranger. It makes me feel so miserable just thinking about it and just so stone trying to look on the bright side of this cruel fact about my inability to tackle simple problems.