Work Sucks

I'm sitting here in the office at 9.15 am bloggin. Why? cos none of my team members are here yet. I'm posted to Starhub Cable Vision, IT Department, Web Development team. Well, I wasn't exactly posted, my dad had some contacts and he put me into this place, little did I know it was going to be this terrible.

For the past four weeks I have been doing nothing, NOTHING I say, except for a few meager tasks like editing a web page and scanning through logs for a certain user, all in all took me about 1 1/2 hrs out of 4 weeks.

The first 2 weeks was utterly terrible, firstly, my supervisor was not expecting me to turn up for work yet, therefore had nothing prepared for me. No computer, no work, no access pass to the office, no computer account, no desk. I was told to sit at someone's place, and was given books to read and was told by my colleagues what I was to do. I was totally shocked by what they do here, it wasn't anything I have learnt. They use JSP and Javascript for their webpages hosted on Unix servers and Vignette for web content management. In school, I did ASP on a Windows platform and didn't learn to use any content management software. Furthermore, over here, they use a whole host of programming languages that I have not even heard about.

So for the first 2 weeks I was reading a book called, Beginning JSP Web Development by Wrox(publisher), and believe me, it was so damn boring. I read till my eyes were dry!

I got a computer some time on the second week, but I still didn't have my computer account, so I had to wait for my colleagues to log me on. I am also not able to log on to MSN or Yahoo! Messenger as it's blocked by the network and there's CCTV's all over the place to monitor screen activity! If you do see me online during work hours, it'll be that I'm sick or I'm secretly using web MSN. Plus I still don't have my access pass so I have to ring the doorbell everytime I want to get into my office (the toilet is outside).

Now, its the beginning of the 5th week and I haven't got my pass, at least I got my computer account, but you know what? My account has no internet access, so everytime I want to surf the net I have to log in to my colleague's account at the browser. Since I have nothing to do, I am practically surfing the net the whole day.

Now some comments on my working environment. First of all, this place has a stinky smell, don't know if it comes from the carpet or the people. My office is 80% filled with foreigners mainly Indonesian and Indians. A small bunch of them are Singaporeans. It's quite crowded here actually, the office floor area is abit larger than LT 45 but there are close to 50 people here with large cubicles fitting 4 - 7 people. There are rooms along the side for the managers and two big rooms at the corner for the 2 big bosses. Talking about the 2 big bosses, I haven't seen them at the office since I came here, they are probably back at the Cuppage office, and one of them is the one who got me in here.

The people here aren't all that friendly, they don't talk much, at least to me. Probably because I do not speak Indonesian (my team members are all indonesian) and also I am not the IT type of guy, so I can't really relate to them, furthermore, what I know is far less than what they know. I guess this is the case in a large organisation. So you could say I am quite, lonely, here.

My colleague told me that for what I am doing (which is handling promotions for cable side), there usually won't be much to do, but then all of a sudden, there will be promotions coming up and I am expected to rush to get the coding done in a short period of time, then it's back to surfing the net again.

Well, I think I said too much for one post, feel free to tell me your experiences during your attachment and I do hope it's better than mine. :)