Feeling a bit melancholy tonight, so allowed myself to browse old files, listen to old songs, trying to reconnect with old friends.
anyway, after graduation, i was jobless for 2 months and God I swear it's a challenging period for me. I was real impatient (probably due to my inner desire that just want to prove myself, to whom?, who knows?) and driving my parents crazy. travelled back and forth KL-Penang for interviews and at last I landed 2 jobs offers (more on interviews & my job selection in the next posts).
I chose the offer in my hometown due to a lot of factors but mostly because I felt more confident with the job description (using a really familiar software to me), and so on June 15th, 2009 I started working as a Mechanical Design Eng in d****b Inc, (Sdn Bhd), and I was there for 31 days.
The company is basically a privately held company and in this case owned by 1 man. I remember asking the interviewer (which was my boss and direct superior-to be) if this is an American setup (due to Inc,) to which he explained no - (Sdn Bhd, but this is not shown in the ads anyway).
They design handphones themselves, for a niche market (security - encrypted phones) and it costs the customers a bomb for a mediocre device (mind you it looks and works like a previous generation Nokia phone, only with color screen). Not bad i supposed, a small company (30 employees) able to design their own phones.. the office environment? mix of western with marriage to the eastern feng-shui superstitious. e.g: fingerprint door locks & biometric access control system for punch card with an indoor fountain in the office. walls are painted green. dell workstation. nothing special. mediocre pantry. below-par toilet.
The phone was almost finished (they've produced a few prototypes so i didn't get a chance to be involved with the device design phase but i was tasked to design the packaging of which the device would be delivered to the customers. Since it comes with quite a hefty price tag, the allocation for the packaging alone is close to 100 USD. So the industrial designer came up with the conceptual design, my input wasn't required at all since he copycat the exact pelican box. i googled it and boy was i happy the first result is exactly what i was looking for! LITERALLY EXACTLY, with the same colour and design and all.. Of course the designer change the colour, add some 'creepy logo' (watching eyes and beak of a phoenix) parallel to the security-encrypted handphone they're designing.
but aside from a difficulty in performing my spiritual duties, these guys are a bunch of rude people (sometimes). In a meeting and during discussion, you should use a language where everybody understands and if you don't, then that's pretty darn rude! plainly as that. this is not about racial or anything, this is simply common sense and office etiquette + communication skills. am i to be blamed for not knowing their language? oh excuse me, they called themselves Malaysian but most of them couldn't even speak the national language to a decent standard. and i don't bother to explain to them that they should use english as the medium of communication since Asians are not the type of people that'd accept constructive criticism. besides, this is common sense and too basic and the fact that they are not being thoughtful about this wears me off. my boss worked with panasonic previously, a giant japanese multinational company, not a fresh grad like i was.
and the owner of the company used to con his father-in-law's money in the bigger manufacturing plant he was managing prior to this setup. of course he wasn't prosecuted (family matters) but he used the money that he took to setup the company. since the company is not making money during that period, i feel bad about the source of it. i completed my task, resign (thursday) and went my way (friday). On Monday(July 19th) I start at a multi-national Russian-owned HVAC manufacturer in Kajang.
I thank God there's no gap in my employment.
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