Hither Thither and Yon

I suppose the first of May is as good a time as any to start on new resolutions. Here’s one: I resolve hereby to write a new post every week. I used to be quite able to, and I do not think I’ve lost that faculty or that facility; but of course now I have a great many more distractions and demands on my time and sometimes it does seem as if the effort of sitting down somewhere and shutting out everything that I need or want to do and spending a half hour or an hour just remembering and recording is beyond me. I don’t suppose anybody’s been hanging on me and waiting for my next post and screaming in silent despair every day that goes by without an update; but in time to come I think it would be nice to sit down and look back and smile in indulgence at my past self.

So, because I can’t necessarily say everything in between the last post and this one—mostly because I haven’t got Internet access at the moment and have forgotten when the last update was—I should perhaps spend a little time to create a local backup of all my posts just in case of strange and unlikely catastrophe—but in any case I don’t know what I’ve said before and thus what more there is to say, and so you will have to make do with what I can be certain you do not yet know (and I can fill in the blanks in a later post); which means, then, that this post will mostly concern my last couple of weeks and the most recent weekend. You won’t be short-changed anyhow; they’ve been an eventful time.

You probably know that when I entered this company it was as a purchasing officer. Over the last six months I like to think I’ve steadily improved, and I suppose the vaguely rhythmic nature of the work helped in that regard—it was a job that very much had a certain scheduled feel to it, and even if one was often chasing deadlines one at least had been expecting to be chasing those deadlines, and if one hadn’t been expecting to then one was quite justified in feeling a little wronged. All of that changed about—let us see—the 13th of April and so it has been two full weeks since I was transferred into my new position as the Personnel of the QA Lab. There were various reasons for the transfer, of course, ranging from suitability to need to… well, let us save time, and let me not risk the anger of my GM (even if the likelihood of him seeing this or you telling him is remote), and say that the transfer was necessary and urgent and that was why it took effect on a Friday.

My previous post as purchasing officer has been taken by a young, very pale, slightly chubby lady, whom I spent all of Wednesday and Thursday acquainting with the systems and the demands and duties of the post; since then I still receive queries from her about various odd things, but it pleases me rather to say that she seems to have acclimatised quite well; though of course that may be due to her being a quick study and not my own doubtful skills as a teacher.

Anybody who knows me knows my opinion on great changes. As far as I’m concerned this new position counts as a change of jobs, which if I remember correctly merits a quite high score on the Stress Meter, quite on par with marriage or something like that; and even if the Stress Meter says nothing about it at all this is still a Great Change. In fact if you were to ask me, I’m more stressed out about this new position than I was about my last one; I’ve got less training since there is no senior officer to teach me this time, and it’s turning out to be quite different from what I thought it would be like, and there’s an audit coming up in a couple months’ time, and the GM is breathing down my neck about having the place absolutely perfect for the audit. It’s probably the last part that has my nerves the most jangled.

So what does the job entail? What if somebody asked you what you thought a Lab Personnel might do? In my case the only experience I’ve had with labs comes from school and university, and the only people whom I knew had a job revolving around a lab were the lab techs, whose job might be essentially summed up as “telling people how to do the things they need to do and then cleaning up after them”. And so that was what I thought the Lab Personnel job would mean—me being in the lab all day and doing tests and presenting results and so on, as necessary. Which, as it turns out, is certainly part of the job, but not nearly half of it: the Lab Personnel is also responsible for a variety of documents (some generated elsewhere, some self-generated), maintenance and/or improvement of the facilities and equipment and layout, the lab techs (of which I have two), and various other lab-related people (i.e. people not directly under me but who need the lab facilities or documents). And so a great deal of my working time has been looking at the system and trying to figure out how it came to be in the state that it is in and wondering what I can do to spruce it up so it becomes foolproof, and in the meantime responding to crises that arose due to the system being the way it is. Which leads to something of an essential conflict between myself and the GM, at least in working-styles, which I’ve only had time over the weekend to reflect on (that tells you how busy I’ve been! or if it doesn’t, consider that I frequently work 13 hours a day) and it does look like he’s the kind to effect change from the outside—make the outside look nice and the structure will change to suit that, is his theory—while I’d prefer to go straight at the system and the flow of things—get the important things set in place and the other things will just fall right, is my theory. Of course he’s the one with decades of experience, so I’m doing as he says as much as I can; it just niggles at me that while I rearrange labels and put up various documents and instructional posters (which are important tasks, don’t misunderstand me; it’s just that they wouldn’t have been my first priority of action), there are documents floating around and a system that seems to not incorporate nearly enough double-checks and feedback loops for safety. So that in effect is the Lab Personnel’s job, as far as I can tell, right now.

And it’s been stressful; I snapped a couple of times last week (as in I spoke more forcefully than intended, not that I broke in two), both of those times because things seemed to be piling up on me and I didn’t at all like having to run about. The lab at this time is still underequipped, I’m still not fully trained in all the tasks I need to do, there are a few things that need doing that will take a great deal of time that I don’t quite know where to get, I still don’t like the current layout of the lab (for one thing they’ve got me seated with my back to the door and that makes me very antsy), and I still don’t know what fires will come, if any. I almost think this is God’s way of driving me to dependence.

And then came the past weekend—sweet, blessed relief! It’s been a four-day weekend: Saturday and Sunday are regular, and Tuesday (today) was Labour Day; and as it happened there was a coronation of a new Agong (or Sultan? I never did take an interest in these things) which gave us an extra public holiday and the company chose to have it on Monday, thus giving us four days off in a row. I took the chance and escaped to Singapore.

For all the goodness and kind intentions of the people in the local church, I still haven’t settled in fully. I don’t know what it will take for that to happen—time, certainly, at least. But a fair few other things, too; it’s a family church, which means that everybody there grew up together and has already got years and years of history with each other; it’s a small church, too, in a small town. Being me, I have absolutely nothing in common with any of them, except for some hobbies and interests; one of them went to NTU, too, and was in my batch of students though obviously not in my course. I think this is illuminating: during his course of study he returned as many weekends as possible to Johor to be with his family and the church. I don’t mean to disparage: this kind of strength of bond is good, and praiseworthy. But it’s also the fact that they are already, so to speak, a complete set that prevents me from settling in. There is nothing they need new members to do, or even that they want new members to do; and as a result I may join in their services and activities and so on, but the strong sense is that they got along quite fine without me and they will continue to get along quite fine without me, and to try harder to interpose myself into this place will upset current dynamics in ways I can’t at all understand because I’ve not been there for the past twenty-five years of my existence. This is, obviously, just my view of things. From their side of things I’m probably very stand-offish and cold and unpredictable and completely without accountability, weather-like in my coming and going. I don’t yet see any solution to this uncomfortable state of things.

But in any case I went to Singapore for a breather.

It’s been great fun. I’ve had meals with friends and reconnected in a way you can’t do over Facebook, and spent time with people and hung out and chitchatted and read and discovered new places and things and people. I didn’t manage to spend time with all the people I wanted to, though; that would have taken time I didn’t have. It’s a pity. But I did enjoy the time I spent with the people I spent it with. Perhaps their sheer disconnectedness is what helps the most; here in Malaysia I have contact only with the people at the company, or my father, or the practical strangers (let us be frank) at church, while there I have the people of Crusade or the old school-mates or the people of the House of Bread. And it’s no toss of the coin which I’m closer to. And already I miss them. I don’t know yet when I’ll next be back there, either; I used to think I’d go back very often and things have not turned out like that at all.

Still, life goes on. And I still need to be strong, and efficient, and reliable, and clever, because my work demands that of me; and so on and so forth.

Today I shaved for the first time. I am twenty-five and today is the first of May and outdoor procreation has not occurred, but I have found a new hair-stylist (recommended to me by the grocer, she’s apparently still very new at her job) and I have blisters on the inside of both my soles in roughly the same place and I’m not sure why. And I have shaved for the first time, with a RM2 safety blade from Gillette (or at least it is my first time out of necessity, for my first-ever time moving a shaver across my skin was back in NTU when I found an electric shaver in the common bathroom and was wondering what it was and tried out the hypothesis that it was a shaver and was proven right). I suspect this may become a weekly, and then a daily, requirement. But it’s nice to know my hormones have finally kicked in.