Wednesday, April 26, 2006
I make international phone calls for a living
Holy crap.It's been almost two entire months since I last promised to update this spot. Remember what I said in my last post about not being a busy person? Scrap that. I'm probably one of the busiest persons I know still waiting for the University period of my life (with a capital You) to arrive.
But more on me sorely lacking time later. All the ASEAN scholars who were bothered enough to visit this page must be eagerly waiting to find out how bad I did in the A-Levels, if they don't already know.
*Drumroll*
A - Physics
B - Economics
C - Chemistry
C - Mathematics
B3 - General Paper
Holy crap (again)! ABCC?! I was hoping for at least ABBX (where X = E and above), at least that can get me into most Law schools (although I don't plan on doing that anymore) around the world. But life is (somewhat) fair and I received my just deserts (NOTE: single S, everyone, it's spelt that way). My teachers were impressed though, because I've maintained a very terrible track record in school and suddenly managed to pull of a distinction and at least got credits for the rest.
Of course, AABB would've looked much, much, nicer on paper... If such a thing were to even be remotely possible of occuring to me in University, I need to be more consistent at hitting the books instead of keys and mice and square and triangle buttons in the future. You can't kill a habit, but you can grow out of it, I think. Eventually. I hope.
*Prays*
Anyway, as I was saying, in the two months that I've been so damn busy is due to this new full-time job I'm doing. It's at this business research company (Synovate), at the Business Consulting department (in Menara IGB, MidValley) where I have to call up companies and ask them questions along the lines of "How much do you spend on purchasing food a month", "How many forklifts does your company own", "What kinds of insulation material are popular there", and "How much engine oil do you use in your fleet in a year". These questions are not applicable to the same companies, of course; they depend on the projects. In any case, it was a really interesting experience, if you're the kind who likes to annoy people with highly sensitive questions ("How much is your company's gross annual revenue?") and likes to have scathing remarks thrown your way over the phone by unappreciative folks, right before an abrupt hangup even before you had the chance to apologise.
Yup, it was a friggin blast. But it's a living.
And now I come to the title of this horrifically verbose post. Due to the scale of some of the projects taken up by Synovate, I had to call up respondents over in the United Arab Emirates (hereafter known as UAE) and New Zealand (hereafter known as Kiwiworld). If not for the opportunity to cause some irritance to certain privileged people in those two countries, I probably would've degenerated into a pitiful whinemonger (right now I am only guilty of whining and being pitiful) from overexposure to rejection (the worst I've ever gotten in a day was 5 successfully completed surveys, each 5 minutes long, after calling over 70 people).
Here's a couple (that means two) of things I found out from ringing these people up:
1 - People in the UAE sound almost exactly like Malaysians on the phone. The Indians and Pakistanis will sound like, well, Indians and Pakistanis, the Arabs will sound somewhat like Malays, and anything else in between will feel like trying to order lobster thermidor at your local mamak stall. And white people will always make you attempt modifying your accent to suit theirs, bleargh.
2 - According to a friend of mine who lives in Kiwiworld, apparently Kiwis get unsolicited phone calls from telemarketers very often, so they tend to have developed very strong feelings on the subject. Hence, the people I called were either extremely friendly (yay!), or goddamn brutish (boo!). Then again, it could be merely the gruff voices of the masculine kind carefully cultivated over years of fooling around in workshops (I called bus companies there, by the way).
Those aside, the other excuse of me almost degenerating into a pitiful whinemonger (right now I am only guilty... wait a minute) is the BLOODY MALAYSIAN KTM SERVICE. I've yet to go through a week where there isn't at least one day that I have to wait up to 45 minutes for a train to arrive at KL Sentral during peak hours. And since it's peak hours, when these delays happen, you get to see normally "I don't give a flying f***" Malaysians coming up with ingenious methods to cram their bodies into the train coaches, hundreds at a time, pushing and shoving to show just how much exactly they "don't give a flying f***" about you or your unborn baby (or your young child, or your arthritis, or your novels you're trying to maintain in good condition). Hell, at times the train is literally more packed than a can of sardines; there have been occasions where I couldn't even see my own arms, for crying out loud.
And since peak hours occur both in the morning when I leave for work (Subang to MidValley) and when I return home (the other way around), the propensity of the delays double. And there's also the traffic jams going to (and coming back from) the train station. In total, I spend approximately three to four hours commuting each day. And due to commuting, I wake up at 6.15am so I can leave home by 7, and only come back by sometime around 7.30pm.
Which serves to explain why I'm quitting my job the day after tomorrow (Friday). Then again, tomorrow doesn't count as a working day because I took a day off to (finally) sit for my driving test. And this also serves to explain why I'm so terribly busy the past two months; work on weekdays, drive on weekends, surf, slack, sleep and (a whole lot of) shit anywhere in between.
I so need to take a(nother) break.
