Saturday, March 18, 2006

There's a Hoax in Everyone

It’s 3.42 am on a Friday night, reporting from yet no other place but the same ol’ cream colored couch of newly wed’s haven. As to why I’m awake at this God forsaken hour, it’s punishment from God for relenting to extreme laziness. Basically, Narrrling and I went for dinner, both came back with at least a 20% enlarged potbelly of Thai food, and fell asleep within minutes of changing into comfortable home clothes. At close to 1am, I woke up suddenly and realized everything in the living room was still alive.. So I woke up to switch off the lights, TV, computer..etc.. Standing in the darkness of my living room, I realized that sleep is going to be impossible and this was confirmed later, after 30 mins of lying in bed next to a snoring potbelly.

So I got up and sneaked out of the room. The first thing that came to my mind tonight, strangely, was work and what I did was that I powered up my laptop and started working till now. Woo Hooo! My boss is SO going to think of me as an A-grade champion hard worker… but I must say I do enjoy my work nowadays, contrary to the old days when I was sitting around Ms Private Parts, wondering everyday about the meaning of life. I also recall more than one time where I’ve quietly told myself, “Everything about this new job, new team is great!”.. Do you know what I like about this new team? Bizarre but true..

I love the fact that everybody is anti-social, just like me. I love it when I have no obligations to lunch with anyone, anyone at all. I love being left alone most of the day at my cubicle doing whatever I want at my own pace without having sneaky colleagues peeping at my monitor screen from behind. I love the fact that my department doesn’t try to go out of the way to force us into stupid inter-department sport activities as if it’s all that matters. I love the fact that my new team seems to have a silent bond that we’ll stand by each other although we don’t see the need to go for meaningless expensive team dinners every other month just to talk chilvary. It’s great here, really. I have no complains.

My job itself, sometimes I wonder if I’m a hoax. I constantly wonder how I manage to do my job the way it is, as if I’ve been doing it all my life although I just started on this job last August and I’ve had no proper training or background in this area. Either my work is really easy or sometimes I think, I might not be the only hoax out there, which is what encourages me sometimes to boldly ask when I don’t understand because I realized that many a times, I am not the only one who doesn’t understand. I use to be really afraid to admit that I didn’t know things because I didn’t want my hoax cover to be exposed. I always thought, in a company where people send in 5000 applications and only 1 is selected, you’ve got to act smart. Now I realize, the 1 selected might have gotten through because he/she has better hoax skills while I just got lucky because I got the right head hunter to do the hard work for me.

I attended a 3 day training recently and the first hoax I spotted was the instructor herself. She made a very fatal mistake, while she was talking about listening skills, she tried to crack a joke and she said this, “I heard a joke recently and it’s quite funny. They say that when normal people say ‘yes’, they nod their heads but when Indians want to say ‘yes’, they shake their heads! Hahaha.. I don’t know if it’s true but yeah, apparently they shake their heads!”

Oh My God, where has she been? And it’s not even funny! I lost all respect for my instructor on the first day of my training. Bear in mind, she’s talking to a roomful of people who won the battle over 5000 other applicants. Over the next few days, as predicted, she was struggling to manage us. At some point, some started to give up. During presentation, some would give really bizarre answers. For eg. we were asked to complete a case study where we had to complete a problem analysis of a situation, whereby 80 barrels of oil was produced in a day instead of the usual 120 barrels. Some groups just simply blamed it on the neighbour factory and closed the case. Every symptom of the problem was the neighbour’s fault. It was hilarious. Some groups gave some highly technical reasoning(that includes technical jargons that doesn’t make sense like O3 created in the air, creating the ozone later to lower the magnesium level in the air…bla bla bla.. ), some wrote things on the board like, “Duh, ofcourse you can only see the problem after the development lar”… It was actually hilarious for us but I guess not too funny for the instructor who was struggling to manage a group of rebels like us.

Oh My, it is 4.37am. I should at least try to sleep, right? Alright.. that’s it for now.. Leave some comments if you care..

2 Comments:

At 3/29/2006 05:06:00 PM, Blogger Sangeeta said...

Everyone's a bullshitter one way or another ;) They just try and bluff their way through. That's why those who have the gift of the gab get away with so much, they charm people with words when actually they're just lying/cheating/etc.

 
At 3/30/2006 05:24:00 PM, Blogger Miki-C said...

Yeah, and come to think of it, i think we're both champion bullshitters.. haha..

 

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