6 March 2012

My new work requires me to deal with a lot of factories and plants including TNB, the country's national power provider. To be able to work for them, we are required to attend this occupational safety and health induction course where we sit for a test and if we pass, gets this passport for entry card into any of their premises and plants. So my company paid for the course fees and I get my ass to the National Institute of Occupational Safety & Health in Bangi for the course.

The course itself was pretty boring but yet gave me a useful introduction and insight into some important occupational safety stuff. The speaker Mr Affandi tried his best to engage us with his talk, cracking jokes, telling stories and stuff to keep us interested and not fall asleep. Overall I think we enjoyed ourselves throughout the course especially when there's more than enough entertainment provided by Mr Affandi and also some clowns, I mean fellow participants of the course.

The only complaint I have is of course the mediocre food. After paying 250 per head per day, I'd expect a more delicious food from the organizer. Not fancy restaurant delicious food but at least some thing we all like to eat at home kind of food. Breakfast and lunch at NIOSH basically reminds me of the dreadful food I had for 5 years at boarding school.

The highlight of the course was of course the test itself. In the morning, they made us sit for this trial test which looks pretty similar to the actual test later in the afternoon. The actual test contains 20 questions which revolves around what was written in the module and also topics that the speaker has been lecturing all day. If you read the book or at least paid some attention to the speaker, you'd have no problem answering and getting at least 12 corrects to pass. Well, I for once am very confidence of passing this test since I paid attention and read through the book twice. We'll know in a couple of days.

16 February 2012

I went to bed last night feeling like crap. Headache, cold and a hint of fever. Going to work today is like 50-50. This morning however, felt so much better. Maybe I just need more rest. Still, today I had to attend this annual Rockwell seminar in Bandar Utama. Rockwell Automation is like the product my company had been selling and we're like the premier partner or something. So I had to go, which I did. That said I still had to go to traffic to get there and the most straightforward way is by using the LDP. You know that highway that make billions every year and yet they increase toll like every 2 years and had massive jams like every morning? Yeah that stupid highway. I was stuck in traffic for like an hour. Even managed to finish watching 2 episodes of Felicity on my phone. By the way Felicity, one of the first TV series created by J.J Abrams rocks!

Why anyone would hold a seminar in downtown PJ is beyond me. Especially when it's supposed to start at 8:30 PM. Traffic is at its shittiest at that time. If I had it my way, I'd do it in Putrajaya or something far away from the city center. Anyway although I came like 30 minutes late, the organizer is pretty relaxed about our punctuality. Everybody was still having breakfast when I got there. Talk about food, there were aplenty at this event. We had breakfast, 2 tea breaks and one hearty lunch.

The event itself was pretty boring. We had to go to a couple of this lab and tutorial and listen to speaker talk for hours. In one class there was this beautiful speaker from Thailand. Her name was Nopharat something-something and I couldn't concentrate on what was being taught since I was too preoccupied looking at her. I bet I'm not the first guy to gawk at this Thai lady in this seminar. Anyway, the highlight of the seminar was the lucky draw of course. Somebody told me we might go home with an iPad today. The truth is, there were only 3 iPods given a way and a couple of other cheap gadgets like external hard drive and a camera. As always when it comes to lucky draws, I'm like the unluckiest guy in the whole world. Can't remember myself being lucky with one, ever. So as expected some random dude goes home with those lucky draw prizes. Still I got myself a goody bag with some stationery inside and two computer mice which is not bad. But seriously, they should give out like 20 prizes or something next time so that unlucky people like me might just get lucky?

2 February 2012

Yesterday I went to this power plant in Manjung again for a Kick-off Meeting for an upcoming project. So far this place has been the furthest I've been for my new work and I've gone there like half a dozen times already. If the meeting agenda was to be believed, I'll be going there a lot more in the next few months. Time will tell.

As I said, working in factories and plants are not very glamorous or clean/healthy. Breathing coal dust for a couple of hours a day is not exactly my idea of fun too. Still somebody has to do it and me being the new guy usually volunteers to do it. Maybe I'll learn something valuable from this.

1 February 2012

My new job description requires me to visit a lot of factories, power plants & warehouses to check on PLCs and automations and stuff like that. While not very glamorous, it is quite interesting to be able to see how they made stuff while enjoying the sweltering hot factory environment, walking in dust and dirt and being exposed to all sort of workplace hazards. Things you do to put food on the table.

So far I've been to a few factories and power plants. My regular port would be this food manufacturing plant in nearby PJ. I've been there like half a dozen times already and I've got the chance to see first hand how they make those chili & ketchup sauce, chicken stock, chocolate drink, milk & yogurt just to name a few. Being the largest food products manufacturer in the world, safety & cleanliness are naturally their top priority. Each time before anybody enters the plant, we need to wear this lab coat and silly hair net so that we won't accidentally contaminate the food. Of course you won't want to find a strand of my hair in your next Kit Kat bar would you? That would be scandalous. Apart from that they have all sort of safety and hygienic measures like washing your hands before entering each new sections of the plant and also having metal detectors in each and every tank. Fascinating stuff.

However except from the occasional free drinks from the pantry, don't expect any free 'gifts' or products while visiting the plant. That would never happen. Of course I don't exactly expected them to pass me a bottle of Milo whenever I come. Professionalism is key. Even the staffs there had to buy products from the factory mini mart located inside the plant, at a discounted price of course.

Working in factories is a far cry from my previous working environment where I spent most of my time in arctic cold server rooms and comfy office spaces. For one thing, I have no idea how those stuff works in the first place and secondly, I basically have to learn pretty much everything myself. It's not easy but I'll have to adapt. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? Not that I expect to be killed or anything. You could die just trying to cross the street. Hmmm.

30 January 2012

One thing I like about my new company is that they are very generous when it comes to food and money. A month after I joined, they gave me some duit raya. Last month for Chinese New Year they also gave me some ang pow and a pay rise to boot. Not to mention the many company dinners and just makan-makan that we had almost every month. The only thing that they haven't give me yet are my own personal office space and a company car. Oh wait, they are giving me my very own room once the renovation finishes! That means a company car would come shortly after. Right.

Whilst I am eternally grateful for all their kindness, I'm just afraid I might not return the favor. I don't think what I did for the past 6 months or so commensurate with what they gave me. I worry if someday should I decide to run for office in the next election or something, somebody might be very disappointed.

That said I just try to do the best I could.

24 November 2011

When I celebrated my 30th birthday, I used to work with something that I love. Information Technology. At least that's what I thought. I still love IT though. But circumstances at my old workplace made me left something I love doing the most towards something that I don't really enjoy but I had to do nevertheless. At the end of the day, or end the month, it's the pay check that matters. On time. Mouth to feed and bills to pay, those kind of things.

Just because I didn't like it now, doesn't mean I won't like it forever. People can change. My job scope could change. Things happen. I call this a transition period. Perhaps once it pays good enough I might just close my eyes on the unpleasant things. Perhaps. But for now I'll just take it in my stride. Take each day as it comes. Be grateful for what you have. For others might not be so fortunate.

Big thanks to my wife who bought me this huge chocolate indulgence cake and the card. Also to my friends online and offline for all the wishes. You guys are awesome. Check out this sweet birthday present from @shhaslinda. I always wanted one of these. It's like she could read my mind or something.

22 October 2011

The past 2 days I've gone outstation at the Manjung power plant. I've been to Manjung a dozen times before but this is the first time I've ever been inside the coal power plant for work. Since it's an impromptu visit plus it's not weekend yet, I didn't get to bring my family along. I'm sure my wife and kids would love to visit their aunt and cousins there.

Speaking of work, it's been nearly 3 months now since I started here at this new place. Sometimes I felt so lost and hopeless in this line of work. It's just too foreign for me. It's like learning ABC all over again except that this felt more like rocket science than kindergarten. Once I consider myself the expert in my field, but now I'm like a beginner once again. I won't deny it crossed my mind to look for other more satisfying job, related to IT but then again it's only been 3 months and job-hopping after such a short time won't look good on my resumé. Besides, I think I'm made of stronger stuff. That and the fact that my current employee has been nothing but super nice and accommodating to me so far despite my dismal contribution. I guess I'll hang on for now until new opportunities come along.

Today a colleague of mine, Farid tendered his resignation. According to him, he's planning to further his studies at a college down south. He could either be telling the truth or he just got better offers from other companies but he's too chicken to tell the truth. After 31 years, I'm not so naive as to accept everything somebody tells me at face value. Anyhow, I totally understand if it's because of the latter. He did the same job as this other fellow but the fellow gets paid more just because of his race. That sucks ain't it? So now I'm back being the only Malay guy at this firm. Oooh I felt so special and privileged. I think there's been no less than 5 people who quit working here since I came. One lasted 2 month, another 1 week and the record so far was Shikin who came to work for a day and then changed her mine, LOL! I tell you, this place I'm working at right now is not for the faint-hearted.

25 August 2011

So I got my first paycheck today. I was a little bit concerned that I might only get this 3 days before the end of the month like everybody else here but thankfully my fears were allayed when I received this crisp & beautiful check with my name written on it this morning. Actually a lot of things that worries me somehow about this new job disappeared when I got this check. It all seems worth it now.

Before today I've planned of doing a lot of things with my first pay. I'm going to treat my wife, my kids and my mom for dinner. Not forgetting some of my closest friends from workplace past. And then I'm going to buy myself some nice new clothes for work (not Hari Raya okay). I badly needed to add more options to my sorry wardrobe collection. The thing is my check should only be cleared on Monday. By that time we would be in Pasir Mas preparing for Raya. Shopping and treating my loved ones will have to wait then. Thank you Allah nevertheless.

23 August 2011

After visiting a coal power plant in Port Dickson last week, today I visited another factory in Sungai Buloh for work. Guess I will be going to a lot more factories after this. It's what I do now, selling programmable logic controllers to power plants, factories and similar manufacturers.

But today, today I didn't sell anything. Just following a colleague to do some testing & commissioning. Poor guy didn't know too much about this new product so he was virtually clueless and got hantam cukup-cukup by the client and our boss. That's life man. Maybe next time it'll be my turn. Today I didn't learn anything because everybody was like so busy doing their job. My friend here was too busy attempting to do something. He didn't even go out for a break until 7 in the evening. I know your enthusiastic and shit with your new job but there's more to life than work man.

It's like learning chemistry or accounting, this new job of mine. I knew very little and what's more, there's no one here to teach me anything. They don't have the time to for now, at least. Sure I can learn to do anything if only somebody is there to teach me. Plus I had to start from the bottom up because I'm like totally noob with all this PLC thingy and don't expect me to learn everything by myself.

Give me something to do, give me a plan and give me the resources and support to achieve it. It's all I ask.

Right now I don't feel so good about all this. In the future, who knows.

29 July 2011

Today will be my last day working here. I felt so sad. Actually I've been feeling low and depressed these past few weeks ever since I tendered my resignation. I dread every new day that dawns because it only meant that my last day here would be coming nearer. Choosing to leave this place is probably one of the hardest decision I have ever made in my life. Before I came here, I was jobless with Adam Farihin and a wife to feed. The boss picked me up from nothing when I had very few to offer and for his faith in me turned me into what I have become today. Despite all the shortcomings, I believe whatever happened to us since early this year didn't happen on purpose. I'm sure he would not put us all in this dire position if he could help it. One half of me said hang on a little bit longer until I finish my studies at least. Another half said here's your chance man, this opportunity won't come along everyday. So I chose to leave. It was not easy but I had to do it.

And like every decent staff here at Microcorp that's about to leave, I had to treat all my colleagues with breakfast during my last day of work here. So I ordered 40 packs of nasi Kak Na and some teh tarik for everyone to eat. Despite the fact that I had to use all the little savings I had left. Despite the fact that I have no idea when this month's pay will come in but I just had to do this. I'd feel dreadful if I didn't. I'm sure it's not much but I did it sincerely from my heart and it's the least I could do.

Goodbye guys. Hope you enjoyed the breakfast. Wish me luck for my new job on Monday. I pray that you guys will go through this rocky patch in one piece. Like Bujal said, who knows someday we shall all be together again under one roof. :)

11 January 2011

Okay class, today we are going to take a look at my working table. It is just a plain old second hand table but since I work here every day, 5 days a week it means something special to me.

1. I bought this fern plant from Jusco for RM13.00 exactly on January 1st. The last two plants that I brought to my office died under mysterious circumstances. It's been 12 days now. I do hope this one would last.

2. This pretty desktop calendar is given by Nadia Comot.

3. This is my Alderaan Ubuntu server. It contains many wonderful and magical things!

4. My underpowered yet reliable second hand Dell SX260 all in one desktop PC. Although it only runs on a 2.0GHz P4 processor and 1GB RAM it still manage to get my my work done everyday.

5. This is the card that my wife gave me for my 30th birthday. Thanks darling.

6. This is the Raya card that Adam wrote for my colleagues, believe it or not.

7. Yes my desk is always tidy and not just this one time for show.

8.Even my tray is unusually tidy.

9. The first check that I wrote using my check book. 500 ringgit deposit for grill installation for our house.

10. I love my place near the window. Hope the rumors that we'll had to move upstairs is not true.

11. I also have a photo of Steve Jobs somewhere on my desk you know, for motivation :)

17 December 2010

Today my colleagues and I worked together to clean the office, you know the usual stuff, throw away unwanted things and paint the wall here and there. Some people say my company is cheap and these are a job for cleaners and certainly not suitable for someone who studied like crazy for 3 years to get their 1st degree. They've got a point there. If my wife's company were to do something like this, their union will be up in arms threatening legal action to protect their fellow employees from such nonsense.

For me, I think this "reciprocal assistance" or gotong-royong thing helps to build a sense of belonging and camaraderie among the staff. Why waste money outsourcing the job to someone else when we can do it all by ourselves? It's not that big of deal anyway. Don't we all like clean our own homes once a month at least? Today we can see who's really hardworking and who's the lazy slob. Besides we are only a small company of 50 and we don't have any unions yet.

25 June 2010

Today my company celebrated it's 10th anniversary in existence. We had some prayers and had a little party to commemorate the milestone. Did you know that it was previously name Cosmos Dynamic before it changed to its current name? Yes it was a dreadful name and I'm glad somebody decided to change it for the better.

10 years is quite an achievement for a small company. We've been through ups and downs and achieved so many things through the years and I'm proud to be a part of that. Almost 4 years to be exact. I'm the kind of guy who likes to settle down at one place and generally loyal to a particular organization. To me if a company treats me right with respect and rewards me accordingly then I have no reason to leave. So far I have no reason to. Here's for another 10 years, cheers!

15 June 2010

While sorting through my emails this morning, I received one from the UiTM Academics department. It was my exam result! I don't remember they ever doing this, sending exam results to students but it is pretty impressive considering their student portal website is almost always down this time of the year.

So how did I fair? As you can see below I did quite well this semester, even better than the last. Principles of Management was never easy and I think my average mark for my assignment affected the final score. Next time remember to do it with the top student in class (that's you Mrs Rock!). Islamic Civilization was quite tough but I got an A as well for that. As usual, thank you everyone for your help, my family, friends, lecturer, employee who gave me that 3 days leave to take these exams. Well, this is just the 2nd semester and we still have 6 more to go. Long way to go and I must continuously improve my results. You know I won't post them here if they were bad right? :)

All this week I'll be working at a client's office in Subang, replacing my colleague who is taking some time off this school holiday to be with his family. Is it just my feelings or does everybody have like 30 days off a year? Cause everybody seemed to take leaves every other week (not counting M.C and E.L). After my sister's wedding, Hari Raya and next semester's exams I will have like -2 days left of annual leave. Sigh.

23 April 2010

Thank you. Thank you all.

22 April 2010

After 6 years working commuting to PJ and KL, my wife today begins her work at a branch much nearer to home in Serdang Perdana. I thought this day would never happen but it did! So now I can gave her a lift to work and pick her up later in the evening. Not to mention we will save about 200 ringgit in transportation cost, cut 45 minutes from our morning rush hour, fetch the kids earlier, go home and cook, make more babies and live happily every after. Still although her new office is only 7 kilometers from home, we still have to leave early send the kids and to avoid traffic in main road Seri Kembangan.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank her previous boss for approving making this happen. I take back everything bad that I said about him and I would like to apologize if I did or said anything mean or hurtful about you. People, they are full of surprises.

After her first day at the new place, Linda reported that her new boss was most pleasant and her colleagues was really nice. Okay now is the time to start anew and fresh babe and show them what you can do. Yes Sales is a new field for you, but I always believe you can do anything. Oh, anyone who would like to apply for a car loan can contact me or my wife ok?

12 March 2010

Once every new moon, some of my colleagues and I will be involved in moving IT stuff from somebodies office. Today is one of those day where we packed and moved a couple dozen of PCs, servers, UPS and stuff from Bukit Jelutong to Glenmarie both in Shah Alam.

Although both offices is not too far apart but the preparation and worked needed to transfer and re-setup a data center is enormous. You have to shutdown everything, pack and organize them carefully, move them to the new place and re-organize and reinstall everything until they are all up and running without a glitch. This exercise is usually done during weekends, after office hours so not to interrupt other people's work. And usually it will take at least 24 hours or more. This year's exercise for example to nearly 36 hours.

It was a lot of ,work and staying up until 3 to 4 o' clock in the morning is no easy feat but we didn't complain even when we look like zombies and had to sleep on the cold hard floor afterwards. . We just do our job that is entrusted to us and enjoy each other's company. And since many hands make the work lighter, at the end of the day we finished our task successfully.

21 December 2009

I spent the last 4 days of the week at client company a little bit further up north. I think we were too good that by the 3rd day I didn't have any computers or problems left to fix. Instead I began bugging the staff there now and then, asking if they have anything to fix.

When I got there, I got the shock news that their HR staff resigned with 24 hours notice. I say good riddance and about time too! What took them this long? He's lazy, incompetence and lately he's been too preoccupied with his part time business too concentrate with work. He'd been the bottleneck, the bureaucracy that slowed down all our transaction, business dealings and almost every stage of decision making we had with his company. Trust me, I bet a lot of people would be really glad now that he's left.

That said, I wish him the best in his business venture and everything that he does in life.

18 September 2009

This morning we had a meeting at our office. At this adhoc meeting we finally found out the status of our elusive bonus money. They will come in after all, but not until the end of the month. This bonus money had became a rather hot topic in my office. Previously we were told that we will get them on the 10th of September. When that date came and no money came in, they were an air of discontent all around the office. Some of my colleagues were readily bashing the management in some of their blogs.

It all comes down to one thing: miscommunication. Had the management explained to us all about this earlier, we would have been spared the anguish and agony of thinking that we won't be getting any bonus this year. Instead we were left wondering and guessing in the dark and naturally this had create rumors and hearsay. We pay about 44K a year for our leased-line backed email service and it's only 2 click away for anybody to shoot an email.

So it all ends well in the end. Before we goes back to our respective home towns today, everybody shook hands and ask for forgiveness from each other.

24 August 2009

Sometimes life is unfair to us. We don't always get what we want. Things don't happen the way we'd like it to be. That's life. You can't change that. The important thing is, what are we going to do about it?

My friend Bok (not his real name), I used to be in the same shoes as you. I joined this company at what you might call, the wrong time hence I was also not entitled to enjoy the annual bonus that the company give away. But I didn't whine or complaint to everyone. I just keep on doing my job, the best I can and sooner or later people will notice. Who knows if you're rezeki is there, you will get something. Like when I started here, I didn't get the full one month bonus. But me and my batch did got something from the management. It wasn't much, but hey at least we got something. And contrary from what you might heard, the company do cares about us.

So dude, you just hold on there ya?