Sayonara SH!

Whew! In less than twenty four hours time, I will finish this race, this long arduous and yet memorable period of nearly six months. After beingrecommended several job offers by my agent, I had no idea why I eventually chose to work here. I mean, the location itself certainly can’t be considered as proximately convenient for me though there is a direct bus, yet the hassle of travelling all the way to somerset, walk across centrepoint and into the office building itself and following an even longer route back home can be daunting at times. I didn’t know what I was putting myself into when my supervisor and another permanent staff member interviewed me, but seeing that there were so many young temp staff dressed in their most casual clothes, walkingacross the receptionist room to the toilet, gigglingand smiling along the way, I knew this job could not be that bad. Moreover, my supervisor looked rather young and very approachable, she didn’t seem like she was going to give me a hard time should I work there.

Even the interview itself was a memorable one indeed. It was a Friday afternoon. Before heading to starhub, I was told by my agent to come down to their office at the eleventh floor so that I can file in some confirmation letters and so on. During that peak holiday period just after the A levels, many youngsters alike myself came streaming into that tiny agency room. The waitingarea there was really pathetically small, with only two or three chairs available for guests to sit and so while a few lucky ones snatched a seat for themselves, a majority lot of people were standing around the corrider outside the agency. It looked as if they were too shy to enter the compact office and enquire for help. Fortunately for me, my agent recognised me almost instantly after I stepped into their office room, after which I was told to fill in some administrative forms and I was lucky enough to snag a seat! That would certainly make the writing process much more comfortable and easier. Haha, I still remember deliberatinghow I should rank myself withregards to level of competence in Microsoft tools like Excel, Word, Access, and my fluency in Chinese. To avoid making a fool out of myself should my IT-savvy skills (or lack thereof) be succumbed to a moment of testing, on a range of 0-10 with 10 being the highest level of proficiency, I awarded myself an ‘8′ for Microsoft Word, a ‘3′ for Microsoft Excel, and filled in a small ‘0′ under Microsoft Access, so it didn’t look too conspicuously embarrassing. Gosh, I don’t think I even knew what Microsoft Access was all about, and it doesn’t help when there isn’t such a programme installed in my home computer or the school computers, though that’s really a lousy excuse. As for my fluency in Chinese, (*shudders..), I had to give myself a ‘5′ because no matter how hard I try to speak the language well, it will always remain as cringe-worthy to the ears.

I stood up from my seat, and handed the form over to my agent. She told me to wait for her to print some documents before I could go to Starhub for my interview, so I returned to my seat. Alas, within seconds, I found a young girl at the seat, busy writingdown something. She was the young girl who walked in with her friend seconds before I had my turn. All I could remember thinking was “wow, pretty fast huh” and the usual hawker centre/coffeeshop scene which comprises of ‘aunties’ puttingtissue paper on tables and seats, coupled with people crowding around on the lookout for potential ‘targets’ drifted in my mind. Still, I was completely fine with standing, since I was already done with the writing procedure. When my agent, Angela, finally returned, I was informed to head to the Starhub building behind centrepoint at 10.30am and ask the receptionist for Emily who would interview me.

Boy was I nervous, it was goingto be my second job interview and here I am alone in orchard road, with only fifteen minutes to get to this place which I’ve never been to. I stared blankly at the note: “Cuppage, seventh floor”. The words didn’t ring a bell. Where on earth is Cuppage? With the note in hand and all the documents in my bag, I walked pass the waitingarea. The girl who took my seat was still sitting there, still busy writing documents on her lap. She looked so deep in thought, I wondered if she was at the self-ranking section, and faced the same conundrum as me in self-evaluation.

The moment I stepped out onto the streets of Orchard Road, my thick-skinned, friendly gear naturally surfaced. Amidst a number of interrogations, I finally made my way to the building itself. Needless to say, with my bad sense of direction, the journey was accompanied by a few roundabout routes and unusual turns, causing me to end up in Kaplan asking the receptionist where Starhub was. How unobservant I was not to have noticed the huge starhub sign which was just next to the smaller Kaplan sign! Haha, so silly of me indeed.

The receptionist area at the seventh floor had really good and furnishings, not to mention two comfy looking white sofas. There were two receptionists there at the time, but I asked one of them for Emily. To my dismay, she told me that there were three Emily’s in the level and I had to get more details from my agent! The whole process after that seemed like a really tedious one, because my agent was unable to find out the sername of the correct ‘Emily’, and as a result, I had to ask for another person, by the name of ‘Sau-Ling’ instead. Sinkingin the comfortable chair for what seemed like forever, I looked around and observed my surroundings further. Overall, with the carpet floor, beautiful decos and glass doors which only open via the tapping system, the company had a very professional feel to it. There were even huge LCD screens propped on the opposite walls of each sofa. Wow, honestly, I was really impressed.

I was still busy dreaming of what it’d be like actually working in such a company for real, till some flicker of movement stopped my train of thoughts. The same young girl whom I saw at the agency, the one who took my seat back there was standing outside the glass doors at the lift lobby. She was smiling yet looked unsure or unprepared to enter the half-opened glass doors. After some time, she finally walked in and approached the other receptionist for Emily.

“Whats your name?” The female Malay receptionist asked.

“Esther.”

It was very soft, almost a whisper, yet just audible enough to reach my ears. She sat opposite me at the other white sofa and we both had a few awkward seconds of looking at each other. With her funky skirt with underlying red trippings, an unusual looking top of a design which I’ve never seen before, a pair of glasses restingon her nose bridge, and donning a pair of black fully covered leather shoes, she looked really young. Considering that it was still the early december holidays, I guessed she was sixteen years of age, someone who could have just graduated after taking her O’ levels and was now lookingfor a job during the holidays. She looked totally unintimidating at all, entirely approachable, but yet I resisted the urge to get my lazy butt off the chair to start a conversation with her. Who knows, she could be my future working buddy! Then again, I wanted to go over and sit next to her, start asking her where she was from and whether she was looking for a job too. You know, all those redundant yet imperatively necessary conversation starter questions, of which the answers are already known, or too obvious. Instead of doing all that, I stared at the LCD screen, trying to make sense of what those leopards were doing on National Geographic Channel or Discovery Channel. The wait for our mysterious interviewers were evidently tugging at our last strings of patience, as I was almost dozing off in the sofa while Esther appeared to be staring blankly into space, again, deep in thought.

I looked at the time shown on the LCD display. The leopards were now grazing on the stone cliffs, their eyes slowly scanning the vicinity for prey, but to no avail. They got tired and moved to another location. I got bored too just watching them myself. Esther’s head was tilted downwards a little. Was she bored too by the leopards? Or am I the only crazy fellow trying to entertain myself with the leopards?

After what seemed like eons, a young lady who looked like my sister’s age approached Esther. Another shorter lady who looked a little older followed her and the both of them introduced themselves to her. Were those permanent staff? Our future supervisors? Man, they both looked like they were below 25 years old. After which, the three of them including Esther went into this meeting room for the interview, while I sat at the sofa waiting for my turn.

Her interview session was pretty ephemeral, so I entered the room with the two young ladies for my turn. They started telling me about the job scope etc, and asked me more about whether I could handle pressure, my work ethics, my preferred choice of job, my previous work experience and my skills in excel. Haha, I answered the questions with most honesty as possible, but of course, chiseled my answer in a more professional way. I also told them that I was the kind of person who loved keeping myself busy, and would want to finish things at hand as fast as possible and get it done and over with. Little did I expect the sterner lady to fire back at me immediately, almost giving me an entire lecture about how accuracy is more important and although they treasured speed, they don’t appreciate mistakes along the way too. While she sayingall of that, Emily was already next to her giggling and saying, “Yes, I’m sure she knows that of course.” I just smiled. Haha.

My first memories with the company weren’t as fond. Sure, the (only) guy there was really funny and entertained me a lot while I was under his tutelage. The other girl whom I worked with was nice too and so were all of the other temp staff in the room, but they were all chinese-speaking and had already known each other for a long time before I came. On top of that, they had different interests as me. For example, during every lunch break, they would quickly go down to buy takeaway, then the all eight of them would go to their tiny confined space in their room to watch some taiwanesedrama or idol drama of some sort withtheir food on their laps. I had no choice but to compromise withthem, because I didn’t want to seem like a social outcast or a loner with a withdrawn personality, which I am not. During those first hard days, I was always dreadingfor lunch, couldn’t wait to get over with it. My usual rather talkatative side felt stifled being in that foreign land, it was so bad that I oftened complained to most of my friends outside of Starhub about it, and they wondered how I was able to survive working there for the next six months.

When news that Lay-theng, my most immediate colleague beside me was to leave soon, I couldn’t wait for the new girl to arrive not because she had a difficult personality, but just coz of the novelty feeling of beingfriends withanother new member of the crew. I was thrilled to find out how she was like, if she could get along with me, had a good work ethic and that would ultimately define how my next five months of working would be like.

On the 26th December, she finally came. It turned out to be Esther! Yeah I know, of all people, what are the chances? She was wearingher formal wear, and she still looked the same as before, just that at that time, it didn’t make sense anymore for her to be sixteen years old. Instead, she was just like me, same age, and seemed like the type of person I would get along with. For a change, it was fun being the tutor instead of the tutee this time, though there was hardly a challenge in imparting these really simple administrative skills and my knowledge of the work’s scope to her. When it came to her first lunch, since Esther didn’t like the idea of eating in and I just felt someone’sfirst day should be of a more welcoming one. Fortunately, the idea of eating in a congested room didn’t seem to appeal to her, which was good!

We ate at the nearest S-eleven food court. She seemed rather quiet, but perhaps it was her first day and she was still a little shy, so I ended up doing most of the talking and probing her with questions to get to know her better. Everything started out really smooth and we broached on pleasant conversation-friendly topics, yet I felt like I was always the one domineering the conversations, and it didn’t help that Esther had the tendency of not establishing eye-contact with me when we spoke. And I’m not demanding for prolong eye-contact, because that would certainly be unnerving and too ridiculous, but rather I would prefer her not to look around so much, as if she was uninterested or too preoccupied with the things surrounding her. Its just basic courtesy to give the person opposite you attention and some form of respect when the both are chatting. Nonetheless, apart from that, I was glad to have a new buddy for lunch, and we both had an unspoken agreement not to squeeze in that tiny room for lunch.

Time flew quickly while workingthere. Since the reports and envelopes only came in the afternoon and the bothof us would’ve finished it within two hours, it meant that we were free on most mornings. With an abyssmal amount of free time we had in our hands, we had the luxury of surfing the net, checkingour emails, chatting online, and even read newspapers, all under the shadow of our toweringfortress of boxes around us. Of course, with all the free time given, we used it to talk more to each other, hence deepening our friendship. Sometimes, sheer boredom would even drive us to do the silliest and childish things such as writing emails to each other even though we were just an arm’s throw away from one another. In februrary, we started creating Word-of-the-Day emails, in which each one of us was to share the meanings of new English words, to improve our vocabulary. Oh boy, our Gp teachers would be proud of us.

Along the way, many things events happened. Esther’s birthday treat at swensons (Jan 28), Valentine’s Day presents, and the closure of S-Eleven foodcourt, our usual lunch hangout forced us to hunt for new lunch territories. Moreover, the timely closure also saw two other colleagues joining us for lunch. They were from the other department, or otherwise known as the Envelope C people. Duringour first lunch out with them, they took us the canteen at Singtel building, which we travelled a whopping distance just to get there by foot. Shortly after, two other colleagues from another department introduced by Envelope C joined us, so our lunch group which started out a humble two, became a larger six.

Firstly, as mentioned above, there was Esther. A sweet, rather soft-spoken Chinese speaking girl and very pleasant. She was chinese-speaking, and was probably the only one out of them who replied me in Chinese even though I spoke English, save for the few occassionsshe choose to speak English too. Yet, despite the constant reciprocals of different languages, we still kept up quite well witheach other. Although at the initial stages, I felt that she was a very private person who tend to keep her thoughts and feelings about certain things to herself, overtime, havingworked withher for six months, I can say I’m glad she’s able to open up and share more to me about the things that trouble her. She was the kind of girl that was easy to talk to, a good listener and one who often asks me many questions about my life, which I felt no qualms sharing withher. With the dawn of universtitycourse applications, the pains of interviews and so on, I tried my best in giving her my input/thoughts about them, hopingthat she would be less confused, but unfortunately, it had probably done otherwise. But for someone who often found a hard time making decisions in life, I’m glad and really applaud her ultimate choice in her matriculation. I’ve watched and seen this dear friend of mine grown so much, and her confidence seemed to have improved along the way. How brave of her, to willingto take up the gauntlet, and seize the opportunity to go to a university which could potentially chisel her in all positive ways, especially withregards to self-esteem and confidence! Even though I may be too preoccupied withwork or typing, whenever she heads to refill her bottle, she would never fail to ask me if I wanted to refill mine as well. It was just a simple thing, yet the fact that she bothered to ask me even if I always gave more or less the same answer is something really sweet of her to do so. The dreadful burden I had of doing so many weekend reports every monday would often be lightened because of her help. The two of us also had a really good work ethic and we made a good team. Packingboxes wouldn’t be that miserable if it was a one man’s job, not forgetting all the brouhahas we had trying to comprehend Rachel’s unique lingo and action-words.

Then, there was jiaying, or kahying, a very happy-go-lucky girl. She was two years older than the rest of us, and was chinese-speaking too. I’ve never met someone who added so much chillito her food, in almost anything she ate, it was as if chilli and her was inseparable. A fashionista, and one of the few who bothered to dress up nicely for work with accessories to match, she oftenedshopped with Hui-si, another colleague of ours. Even though I only knew her for such a short period of time, she was really friendly both face-face or on msn, always asking me how I was doing. When all of us were together, I always felt that she was the big-sister among all of us, especially to LT and me who were the more childish ones. Sadly, what a pity she had to leave us so soon for school commitments.

Like Jiaying, Li-ting was another member of Envelope C. Since Esther and me handled Envelope A and B, at times the starhubshops would mix up the documents between A and C, so the two of us ‘worked’ closely with those two. Well, well, well, where should I ever start? Somewhere near the start of this year, I went up the envelope C folks to ask them if they had a certain piece of trade-in form I needed, but sadly, they told me that they didn’t have it. After some time, this short, really young-looking girl came behind me at my desk. She had a pair of black rectangular glasses, a spunky hairstyle and donned a pair of sport shoes. I’ve seen her around the company, but it was the first time I actually saw her face up-close. She was wearing her huge red jacket, which was evidently too big on her, it made her look like a technician-wannabe. I didn’t know what her name was, so I called her ‘Eh!’ instead. Little did I expect her to go ‘B!’ and ‘C!’ immediately after that. I was thinking, this girl sure knows how to pull silly jokes like these, perhaps she isn’t as serious as she looks and that was a good thing. She handed me the missing trade-in form I wanted, tellingme that she searched it from her pile of unwanted stuff. That was the first day I met this friend. I didn’t know when it began, but duringthose lunch sessions, we started takingturns to insult each other, in a harmless way, the way good friends do, just for the fun of it. There wouldn’t be a day she would say somethingnice to me, nor was there a day she would not be making indirect or direct praises to herself. LT was the live wire among the rest of us, and if we became more childish or lame after working here, you would know the reason why. I thought I was someone who talked about my family alotto my friends, but till I met LT, that would certainly be an understatement indeed. She shared a lot about every little thing she did, tell us about her feeling-of-the-day, and everyday all of us would be spoon-fed witha daily chronicle of what happened at her home, what grandpa cooked for dinner and so on. She reminded of myself when I was younger, ever so eager to tell my friends about everything that happened. It was fun talking to and bullying a kid like her. Haha. Then again, LT had erratic moments of various emotions. There would be days where she would suddenly exclaim to us, ‘Today, I’m very happy.’ or ‘Today, I’m very sad.’ or the more commonly heard ‘Today, I’m very angry.’ Yet, its funny she says all of that, but behaves more or less the same way every lunch hour, regardless of the emotion. This spunky friend of mine also has a weird penchant for the marine world, such as reptiles, salamanders, amphibians and fishes, its insane. Within the first few days of knowing her, I already got the privilege of seeing pictures of her ‘pet’ gar-fish (which is like a cross-breed between an alligator and a fish), her slimy really poisonous looking red-spotted salamander which she reared at home, and other domestic creatures like her hamster. Ever so willingto share with others those pictures, there was once I got bombarded on msnby her ongoing requests to check up various sites about shark species, even though I don’t even recall myself showinga liking for sharks? Yet oustide that ostentatious bubbliness she projects through lies a more sensitive and emotional side to her, which can be only felt and seen after being with her for a period of time.

Thirdly, there was Hui-si, a pretty, easy-going girl who always had a wide smile on her face. This was one that always seemed really busy doingoffice work, but most of the time, she was preoccupied with meebo-ing, or on the office phone or her handphone. Of course, she was lucky the nature of her job scope was not as taxing, urgent or had any deadlines meted out, hence the luxury of doing all of that. She was also probably the only one who could understand my sarcasm especially when it was directed to LT, laughingalong with me. Since her desk was nestled nicely in the spacious far end of the office, all of us would head there to chit-chat and gobble on the junk-food Hui-sihad for a tea-break. (only after we have finished the day’s work). When it came to our mini lunch-in potlucks, she was always obliging, always willingto bring the carrots, for example, without any complains.

Then, there was Doreen, the real adult of the bunch of us. I guess the stark age gap between her and the rest of us would sometimes result in the disparity of the level of maturity as well. She was the reserved, more quiet one of the bunch, and probably the more serious one too. Sometimes, I try to make an effort to talk to her more and bring her into the conversations, or stand next to her while we’re walking so she wouldn’t feel so left-out in the group. During those times, I’m glad that she was actually quite responsive and shared a lot with me about something that held dearly to her- her catholic faith. Being the staunch catholic she was, she was conservative in her dressing at work, as most of the time she would be seen donned in long-sleeved, covered up pants, or long skirts and she was also very close to her mother, who would buy bread for her to bring to office to eat. She might be the most serious and grown-up among all us, yet I’m glad and hopeful that she had the chance to experience what it was like to be kids once again, when mixing with us, especially have a part to play in the pot-luck pasta/potato salad or banana split sessions.

All in all, we’ve been through six months together, dragging ourselves to office, doingthe same mundane things, yet because of the wide variety of great company I had, the experience had been memorable. I don’t think my crazy idea of the pot-luck sessions would have been as successful if I didn’t have such cooperative and obliging friends. Ben-and-Jerry’s there didn’t prove to be another miss this year, and we sure had a great time queing and lickingthose ice-creams in Cathay. All the daily conundrums of deciding where to go for lunch had been silly yet funny in a way, because most of the time, it was either cineleisure, cuppageplaza, or even random bring-your-own-sandwich-days which ensued whenever someone messaged saying that she would be doing just that.

Nonetheless, the memory of working in Starhub would probably stay with me throughout the days of my life, especially when start working full-time for real, I would no doubt be treasuring those past moments. Whoever said working life was tough? It wasn’t for me, at least not in this company.