Working in Chaos

If not for my sore throat that woke me up at 3am and causing me to lose sleep and made me decide to take an mc the next day coz I didn’t wanna go to work sick and tired from lack of sleep, I wouldn’t be here in front of my laptop now, blogging about the things that happened since I started my attachment in Sunward Pharmaceuticals.

I don’t know if it’s me or it’s the reality, but the 2 out of 3 offices I’ve worked in had loud talking managers, coincidentally these are the small kilang offices. It’s small in the sense that it’s REALLY small, and the office staff has less than 10 people. The rest of the plant has many employees but this department’s office has around 7 or 8 in total.

[momentarily distracted by stupid bugs that lose their own oversized wings by clumsily flying around with absolutely no sense of direction and landing upside down. One even got its wing stuck under a cable and can’t move an inch now. Stupid bugs]

The lab itself has more staff, mostly lab assistants or lab techs themselves. The lab itself is damn small prolly the size of SIGS form 6 class room, but in an elongated shape. Imagine a space of that size and all the work benches and all the instruments and all those people inside. Oh yeah, did I mention the stools for the work benches? There’s barely room for walking. And one of the very basic lab rule I’ve learnt form uni is that you can’t have too many people in the same lab at the same time, and this lab has violated that one basic rule.

There was another room that I worked in, checking for black spots inside of syrups, the office chairs are so old I actually broke one. And I wasn’t the first to do so. There was another person who broke 2 in a day and I think there were 2 others who had the same problem. This is another hazard. I don’t really think they have hired an occupational safety and health officer, seeing that the whole kilang is not so safe.

Back to the main QC office (oh yeah I work in the QC dept), the manager. The QC Manager. Miss Ng Biow Teng. But she’s really a Madam oredi. Over 40 yrs old. The first day that I was there already I didn’t like her. And she never even spoke to me. When I was being trained in the lab, she walked in and immediately I had a déjà vu moment. She reminded me of the loud-talking bitch of a manager in TW Garments kilang. That garment kilang manager was a good-for-nothing, loud-talking show off who only knew how to walk around acting important. She made sure everyone heard her when she was talking on the phone with her boss or supplier and made sure she was heard everywhere she went. That’s the exact same thing with this Miss Ng in QC dept. She made sure everyone heard her when she handed out corrections of their work to her staff, when she was giving instructions, when she was delegating tasks, when she was on the phone with her boss/suppliers (her grammar is all over the place, can’t help but chuckle to myself and make corrections on her English under my breath. “Viscosity” becomes “Vico City”; she’s just TTY v2.0 XD)

I don’t really know what’s with these people but I think it has to do with being trapped too long in a small, unimportant company with a little position of power. My opinion is that it gives them an illusion that they really ARE that powerful, and can bark orders as they like. And I think that the shouting is a way to reassert that they are your boss. The people who work in offices like this are stuck there long time. For some of them it’s their first and last job and they are bullied into thinking they have to submit to their bosses. But I just feel that if you have accumulated enough experience from this company then you should move on to bigger companies. Otherwise you’re just stuck there coz these small companies only promote people based on how long the staff has worked there, not their merit. And when these people get up there you either have to wait for them to drop dead or retire before there’s a vacant seat for promotion. It’s just a dead-end job, IMHO.

And what Miss Ng may or may not have known, her staff bad-mouths her every chance they have. They make fun of the way she walks, talks and talk shit of her. A manager is supposed to manage people, have soft skills, and inspire her team. She has none of the above-mentioned quality. She just barks orders at people and shout at them when her unreasonable demands are not met by her staff. And from what I heard and seen, the people in the office get more work done when she takes a day off.

Oh yeah. And the Chinese in the office don’t give shit about you. They only care about getting their work done, and are absolutely not helpful at all. Selfish bitches.