A Meaningless Chapter

My dreary existence expands in scope and develops a whole new intensity. These days I have been pondering the meaning of existence, and found the exercise to be meaningless. The fact that classes had ended for this season does not improve my mood greatly. In fact, the prospect of failing all my examinations has a cold and sobering effect. I can expect my agony at my flophouse university to be prolonged and more expensive. I conclude that the best thing for me to go for it and see where my efforts take me. It sounds like a football team who are playing against vastly superior opponents and expecting the worst, but when you are skint, tired, uninspired and back to the wall, going for it is the only option. Either that, or it is go to the ground, spread your legs like a whole and asked to be raped…gently.

I have been testing out the upgraded version of my company’s computer system for the past week. I must say it has been an excruciating as it has been fascinating. In view of the many problems, excruciating seems the right – and only – word. It is also the only word my overworked brain can think of right now so yes, excruciating it is.

Although the new version is supposedly to be slightly more advanced than the previous one, it looks like a whole new different beast altogether. For starters, a substantial portion of the original interface seems to have been changed. The options that were so intuitive (comparatively speaking) have been replaced in a variety of ways. Either they are now in a different position, or have different or newer functions. Compare MS Word 2003 to the crap 2007 version and you have an idea of what I mean.

At least MS 2007 works. The new program is riddled with bugs. We are finding new bugs and program errors ‘for fun’ and we are not even halfway through this infernal program. It does not help matters that the company that designed this integrated business system has such mediocre support. Their technical support staff does not even know how to run their own program, and the material in the CD they provided is useful only if you have a year to sort through the thousands of pages’ worth of instructions. Engineers and technical people tend to be poor writers. These buggers can never be concise if their paltry existences depend on them keeping it short and sweet. To compound our misery, we are not even informed of the exact features the new version has. It has been all trial and error and it is virtually impossible not to miss out anything.

There are only three of us, my boss, my senior, and I. We are like the Special Forces. Besides our daily tasks of providing support to our users from SIX different countries (in particular those inept jokers from India), we have to (i) liaise with our foreign colleagues (ii) help the other IT team in their inquiries (iii) provide training to our other colleagues on how the damn thing works, its unreliability notwithstanding (iv) assist our dear colleague in Malaysia in resolving technical issues she should have been able to solve with her 20 years of experience, (v) test out and troubleshoot the program, and (iv) communicate with our two programmers on what we want.

So little time (20 days to get the damn thing up and running) and such paltry resources. It is little wonder I have been losing what is left of my strength and sanity. Before long I may lose more money because I have no time to study for my bleeding examinations and I would have to spend money repeating the shit that I flunk. Every day has been like nine to nine, and I am not even a permanent staff to begin with. By the time I reach home I would be so damn exhausted I could barely keep my eyes open. Long hours of staring at the computer screen have affected my eyesight. My perfect/almost perfect vision is going to the Hells. Hitting the books with the sort of inferior lightning my house has only exacerbates my agony. At this point of writing, I have finished the cursory round of studying for my Political Economy of ASEAN. I was to commence on Human Resources tonight but I only left the office close to ten. There is no way I am going to burn the midnight oil for a fourth consecutive night without risking collapse. Still, I still harbor ambitions – or desperation – of finishing the foregoing mentioned subject by Sunday. Two subjects in one week, and then it’s the Finance modules – which I expect to fail. Life could hardly be more fun.

Speaking of fun, I did mention about my trials and tribulations being fascinating as well. Here are the reasons. My company is a most unusual company. For an American company you would have expected that its employees would have had more work/life balance. Hell no! If it had not been for the highly informal organizational culture, one would be forgiven if he had thought it a Chinese firm. It is not unusual for people to stay a bit longer after office hours, and hardly rare if they stay considerably longer. My boss was still working in the office at 2am a few months ago. When we left tonight, a few colleagues were still hard at work. In fact, the only people who get to have a life are the expatriates in corporate management. I remember one bloke telling us about his Mandarin lessons and how he hoped to impress his pretty instructor. How sweet. I wish I had the time to take up a foreign language after work, and possibly take the opportunity to take my bootylicious instructor to bed for some engaging pillow talk. I got nothing against the bloke. He seems like a nice chap. It is just that things are, to quote from Buddha, thus.

Having said that, I wish that some of those in management would have some brains. On an ordinary day our integrated business system is already riddled with bugs and quite few users are experiencing difficulties with the damn thing. To expect us to make the new version work within such a short span of time, with such scant resources, is absolutely ludicrous. And let us not forget that we are implementing our online store. We were supposed to get it up for people to order items, but we are a month overdue and even now, despite the combined efforts of the Australians the Americans, us, and possibly the Taliban, it is still NOT FUNCTIONAL.

I don’t understand why in the Hells must the management rush us like this. What is the point of having an unreliable system and a dodgy internet site just to meet some unreasonable deadline some managerial Peter Pan had set? When shit happens, as it surely will, the company will definitely lose more money. First, given the fact that only THREE of us are supporting the IT for SIX countries, it would be IMPOSSIBLE to prevent a reduction in efficiency should just ONE person from EACH country encounters a technical problem at the same time. What are the rest going to do when they cannot print documents, when the customers want something done and they cannot log in or access some function, when the system hangs and they are left stranded?

Second, when you cannot even get your internal processes in order, how are you going to handle the competition and your prospective customers? When your competitors are swiftly implementing their business strategies and you are still bogged down by internal deficiencies, it stands to reason that they are going to get a head start. When your customers want to order items online and the site just cannot work, do you think they will stay with you long enough to develop customer loyalty? The failure of the business to generate revenue, coupled with its propensity to work its employees to death, will surely contribute to loss of customer confidence and employee motivation, resulting in high turnover, attrition rates and resources wasted. Indeed, for all the eloquent rhetoric of our CEO, the fact remains that only a whole new outlook in corporate strategies and effective human capital utilization will pull the company out of its mire. For this I offer a simple solution: PUT ME IN CHARGE.

Fuck. I just wrote a short essay on Human Resource Management. Talk about not having the time and energy to study. Writing is not only therapeutic, it is educational as well. I will be writing more after my examinations. Cry me a river.