Another Part of Hell

My first day in another part of this Hell. I feel like quitting already. In fact, I feel like quitting the moment I got the job. Never had anyone in this world been so negative and I am sorry to say that once again I have achieved the impossible. I have been feeling a bit unhinged these few days. At times my anger, black and pulsing with malignance threatens to pour forth from me. Sometimes fits of melancholy engulf me. They are always tinged with anger and regret – anger at the people who have a cushy job in Shenton with a good salary to boot, and regret that I was born a Sinkie and to make it worse, I took the wrong career and chose the wrong course twice. They say that writing is therapeutic but for me it often has the opposite effect. My words maim even me. I apologize for the haphazard description of my first day in Hell. I am too tired to really bother and fuck me if I really care about structure. It is random and I like it this way. It is my blog and I do whatever I like.

Getting to my gulag is very difficult without gulag transport or your own. The queue at the bus interchange can easily stretch to nearly a hundred metres in the early morning. If I rely on the bloody bus, I’ll have to wake up at 6 am, which is damn ridiculous. If the gulag minibus ever breaks down, I'll blaspheme so hard even the dead will rise.

My office is a rickety, dusty and sorry affair. I have no access to a computer, nor do I have a table of my own. Three of my gulag mates occupy the tables in the main room – my superior also calls the room a ‘storeroom’ – and my superior and I do our paperwork in an enjoined room. For now I sit across him at his desk. Folders and files stack the shelves next to us. It is a bit messy and the paperwork, while not hopelessly untidy, would give any self-respecting office girl in Shenton Way a fit.

The work area is quite big, maybe fifty yards by fifty yards. Shelves holding slings, riggings, wireropes, blocks and other engineering stock fill much of the area. An overhead conveyor lift or crane, used for carrying heavy objects around, is fixed at near the opposite end where my ‘office’ is. Pallets stacked in a small area, while machines are placed and lifting vehicles are parked randomly. A flight of stairs led to the second floor, which balcony overlooks the entire floor space. For a factory in the heavy industrial area of Sinkieland, its toilet is surprisingly clean. Unfortunately, it has no toilet paper, and the portions of the sink are caked with age-old soot.

Lunch is only 45 minutes. With the nearest canteen hundreds of metres away, we have to rely on the gulag’s transport to ferry us for slop. It is a far cry from the leisurely lunch hours my colleagues and I enjoyed when I was still in my former gulag. The scenery was much better, and so was the air quality.

After my superior was called on site, I was left alone for nearly three hours. There was little to do save to read the horrible catalogue book and attempt to memorize the names of the different types of blocks, slings, hooks and whatnots. I came close to falling asleep on a few occasions. Try as I did, I could not get much into my non-technical brains. Occasionally my gulag mates would walk in to run some errand.

My interviewer told me they hadn’t prepared my employment letter as they were still undecided of what title to give me. I thought it was ‘sales coordinator’ but obviously they thought that since I wasn’t doing sales, it would not be appropriate for me to have the word ‘sales’ in my job title. Okay, I said. After lunch they finally got my employment letter ready. It says that I am an ‘admin and technical support’ – whatever that is – and the woman (my interviewer) explained the contents of the letter to me. (As if I do not know how to read. By the way, there are a couple of grammatical mistakes – pathetic.) After satisfying the general terms of contract (10 days leave and three months probation and so on and so forth) I signed the damn thing. I have a haunch that the woman knows I am probably going to leave in a few months. She kept saying things like, ‘If you stay long enough’, and ‘….may find the job not to their liking.’ Smart woman.

My gulag mates consists of Sinkies, Indians, and Chinese, with the latter comprising most of the technical workforce. From my first impression, my gulag mates in the administrative/sales/accounting/operations departments are typical Sinkies, not intellectually inclined and mostly unappealing, especially physically. The Chinese are your typical factory worker: hardworking and impatient at times. I don’t think I will make any good friends. Although I am a philistine by the standards of my atheistic friends, I do have to dumb down a lot when I talk to people. Sigh. I am neither intellectual nor boorish. Stuck in between. Neither here nor there. I expect to go to Limbo after I die.

I think my gulag is quite shambolic with its business processes and job delegation. While I was trying to digest the damn book I was tasked to read, my interviewer came to me and asked if I could furnish a transcript of my polytechnic results. I told her that I lost the damn thing long ago and few employers, if any, will ask for a transcript of the results in poly as they are contend with the diploma. She said it would be quite helpful, as it may be good for the gulag to know more things about me to afford me opportunities Besides, the Accounts girl asked for it. I was quite befuddled. Why in the Hells is a accounting staff doing the work of the HR?

My superior shot the shit a bit with me and told me they were actually looking for a person with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. My interviewer said that he needed someone to help him do the paperwork and now he tells me differently. I don’t think good interdepartmental communications is the norm in this gulag.

On the operation side, there seems to be a heavy reliance on paperwork and ‘scribbling’. If some joker cleans the whiteboard or my superior loses his notebook, we are going to suffer in our documentation. Why not computerize it? The gulag has been around for 30 years already. Surely it should have had a decent business platform by now?! Lastly, the gulag website sucks. It looks like something a child would come up with!

60,000 foreign trash from India coming in. Whether I quit tomorrow or six months later won’t matter. I don’t think I’ll ever manage to get a business-related job in the city area even on contractual basis. Why in the Hells did I get a business degree and why in Gehenna did I suffer so much for this piece of academic trash?! I should have spent the money on whores. Either way I get fucked, but at least I would have gotten a fucking good time!