Enjoying Tokyo

I can really live in Tokyo, once I know the language and get used to the food. But tonight, I managed to get by without saying much.

I woke up from my nap feeling hungry. With the knowledge that the shops here close by 9pm, I plowed through the hotel’s restaurants and even contemplated room service. All were overpriced and none looked appetizing.

All I wanted was a simple bowl of noodles. Steaming hot noodles. With egg. Definitely with egg. I had this incredible craving for egg. I even thought of getting fresh eggs from the convenience store and boiling it in my hotel room’s electric kettle.

Although this is the land of instant noodles, I know I really shouldn’t resort to getting cup noodles from the convenience store in the hotel. (Or egg for that matter.) So I dragged my sorry ass out of the hotel flushing like a drunken idiot.

It was the best decision I made in a long while.

I found a noodle house the size of its kitchen, with less than 20 seats on a counter surrounding the kitchen. Not knowing anything in Japanese, I ordered my food with a single alphabet of the English language, according to the tag on the pictures outside the restaurant. I ate sitting shoulder to shoulder with local men drinking Asahi and finally paid and asked for a receipt by pointing to the print-out slot on the cashier. I knew I had it when the cashier responded with “Oh! Receipt-to!”.

Dinner was completed with a grand total of 1alphabet.

Satisfied with my steaming hot bowl of noodles, I left the store and decided to take a stroll around the area.

Passed by an ancient shrine along a row of restaurants and bars. Saw Yoshinoya in the land it is from. Counted 3 convenience stores in the half a km area near the hotel. Got surprised by a talking traffic light. Cheapest vending machine sells coffee for 80 yen. Passed by many men-in-suits reeking of alcohol. Passed by many men in suits and ties riding bicycles. Got surprised by a music playing vending machine. Bought Meiji milk without saying a single word.

The shops close by 9pm? Well, just a few of the department stores around. This place is still bustling with activity way past 11pm.

I thought Japan was a place I’ll never like. I don’t enjoy the food and I’ve no interest in their culture, TV shows and anime. But I really like Japan, if for nothing else I like the Japanese. They’re gentle, gracious and extremely polite. It is a very comfortable city to be in.

First trip to Tokyo

It’s only 7.30pm.

I’m in the hotel, eating expensive hotel lobby bread and drinking brought-from-Singapore 3-in-1 Milo.

I’m burning a fever and I can’t understand the Japanese instructions on the cooling pads I bought from the hotel’s convenience store.

If only the Tokyo view outside the window will stop calling out to me.

Miserable. I can’t stay another minute anywhere.

One of the best things about my internship, is that I get a glimpse of my lambo almost everyday when the bus passes the lambo showroom.

=)

Making some marks on the passport

I hope these trips won’t be just marks on my swanky new biometric passport.

For most people who hear that I’m going on all expense paid business trips to Tokyo, Seoul and Jeju Island, this must be a dream come true. It would be for me too, if it weren’t happening to me.

Somehow, the excitement is not there. Not like how I would have expected it to be. After all, these are places I’ve never visited, and business trips are a first for me too. It is fantastic exposure to interact with business people from different countries and to participate in an important staff meeting. Besides, which company spends so much money for an intern to go on a business trip?

It’s too good to be true.

This lack of excitement may be partly explained by the unenthusiastic person I’m traveling with. But the more significant reason, it seems, is that I don’t think I have done anything good enough to be worthy of this treatment. And the uncertainty. This feeling that it may be all taken away suddenly seems to prevent myself from celebrating what I can only express as ”a stroke of luck”. After a long wait, I get an internship that possibly gives me the most exposure I can get as an intern.

Someone told me, “Congratulations on the trips! I guess that they’ve realized how valuable you are…”.

Sheepish. The Big Guy who suggested these trips doesn’t know anything about how valuable I am, but suggested these trips based on a business point of view. And also because of the highly commendable company culture that encourages people to make trips overseas and interact with their counterparts in other locations.

Walls

Hands tied, tongue tied and blindfolded, I have been led by the nostrils through a labyrinth. Every person I meet feels like a hard knock into a wall. Fully aware of each person’s own agendas, I am helpless in circumventing the walls they pose, seriously preventing me from making the best out of what I thought is my most challenging job experience to date.

I am feeling inadequate at this corporate game. Too inexperienced to play the lead and too haughty to play along. The lead is choosing the path of least resistance - cover your ass, grab their watch and tell them the time. It is leaving me irritated, dissatisfied and utterly miserable.

I have to do something this weekend. I’m hoping for the best.

Elephant, Pig and Superpowers

I finally have the answer to a friend’s question.

“What would you choose to have if you could suddenly have a superpower?”

At that time, the question completely caught me by surprise. So I gave a lame “there’s nothing I really want, I’m happy as it is” or something to that effect. The proper and better answer comes a good 2 years after.

Teleportation. Yes, definitely teleportation.

I can only fully appreciate Nightcrawler’s gift after Saturday, when I realized I had stupidly left something in school when I needed to pass it to someone somewhere else. That means a good 2 hours wasted just to travel to and back to retrieve it. It’s a small problem, but also an extremely irritating one. Teleportation would save all the traveling time that I suspect wastes a good 20% of my life.

The very next day, I made my first trip to Ubin, an ambitious cycling and hiking full day outing on mountainous roads for someone who has otherwise led a relatively sedentary lifestyle. According to a signboard, legend has it that Pulau Ubin and Pulau Sekudu were created when an elephant, pig and frog all lost a race and were therefore turned into rocks with mutated single-pincer crabs digging holes into their backs.

Imagine, if they had learnt teleportation, the race would have been completely redundant, and we would have saved a lot of money on boat trips and rent for the van. My friend would also have been saved from her 2 bad falls on what was meant to be her birthday outing.

Nonetheless, it was enjoyable and I realized how much I missed biking. My legs are not aching as much as I imagined it would. But my neck hurts. It appears that the steamboat dinner after that might have been more strenuous than the biking.

An Old Disappointment

I was suddenly reminded of a disappointment from a while back, and my old blog post in respond to it. Sometimes, words written in anger can sound so right.

I guess I know what he’s thinking about again. I am so stupid, I missed another chance at pleasing her. While -she- must be saying everything good and supportive to her, I threw a huge wet blanket at her. What you may not know though, are the things that are truly bothering me -Why do you always see me as being so shallow? Why do you always try to tell me how to live my life based on some idea you spawn out of the top of your head? Why do I always have to justify my choices by a quantifiable expected benefit?

And she. There is probably nothing more abominable than throwing support and saying all the noble things about leaving the problems for her to solve, without even understanding if solving the problem was what I really wanted. How do you show that you truly care for my welfare, when you are not interested in what this program was all about, don’t ask if it would be beneficial to me and don’t consider if there were any other problems and risks involved?

I need someone to discuss the issue with, to cross-check if the benefits and problems that I consider are real and to share with me his/her advice. I don’t need someone to judge me, or to be blindly supportive of me.

- Confessions to a Stranger, 1 April 2008

Feeling mellow

Clark Quay is beautiful at night.

I was tempted to take a walk after parting ways with friends. After all, the place is so lovely and the night is not too late. But the thought of work the next day pretty much spoils the mood.

Well, I like the job, it’s interesting and challenging, and it tickles my intellect in the right places. But the people you work with sure makes a huge difference. I think I have to pay more attention to people and culture when choosing a company next time. I thought I could work anywhere as long as I like the job.

On the bright side, planning for outings with friends makes me happy, and there’re things planned for the next 2 weeks. Amazingly, we’re now favoring a quieter place with good food and not so much of alcohol and live bands. We’re getting weary of noise.

These days, I’m listening to more jazz.

Why do birds suddenly appear, everytime you are near?

Just like me, they long to be close to you.

The Nerd and The Bean-counter

As I was reading materials on forecasting models for the project I’m assigned to, I came across this phrase – “The specialist may believe that the manager is too ignorant and unsophisticated to appreciate the model, while the manager may believe that the specialist lives in a dream world of unrealistic assumptions and irrelevant mathematical language.”  (website by Professor Hossein Arsham)

How aptly it describes the situation. Although I am far from attaining that “specialist” status, I fully understand where the “specialist” is coming from. In fact, that sentence put the entire situation in context, and I’m beginning to understand better why the clash of ideas came about.

Lack of experience and personal preference make me approach the problem at a more conceptual level. When faced with this forecasting task that is entirely new to me, I chose to read textbook methods, case studies and learn some of the existing models people use. As usual, I dug through my favorite databases of academic journals and Harvard Busines Review articles, googled the web for modeling tutorials and test out how statistical softwares can help me in completing the task. At meetings, I brought out concepts, big models and macro analysis ideas. But the “ignorant and unsophisticated” accountant naturally didn’t appreciate them and cannot see beyond the implementation problems she is familiar with.

From her perspective, I am a fresh-out-of-school kid – inexperienced, agressive and impractical. I do not understand the real world problems, I cannot anticipate the problems of sick leaves and other work priorities that make people unwilling to cooperate with me when sourcing for information. Unlike the kid who uses “irrelevant mathematical language”, her approach to the project (based on her vast experience in day to day operations) is to understand the problems causing inaccuracy in current models and then devise ways to improve them. Therefore, she is appalled that I do not put understanding the details of existing models in top priority, and cannot understand why I suggest reading up on industry trends and competitors before meeting with the relevant staff when “they should know better and you can’t try to show that you know better”.

We can’t see eye to eye because my approach is to trash the lousy old model (if they even had any) and design a scientific model based on existing approaches and good practices, while her approach is to understand the problems of the old model and fix it up. Theoretically (pardon me), this should mean that we complement each other and will finally come out with a fantastic model incorporating the best of both worlds.

However, stereotypes of the narrow minded bean-counter and ridiculous academic combined with all that misunderstandings of “trying to show off” frustrate the cooperation. Multiply all that with the huge generation gap and our stubborn characters and we have the most impossible couple possible for a team project.

I realise this is actually the first time I have to work closely with someone who has a wealth of experience and who creepily speaks like my mother. I’m tired of her worldly-wiseness that is desperately trying to rein in my progressive ideas and “just try it out” attitude. Barely one week into an internship where I have proper work and I’m already missing the energy, ignorance and lack of fear of my peers.

On the positive side, I hope this will make my negative EQ at least slightly less negative, drive some tact into this rock-hard skull of mine and add some worldly-wiseness into my empty repository.

Clash of Ideas

I’m feeling the clash of academics and “accustomed practices” at work. The ridiculously academically oriented new-kid-straight-out-of-school versus the veterans with 30 years of experience in actual work. I’m quite surprised to only face this problem now considering I’ve had a number of part-time work experience. (Guess you don’t realize it until you’re given proper work? So I should be happy.)

It seems that the intuitive and gut-feel methods that have always been in use at work are favored over scientific methods. Perhaps that comfort with what you know (plus possibly the extra work) just doesn’t leave you open to other methods. I’ve always seen myself as a flexible person, and I never believe in relying on standard models. Still, my years of science education is making me shun taking a purely judgmental approach. I mean, despite how sensible the approach is, I won’t trust my guts entirely with sophisticated analysis. My guts are only good for creating rubbish from food.

Somehow, we’ll have to make this work, marrying scientific methods with judgement, which logically is the best way to get results anyway. This internship is going to be interesting.