If you’ve been following me at @afifrais, you’d probably heard that there was a minor organizational reshuffle at my office for the new term. Well, the major change for me at least is that I’ll be transferring out from the KL campus to the Equine Park one. Needless to say it was a huge deal for me because for once I don’t have to ride my bike for a 90 minutes return trip from Semenyih to work every day. Equine Park is only around half an hour ride or drive from my home. I’d like to thank my bosses for making this happen. I know they played a huge part to fulfill my wish.
Other than that, the company is getting everybody in the ICT department certified. Meaning they want everyone to have at least one IT-related certificate to show for. They will pay all the course and exam fees and if you pass, give you a special extra allowance for the next 12 months. If you don’t pass, you don’t get the allowance (obviously) and your appraisal might be affected as well. Sounds fair to me. They only want the most qualified people to be serving their customers (students, staff and parents). Me and two other colleagues of mine decided to take the macOS Catalina Essentials course and the subsequent certification exam. Since we already took similar Mac OS courses in the past, we thought this one would be a walk in the park. How wrong we were to assume that because macOS Catalina Essentials course was nothing like Maverick or High Sierra. It covers much more topics and the exam questions were quite tricky. In the end from the three of us, I was the only one who passed the exam and got the certificate. I think the course and the exam wouldn’t be so hard if only we had more time to study. We essentially had about a week from the end of the class to sit for the exam. Add that with endless summer holiday jobs, we hardly had enough time to study. Even I couldn’t score as high marks as I did before.
Anyway how’s work at the new campus? Although the place is much closer to home, I still need to leave home around the same time as I did before. Why? Because there’s about half a dozen traffic lights from here to there making the commute just as long if not longer than the old workplace. The first week of school was crazy to put it mildly. I was swamped with work up to the nose. The management decided to switch to a few new systems and hardware all at once so you can imagine the amount of work we had to do to make everything run smoothly (if at all). It’s a small miracle that almost everything went on smoothly the first week. The second week afforded me more breathing space, with less issues and jobs to finish but still, there’s hardly a moment I spend being idle or doing anything else at my desk. I was literally the first one in and last one out for the entire week.
How does it compare to the old place? It’s hard to say at the moment because I reckon it would be just as crazy over there this new school term with all the system and hardware change going on. That said, I’ll have to say the grass is indeed slightly greener on this side of the Klang valley. For reasons such as commute distance and the good food (with generous portions) offered at the secondary campus. I’m still getting to know my way around the campus. It is a huge place, about twice the size of the old campus. On the plus side, there’s a lot more eating and shopping places in Equine Park. For once I won’t be stuck with just 3 eating places to choose from.
One thing you need to know though, my position and working place is far from secured. The management will do an annual appraisal and test for my position. If I did badly or my work performance dropped, there’s no guarantee that I will keep my comfortable position as the deputy to the System Admin like what happened to a colleague of mind. He was unluckily transferred from here to KL for I assume that exact reason. Hope I don’t suffer the same fate. Like uncle Ben said, with a comfortable position and good allowance comes a big responsibility so don’t go slacking at work. Yeah I totally made that up.
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