Random rants

There isn't much things to do recently, but I have been feeling restless since coming back from Sabah.

The main reason is due to the office politics, which made me feel really sick. The HR manager herself is not doing things correctly, so I really have no surprises seeing how others behave.

Mr. Porche911 went to Europe for some important meetings, MD went off for three weeks to dun-know-where. The managers that left in the office are Cockroach, HR and Decamouth.

Decamouth brings in his own laptop to study about the share market trends, he had recently signed up for some "technical analysis courses", and is happily showing off his knowledge in front of our see lai (middle age lady) colleagues.

Twoheadsnake having a lot of small talk sessions with Azreal until their head almost sticked together. Twoheadsnake also switches on radio with the amplifier.

Decamouth also switches on Jazz musics during work, and I got accused, cause it sounded like coming from my side.

The HR didn't care about them, but come and asked me to remove my headset instead. Damn double standard.

Twoheadsnake tried to pull me to work on his project, which I had handed over since the end of August, guided him for a month, and he actually told me to get my hands off the project. Now he is trying to get me in again, to do his work, so that he can claim the credit. I refused, and am damn pissed.

Azreal and Twoheadsnake go out at 8am (working hour starts) for breakfast, at 11.45 am for lunch, come back at 2pm to work, went out halfway working to get cakes for tea time... and our HR is fine with it, even join them sometimes.

HR organises a lunch for everyone, but didn't mention what is it about, and the menu etc were all decided by Azreal and Twoheadsnake.

Cockroach pretends know nothing about my Sabah project, he didn't allow me to handover the project to him, and asked Decamouth not to give me any sales to handle, so that I can't claim that I am busy at Sales department, and urge him to take over my projects. (I should have handed over all my projects back to Cockroach, according to Porche911 and MD, since August!)

Azreal screwed up my project, yet trying to blame it onto me. She wants to take control of everything, yet push all the dirty work to me. She is so busy for nothing, spending almost every half morning in Cockroach's room chatting, and half afternoon in HR's room gossiping. The rest of the time, she is whispering with Twoheadsnake. She never got her time to request quotations or raise any urgent purchase orders, and yet simply raise any purchase order she likes without any approval from myself, the project engineer.

One of my variation order from the customer is going to explode -- I chased the vendor for quotations, and got it. I followed by working a mark up and quoted the customer. Azreal issued purchase order to the vendor without us receiving an order from the customer. I foresee the customer is going to reject our quotation, as the variation is simple, yet the quotation is pretty hefty. The vendor already finish making the product, and I don't know who is going to bear it. I have full black and white to cover for myself... I don't know who gives the instruction to issue the purchase order in the beginning.... let's see how it goes...

It doesn't matter if I covered myself or not, it will eventually be me to clean up the mess as always.

Porche911 gave me some little tasks to work on, while he is away in Europe, and he also asked me to help out Decamouth in his work load, as there are too many enquiries coming in. But Decamouth didn't want to share it... so I can't do anything. The little tasks by Porche911 got finished within half a day. -___-

I was basically lingering around the office yesterday, before my leave starts today. Things I mentioned above are all small stuffs, but they are enough to create negative atmosphere in the office to affect others, and to create rumours.

Anyway, I will be going to Indonesia Palembang mid of November with Porche911 to meet a customer. The trip is to visit their production plant, and investigate if enquiry is worth spending too much efforts or not. Apparently, the equipment we will be investigating is older than myself, so I guess there will be a lot of things to discover.

I am pretty tired talking to sales agents, cause our agents so far are perfect postmen, but never add values to the information they gathered. The Indonesia ones are pretty rough, and love to show their power; the Singapore one is damn good in copy-paste my feedback to the enquiry, without filtering the message that was not meant to be seen by customer; the Taiwan one is very political about their scope; the Thailand one is ignorant.

I do not know what went wrong, but I guess I have to start learning a new way to deal with people. I tried to stick to facts, and be transparent about my work. But the office culture is obviously not like that. People keep things to themselves, scared that others will learn their expertise. To me, if you can take over my job, that means it is easier for me to walk away from this current position to somewhere else; or to have the time to do more value added stuffs in my tasks.

Anyway, enough rants for today... I am going to stop.

Rooms

Today is my second time talking to customer.

The first time was awhile ago, with another customer, and I have made some mistakes by forgetting some of my points.

The second time was slightly better, as in the conversation with customer become more fruitful, but yet I still left out some points... though lesser.

Anyway, I am happy, as each time when I clarify things with the customer, regarding their tender documents, they seemed pretty ok with it.

May be I am speaking too soon.

Sales is my weakest link, as I have no sense about money, and the logic behind it.

Speaking about money, our office was pretty free over the past whole week, as all the managers (except HR) was away for some meeting. Decamouth brought his own laptop to work, in order to monitor the share market -- We finally found it out today.

He was happily sharing his share market knowledge, and about what he had learned by attending those courses offered by the traders.

Well, none of the mathematical jargons he mentioned was alien to me, but the financial and share jargons really got me lost. Golden Ratio, Fibonacci number, moving average etc, I know these things by its mathematical theory, but didn't know how to apply them to financial terms.

Come to think of it, I guess I need to pick up a bit of economics and finance, since I am now starting to deal with figures. I wasn't interested in business management during my university days, or even my secondary school days, was only because I couldn't understand the meaning of the words.

What is surplus? I know it has a definition behind it, but all I wanted to know, is just whether it is an extra or not enough. The economics text books go around the bush, but didn't tell me what it is.

What is liquid asset? For a teenager who only have money to buy bus ticket, it was two english words putting together.

All these are so similar to my journey of learning musics. I didn't know C D E F G A B was read as Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti.... I thought C was supposed to be read as "see". That was my first step into musics, and I couldn't understand it, which made me gave up following the remaining stuffs like quaver notes, crochet etc. -- couldn't even understand what people were talking about.

Anyway, back to the topic... I guess if there are things that I don't know in this world, I should be happy about it. Just like if there are things that I still need to work on when talking to the customer, it means that I still have rooms for improvements. Sure I make mistakes, but then, it showed me how much I need to improve. I think having the luxury to improve yourself is good, because it makes you grow up. And I am allowing myself some rooms to make mistakes just for that. Of course, don't make mistake on purpose or negligence -- that won't help you grow.