Sunday, August 7, 2011

Why I Left My Gulag


Below is an account of my precious stint at a gulag in some godforsaken industrial area in an obscure corner of this cesspit and the circumstances that compelled me to liberate myself from this Hellhole.


Misused and abused talent

What is a highly intelligent individual like me doing in such a crap place? This is a question I asked myself every day. I have a bloody degree in business and I am doing something unrelated to what I studied. It does not take even a bloody diploma/’A’ levels holder to do the shit I was doing. I should be doing accounting, sales, human resource, or any other thing that is business-related. It infuriated me to no end to see less educated people doing these jobs and it was even more galling to see how much more competent I could have been if I were in their positions.

I was hired to help with the documentation and I was not even given a bloody computer to work with. I even had to share a desk with my pathetic *superior*. Any employee would reasonably expect to be given a proper place to wok and proper tools to do his job. I had to voice out my demands at a meeting a month later before they even gave me my own desk (by kicking out the guy who was using it) and a computer. Sadly, the computer was not working and the IT guy came, saw, did nothing and left, never to be seen in my room again. It was highly insulting. The computer gathered dust at my desk and was still gathering dust on the day I left. I bid good riddance to the damn piece of junk and I hope it catches fire and explodes in the face of the sod who tries to get it to work.

Obviously my talent was not being properly appreciated. I was just wasting my precious time, stuck in a lousy job with lousy wages, working with lousy people, using lousy things, and doing lousy things. There was only one way and that was out.


Low pay and non-existent perks
I am a degree holder and in my job (if you can call it that), I have to work five and a half days a week and the rates they were paying me simply did not justify my hard work and worth. In addition, for the abuse I suffer, they should be paying me more.

In most companies, the thirteenth month bonus is guaranteed. Not so for this one. You are allowed to take medical leave after you are ‘confirmed’ at the end of your probation period, but the amount you can claim is only $25. If you fall sick during your probation period, it’s unpaid leave and you have to fork out the medical bills from your own pocket.

Also, there are no short courses or people development programmes in the gulag. The bloody management only believe in working their employees to death, so better to profit themselves.


Sheer exhaustion
From the moment I started work to knock-off time I had had no respite. Tons and tons of documentation required my attention and I had to help out clearing other people’s rubbish. I don’t know whether they really didn’t know or just acting stupid, but I found myself having to help the older staff navigate their way through the documentation. I could never finish my work because shit kept piling up. I was once asked to stretch a diagram of a big engineering item. One part of it was partially obstructed and to get the dimensions, I had to remove the fucking cotter pin that fastened the bolt to the structure so that I could take the measurement. Can you imagine a fucking office worker being made to do an engineering task and one that requires him to stand in slippery ground and contort his body?! Bloody Hells! This is just one of the pieces of nonsense I had to put up with and I lost at least five pounds in my ten weeks at this accused gulag!

Saturdays burnt
Having to work on Saturdays when most of my peers are on five day work weeks is depressing as it is. Imagine having to stay past the working hours stipulated in your contract. Contractual terms stated that the end timing is 12.30 pm but I found myself working until around 1.30 pm due to last minute jobs. I didn’t get overtime pay for this extra hour and I was quite appalled at this exploitation.


Dysfunctional conflicts
Every day things screw up and when things screw up, people screw one another. There is little, if any, respect among gulag mates. Verbal violence is the norm. People use colourful language on one another without thought. They do not understand how what ‘I’ll get back to you' means. Every damn thing is urgent. When people rush jobs, things inevitably screw up, tempers flare, and conflicts arise. It is like a war zone in my gulag. It is every bit as volatile as the Gaza Strip. Once a gulag mate from China got so sick of one of my sales staff that he physically attacked the whoreson. I nearly attacked the same bastard after he got on my nerves one too many times and if I hadn’t left the premises for a ‘count to 10, breathe slow and easy’, I would have walloped him and found myself in the dock. Things are so horrific that even on my last day, two drivers almost came to blows. One guy told the other guy what he thought in no uncertain terms and the twit retaliated by asking after the guy’s mother. This is ridiculous. Even school kids learn not to insult their opponents’ families and to hear fifty year olds commit mistakes not even school children make is disturbing.


Mediocre people
Most of my former gulag mates (including the management) are just incompetent. My gulag mates in the technical department did not know how to convert pounds to kilos, tons to kilos and other elementary conversions until I taught them. I was shocked they didn't know. One would reasonably expect a technical person, especially one who has been educated in a vocational institute to be able to do the things required of their trade.

The joker whom I was hired to assist with the documentation was the most hopeless excuse of a leader I had had the misfortune to work with, and I certainly encountered more than my fair share of cretins during my years of working! He was the leader of his department only by virtue of his long years at the gulag. None of his men give a fuck about him. They can lecture him, use sarcastic remarks on him and all his does is to sit and bear the abuse. If I didn’t know, I would have thought he practically basked in the abuse! Already despised by his subordinates, he also suffers lectures from the sales people on a regular basis. What a hopeless specimen! If I were him, I would have committed suicide long ago.

My administrative cum sales cum human resource cum what-have-you staff is made up largely of functional retards. Every time I received a document from them, chances were that it was riddled with grammatical and spelling mistakes and poor formatting. The ones who appeared to be more competent in this regard were the girls who graduated from poly not so long ago, which spoke volumes of the inability of the older staff to learn and improve. There was an incident when shit hit the fan and the customer was pissed off at us. My lousy *superior* did not dare to call the customer to explain for something which was basically our department’s fault and the sales personnel, after listening to my explanation of what the Hells went wrong, asked us to explain. I had to draft an apology letter on paper - my computer was unserviceable – and then explain to her the gist of the situation and how my letter was crafted. Bloody Hells. You are in sales and you don’t know how to write something as simple as an apology letter. Pathetic.

The management is just as hopeless. In most companies, the management will be sitting in corner offices or upper floors. Not so for my former gulag’s. Being typical traditional Chinese bosses, they are very paranoid and mistrustful of their staff. They think that if they do not keep tabs on their employees, they will slack away. Their solutions to their lack of confidence in people are simple: install cameras and sit among their employees so that they are always within sight.

While their paranoia can be tolerated, their sheer incompetence is not excusable. They want to upgrade the gulag’s accreditations and to achieve this, they need to attain a certain level of conformity and quality in their engineering standards. However, the engineering standards are non-existent and slipshod work is often produced. This is equivalent to getting a toddler to sprint before it has even learnt to walk. The depressing part is that they knew of this deficiency and showed no sign of getting their house in order. They told us to do this and then, to write up work processes when they don’t even know what kind of standards to meet for the accreditation agency’s approval! I had to resort to referring to previous records - by some miracle they met ISO standards a decade ago - and tried to conjure some write-up which was more stringent but not necessarily correct. Being educated and one of the rare few who are competent in writing in English, I was the only one who was capable of writing such documentation. My clueless *superior* has terrible English, like the rest of his fellows in the department. I had no managerial support at all and I decided that it would help preserve my sanity if I just packed it in and left them to their own stew, which I did.

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