An Unnatural Calm

Life has returned to a calm.

The past 2 months has been a frantic rush of interviews, meeting person after person, knowing more people from different generations in 2 months than I could possibly know in years. Moving alone in unknown places, hearing strange languages I don’t understand and being constantly bombarded by new inputs is extremely exciting, yet confusing at the same time. Despite spending so much time on my work and thinking that I understand what I’m doing, I seemed to have trouble answering questions coherently. My processor is not fast enough for all the information I’m getting. I’ve lost the ability to speak without consciously thinking of what to say in the next sentence.

Now, sitting at my desk and doing my own work, finally having the time to think through things proper and plan some scheme of things is like a blessing. But it feels somewhat unnatural. Too slow. An uncomfortable, unnatural stop. 

The mad rush and fire fighting has been fun. I could get used to a corporate lifestyle. In fact, I don’t even feel like going back to school. This is not my dream job, but I crazily offered to work 3 days a week even after school starts, since I’ve as crazily planned a 2 day week with 1 full day of classes 8.30am to 6.45pm. The boss enthusiastically soaked up my time, telling me they have much more needed to be done. And I feel sluttishly happy to hear that.

This madness has to stop some time. And I really hope it’s not going to be Week 8 of the coming term.

Next stop, The Philippines.

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.

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.

My interesting life as an intern

It’s my 4th week into being in a finance operations department and I feel accomplished for remaining sane and madly in love with numbers and MS Excel.

Having the extensive experience of being in the department for 3 weeks, it is impossible to resist the urge to share this wonderful knowledge of an average accounting workplace. How else better than to share it in this unoriginal classic, boredom-induced brilliant you-know-you-are-this-bozo-when-that-happens way?

You know you’ve been working in an office for too long when:

1. You lament leaving for lunch 5 minutes past lunch time.
2. You become Cinderella at the stroke of 2pm.
3. Returning to office 10 minutes past lunch hour makes you feel as ecstatic as a teenager beating curfew.
4. And then you leave office way past working hours.
5. And occasionally, way before.
6. You no longer think that the crazy old lady who peers into your cubicle looking for evil is actually the disciplinary mistress hoping to catch you MSN-ing.

You know it’s the finance department you’ve been in when:

1. You no longer break your toe as you sit and stretch your legs.
2. Instead, you rest your legs on the piles of documents under your table and eat breakfast.
3. You no longer marvel at the construction of 3-inch files each packed with documents 7 inches thick.
4. You actually KNOW precisely how to achieve that engineering feat.
5. It has become second nature, not a feat.
6. No, it’s a hobby.
7. You have such extensive understanding of numbers you know the precise payout of all local lottery forms.
8. Your love for numbers is so strong you cannot resist discussing the lottery at the top of your voice.
9. You no longer bump into the cases of documents lined along the narrow corridors of the labyrinth-like workplace.
10. In fact, you know where to locate documents along those narrow corridors of the labyrinth-like workplace.
11. And not get lost.
12. You gave up asking for soft copies of documents.
13. You believe in miracles when a colleague passes you a 3.5 inch floppy diskette with a soft copy of something.
14. Pressing the calculator to compute numbers you see on the excel spreadsheet on your computer monitor feels normal.
15. So normal it becomes a habit.
16. You are obsessive compulsive about the cents in million dollar transactions.
17. You know what each 3 or 4 number code in the 24 number account number means.
18. You can name the account from that string of numbers.
19. And feel in a superhuman way when journal entries have been posted to the wrong accounts.