Year End Review

Working in a business corporation while waiting for my spm results to come out thought me that, if you want to be successful in the years to come, always review your performance.

2006 has been a real real real tiring year for me. Kick started the year with working in a pharmaceutical company as marketing assistant. Salary was good, but the workload was darn.. 10 hour work that required me to do stuff like online research, product study, basic marketing skill courses, packaging, quality control, designing and presentation, calling up clients and suppliers, dealing with complaining customers, so on and so forth.. it was a wow for me initially.. you're a marketing assistant man! Sounded so cool.. but then when the work came it was 'oh no', and I was a young 18 year old chap then, that had so little experience in working and was the youngest fella in the whole office! There were times where I'd travel outstation to places like JB or Penang or Malacca or KL to deliver stock or meet clients, I went for a business-cum-fun trip to Hong Kong with my boss, tagged with him to see how he dealed with his Hong Kong counterparts.. and after coming back worked late night shifts with him and another Dr to help the doc to handle some online submission of reports and paperworks.. somedays would require me to work more than 20 hours straight, some days were just normal days, somedays were mad rush where in the last 2 hours of the day you have to beat probably hundreds of packaging stuff, packing barang-barang into envelops to be couriered down to KL.. but it was a great time working in the pharmaceutical company.

Eventually as I left, my boss gave me a recommendation letter.. here is it..
WOW..that was so super nice of him.. and I submitted this recommendation letter to all the universities I applied for..apparantly I was like a 'kai xing guo' back in office then.. and well well.. always filled the office with laughter.. hahahaha..

After working with him for 4 months, I went over to work as a volunteer in the Ipoh GH. It was another new experience altogether. Usually I would go with my best friend Wei Li - a baby genius and answer bank from SMC - to hospital, and we would visit wards like Spinal Care Unit (SCU), Psychiatric Ward and occasionally the pediatric ward, of which is the hardest one to handle. What we did in the wards were nothing actually, just sitting down with the patients and talking to them, entertaining them by telling them lame jokes, listening to them tell stories about how they fought the communist rebels back in 1960's and sometimes, bug the nurses to show you how to check blood pressure using the stethoscope or stuff. Great fun! And the incentive of every hospital trip would be lunch and a movie with Wei Li in Ipoh Parade. Could you beat that? That was the most enjoyable month in the year.. just light and easy, talking crap and rubbish with WeiLi and working in the hospital.

At the end of the volunteer programme, we decided to do another 2 weeks in the microbiology lab instead. That was where my dad used to work at. He was a state microbiologist but retired last year in 2005, so now the son's stepping into his shoes. *Ahem* Forgive me about that, but that's what the people there did say.

"Eh, anak Boss datang kah? Ganti bapak ke?"
Well.. that's really not the case.. coz you see, unlike the knowlegable dad, the son has no darndest or slightest idea on what do you do when you get a blood sample or urine sample. So it's all learning from scratch. Learning what to do when you get a sample, how to do culturing, how to do streaking on a petri plate of culture, what's a sensitivity test, a diagnosis test of bacteria and stuff.. blood count, sedimentation.. things that we should be learning in no time to come.. great fun indeed, but great work and responsibility. It was so fun, that I again ended up fooling around in the lab, brought so much laughter to the lab that they had to kick me out of the lab for 2 days when the ISO auditors came to audit the microbiology lab. (They were worried that we would be charged for making a nuisance in the hospital, and thus degrading the image of the hospital.. whatever..)
After the trips to hospital were all over, it was time to start my classes in INTEC.. and that's the beginning of disaster. First time I stayed in a hostel, I didn't know that the toilets in our apartment could be so dirty.. so that's where I learned the usability of Clorox, a ingenius discovery of mankind which is basically a solution containing hypochloric acid and hypochlorus acid.. simple yet usable. And man, Clorox is so strong that when I'm not careful, my nose goes numb from accidentally inhaling too much chlorine gas after I spray the whole bathroom with Clorox.

And in every apartment, you get real whacky roomies.. for one, my roomies are all a bunch of work-hard-but-fool-around-mad guys..they'd study so hard until all of them go mad and end up doing mad mad stuff like that..

But that's the fun of living in an apartment with all sorts of people. These Malay guys are the best people to hang out with! Fun, whacky, crazy, mad... and they'd get rowdy with you if you're not careful dude..
And yes, that's my table if you happened to wonder..
Of all the mad things I've done in INTEC, the worse things to do were: firstly, join Toastmaster; secondly, join MINDS Debate; thirdly, fall in love. On the third issue, I wished some people would have just warned me that INTEC's precisely the wrong place to fall in love..

About Toastmaster, Evelyn Aun, a girl I met in INTEC strongly recommended me to join Tm just because she joined it and she found it fun. So I went like, ok, fine, if you think it's fun then it should be fun for me too.. And I joined, paid the registration fees and I regretted it till this point of time. And after paying RM 30, I participated in a humourous speech competition and won the INTEC level, but for me to participate in the higher levels I had to pay the full registration fees which cost around RM 180.. another bomb, and trust me, it was very very expensive to pay RM 180 just to join a competition.. and I did, and lost 2 rounds later.. *sigh* so much for spending RM 180 only to lose so soon.. not fair..

And about MINDS Debate, I've always wanted to be a good debater, but in my career opening match, I was pitched against a Singapore senior team from Temasek Polytechnic who happened to totally demoralised and humiliated me and my teammate on the field.. so there you go, another happening outing..

Then as the year drew to an end, there came the VBS, the most happening event in the whole Ipoh. Every VBS more than 500 kids turn up, backed and supported by more than 100 crews, teachers and personnels to ensure that this VBS runs smoothly. The Vacation Bible School is to cater to kids to know more about Jesus in a fun and interactive way, and I tell you, it was really fun. Fun not only for the 500 kids, but also the 100 odd personnel on duty.


But for that kind of fun to take place, it was a lot and a lot and a LOT of work. Many late nights, many sleepless nights of preparation and decoration, many long hours of practice and rehersals and trainings, many mamak supper to keep us going for the next few hours of work and stuff, graveyard shift.. all for the glory of God! And though it was really tiring and pooped, we were still rewarded with the joy of the Lord.. after all, the joy of the Lord is our strength! =D


Last event of the year would have been the Christmas Carnival back in Shah Alam New Life.. it was held in Chinese Taipei School, and man, a lot of people turned up!! Couldn't have anticipated the crowd, and I was emceeing with Erin. Well, it wasn't my best performance.. but nothing much to complain about. Helping out as usual, making sure that I'm there when they needed people to work out stuff.



And of all the things I did, I did a lame dance for a talent quest event called '30 Seconds to Fame'..man, Erin was singing the song "Ain't no mountain too high enough" and I was doing the worst move in my life.. anyway..

2006, it's a pretty tough year to evaluate. All I can say for 2007 would be for a hopefully better year, and maybe a little reminder to myself:

'Don't fall in love'

=D *grins*