Sunday, June 17, 2007

Not much updates for the past week cos there has not been much work in the office.
Handover took only one day. My predecessor is a tall gal (1.7m), same age as me and has big eyes. Found out that she has found a job very near to her home and the organisation she is joining was my first workplace. Singapore is too small i guess....

For the rest of the two days while she was still around, she took me to some departments and taught me the shortcuts to walk to there. Most of the time, she left office to catch up with her friends from other departments and our boss dun seems to care much about her "MIA". For the first two days, i left on the dot after checking with boss that there wasn't anything to be done for the day. And on the thrid day, which was my predecessor last day of service, i could not contain my curiosity and asked her if it is usual for her to leave on the dot daily. which she said "Yes".

And i wondered why boss asked me before the interview that, as he put it:

"Tell me honestly. Really honestly. are you a 'on-the-dot' person?"

That gave me the impression that i may need to stay back, which is not a problem for me as i have been doing so for my last two jobs.

For my prev job, I was already on the job the second day, using my ex-colleague account to help her clear her backlogs. And not to mention for my 2nd last job, there was often a period of time where I am doing two persons job whenever one resigned.

So suddenly having with the so-called "normal" workload to the colleagues of my same level ( i realised it's the executives who need to stay back for meetings), I am not feeling used to it instead. Also realised that as boss had put our position (my predecessor & i) under a different headcount, to freed us from the "boring administrative tasks", i did not have to deal with purchasing of stationery and other supplies for the people in the department --these fall under the secretaries' jobscope instead. Even though compared to my predecessor's jobscope, I have one more task relating to events management, I am still rather free for now as there is not major events planned for these few months.

My predecessor told me that there some tasks which she is unable to handover to me as these are ad-hoc work given by our boss where he have to first explain on how to do the calculations on the excel spreadsheet. The only thing I have to take not of is that he is a very neat person, as can be seen from him workstation, must make sure that whatever files passed to him is clean & tidy (meaning not to take those recycled files).


At least on Friday, I managed to spend some fruitful time as I was given a chance to attend the tutorial on costing which boss conducted for his executives. Heard from another manager that my boss is one who is willing to spend his time on training others. Seems to be true as on that day, some executives reporting to different managers, who had gotten the word from others abt the "tutorial" , asking if they can "gate-crash". The session lasted from 10 am to 1.30pm, touching on the 2 excel template he had came up with on NPV generation. I have no problems with the first, bu looking at the 2nd spreadsheet, it seems really cheem. To get the figures on the first page, one would need to link from from 8 other annexes. Each annex is about 3 pages long. Imagine how many different figures one would need to get hold of first. For me, as I do not have any heath care background, I have much difficulty figuring out the terms they used, such as the different class wards applicable and terms such as "cream-off". Even the executives joked that is boss take 1 week to do up the costing, they would take at least one month.


On another note, lunch at current workplace is definitely better than my prev workplaces. There are two kopitiams, one staff canteen with lots of varieties of food to choose from, and if hat's not enough, my colleagues and I even went to NUS science canteen. So far, we only tried the western food ccos the prices is really cheap. A plate of chicken chop/cutlet only costs $2.20! Shall go there more often now as it's still their students term break period.

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