Fire, Fire Sabot

Today is not a good day to be me. Admittedly neither was yesterday, nor was last Saturday or Friday or Thursday; we would save a fair bit of time by simply admitting outright that my days have not gone well for nearly a whole week, and it’s a mishmash of my fault and others’; but mostly mine. I suppose it’s a mercy I’ve had two uneventful months of steady slow peaceful working, and it’s only now (in the last month of my three-month probation period at this job) that these challenges are piling on and turning into a crisis; at the same time I wish there were no need for such events to occur. But let us go back and trace everything from its root cause.

Work has been going quite swimmingly, apart from the odd worry or two about timings and things like that; perhaps those should have been an early warning system to me, because even odd worries become signs of danger when they pop up during a period when one’s hands are supposed to be being held by one’s senior officer while one acclimatises. But my faults are many and my accomplishments are few, and so those worries came and went and I tried to get better. Perhaps not quickly enough, or not better enough to achieve the standard at which I ought to be already; my temperament is turning out to be more the plodding kind that slowly feels around the edges of things and does best when things change only a little, and not the explosive fiery kind that vaults towards and over challenges with snorting nostrils. I don’t know. But I digress…

Adjusting to working life has been both fast and slow. I’ve adjusted fairly easily to living on my own and providing my own meals and driving and doing my laundry by hand and occasionally even mopping the floor of the house that I live in; I’ve never yet needed to wash the car because of the daily torrential rains, but I shall soon need to pay my first road tax ever; the personal side of things seems to be falling easily enough into place, even if I am still effectively friendless here (apart from such friendliness as I receive from the colleagues). It’s the professional side of things that’s going a little more bumpily; maybe I started off somewhat well, since most of the people in the company know that my father is friends with the CEO; maybe that caused them to expect more of me than they would have of other fresh graduates; maybe it caused them to have lower expectations of me. I worry a lot about other people’s expectations, mostly because I have so few of my own. So I’ve tried to learn as much as I can and remember and do and work as well as I can; maybe I could do it better if I tried harder, or changed my approach, or something. In any case I’m learning to live with sudden changes and rushing people (and being rushed by people), and even though the environment is so quick and so malleable I still need patience and carefulness and all sorts of things. It seems rather a self-contradicting sort of demand, doesn’t it? There’s certainly a lot to adjust to in any case: languages, because Mandarin and Malay are far from my first languages; people, all of whom are strangers to me and all of whom I still don’t quite fathom; work, because (as I mentioned) I need to be both fast and responsive, and yet slow and steady and patient, and I haven’t quite struck the balance between the two; and the various demands of my personal life, such as they are: a church to go to, friends to sit around with, doctors and dentists for the inevitable breakdowns of my body, places to buy groceries and the various little miscellanies of life. And two months has just sped by so quickly that I hardly feel as if I’m ready for anything.

Responsibility is a heavy thing to bear, especially responsibility for other people. I’m a purchasing officer and therefore rather in the forefront of the supply chain; what this means is that mistakes that I make don’t tend to show their effects until it’s too late to easily fix them. Like a couple weeks ago, when I asked for a delivery to be delayed, and then forgot about it; in the meantime circumstances changed and it was nearly too late for the delivery to be brought forward in time to meet our needs. I never before was responsible for so many other people; at the very most, one or two perhaps, in university… It causes one to understand, at least, why it’s desirable to have been in a position of leadership in extracurricular things: they’re a safe place to fail, though failure even there is (these days) becoming serious. And then today I was basically the point of failure in three different chains of information transfer, in three different ways—one by misreading an Excel file, one by confusing two different items with each other, and one by simple forgetfulness—and when combined with last week’s failure to anticipate the shortage due to the delayed delivery, my record is very tarnished indeed. It does not thrill the heart to be asked by one’s manager if one could possibly make any worse mistakes.

It’s a mercy I’m here really. In any other place I would probably turn tail and run—take the next three days off to sit at home and lick my wounds, stew in self-pity and fear and worry—if I lived in the ancestral home I would actually be encouraged to do that. That’s kindness, of course: alleviate the suffering due to happenings at work by avoiding the work (and therefore the suffering). But as it is I’ve nowhere to run but forward; be the path ever so thorny and twisted and dark, I still have to go on because I have no good path of retreat; I’ve gone through so much trouble to get where I am that I might as well go through trouble to stay here. And at least I know where I’m likely to fail again, since I’ve failed before (and in such a variety of modes, too!); and the room for improvement seems to have a few extensions thrown on every day. The thought came to me earlier that God would be a very convenient target for abuse at this juncture. After all it is, to a great extent, His fault (so to speak) that I’m in this position (or indisposition, to make a terrible pun); He brought me here and opened the way, and now the way has led into a valley of shouting and miserable admissions of one’s own faultiness. But He’s not to blame for my own humanity.

Even so, today is not a good day. Tomorrow will not be likely to be much easier on me; but these nights without Internet (for I have run out of my credit on my prepaid Internet service, and the shop that sells the top-up cards is not where the website said it should be) are time for me to do chores and think and reflect. Even if my thoughts are jumbled—this post will not be an easy one to make head or tail of in future, I expect—at least I have thoughts still, and a mind, and hope.

(And an ever more crippling fear, which I really should get over some time, of disappointing other people.)