The Taiwanese seem obssesed with fireworks. It must, at least partly be because the Chinese were the ones to invent them. I never knew there was such a thing as the fireworks festival but apparently there’s one every year on the wafer front on Danshui River. Or is there? Doesn’t matter. A few junior high classmates said they were going and asked me if I would come. People sure did turn out in the masses and the queues at the food stalls were the longest I’ve ever seen. Now, who would line up for half an hour just for piece of fried chicken? It was smart of my friend to suggest that we eat before going.
The highlight of the night was easily the “Will you marry me?” act put on by a couple a few minutes before the actual fireworks. This guy dresses in a suit in rather humid weather, stands on a stool with a bouqeut of flowers and a large neon lighted sign saying “XX would you marry me?”. Stands there on his mobile for at least 15 minutes while hundreds of people wait for his girlfriend to come. The girl comes and obviously says yes, all pre organized but still something you don’t see everyday!
The fireworks themselves were actually pretty good. I got to see some new ones that I’d not seen before. They were being fired from a few different spots and we unfortunately had a tree right in front of us so each time either the left or the right lit up, you’d get this large swarm of people shuffling right or left to get a glympse of the sky. The shuffling was then followed by ooos and aahhs. Don’t remember anyone going ooh or aah at fireworks in other countries, guess it must be the Chinese!
Going home was a nightmare, as it always is with these kind of things, but this time it really was actually quite bad. They didn’t close the roads near the exits and because we had to all squish out of watergates in the walls it meant it took half an hour to go 50 meters. Anyone for H1N1? Perfect situation to get infected, must not really be the scare that it’s meant to be. Worse than Times Square on New Years while it lasted because of the humidity! I’d always rather be freezing than burning up.
It’s been over half a year now since my last post and I’m blaming it on work. Fridat I took off. I deserve it having worked an average of at least 14 hours a day the past few months. I really don’t get it why they don’t at least shift the human resources around a bit in our department, why do some of us have to work till midnight and others only 8? What’s even worse is that the global economy is getting back on track now and they respond by hiring new blood a few months too late. The factory is running on over 100% with a 20% workforce that doesn’t even know the basics. They expect the slightly more senior people, like me, and I really do mean only slightly more senior to teach the newbies about the tricks of the trade. The problem is we’re already working on overdrive with a skillset that’s at best 75% of what it needs to be and now we have to some how take time to mentor. Not fair for us or the new guys. And on top of that, obviously your boss will not take this ‘teaching and learning’ time into account when giving you work. Anyway, the longer I stay, the more I think I should leave asap.
Just took the annual health check about a week ago. I’m sure lots of numbers will be in the red b/c of this first year at work. Oh, and I’m definitely swearing a lot lot more!
So I’m at the metro station at Taipei main station during the weekend and it’s absolutely teeming with people. Kind of reminded me of what it’s like at Times Square station during rush hour in New York. The metro station doesn’t smell as bad as the subway station though…
We had missed out on the 尾牙 this year because our company is in cost saving mode. But at least our department didn’t deny us our 春酒. Although I thought that the food would be better! We all crammed into a large conference hall style large room, filling about 10 tables of 10. Nearly everyone was late of course. The first section with full attendance got 2000NTD as a prize. Rather ironic though, if they got there first more or less means that they had the least amount of work or was being the laziest. Hmm, rewarding laziness is most definitely against company policy! Our section came probably last in this competition.
It was a nicely organized fun night though, with a good variation of games, quick fire questions and karaokeing, all giving the attendants the chance to get cash rewards in a raffle. Being the newest member in our section with the highest employee number meant that I had to represent us for the karaoke. I few of my colleagues were nice enough to go on stage and sing with me though. Anyway, we ended up earning around 4000 for our afternoon tea money pool. Not bad for a nights work!
We should have these events more often, they really do help us relax, get to know each other better and feed the poor engineers!
I can’t even remember the last time that I spent Chinese New Year home in Taiwan. Must have been more than 10 years ago! I missed out on a lot. All the friends and family, all the fireworks, all the food and most of all, the large amounts of lost money from gambling!
It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything. It’s already a week into 2009 but I’d still like to wish everyone a Happy New Year!
I was around Taipei 101 during the countdown celebrations. They had a lot of big name musicians carry the crowd along. That was the good part. However the fireworks on 101 were rather uninspiring, probably partly due to the lack of money available these days, and also I thought they didn’t quite build up to the actual countdown itself!
Here’s a picture of 101 during the fireworks. There’s another better picture in the photo album section. And also a youtube video of the fireworks.
We’re now well into the recession of the century and analysts say that we most likely have not yet hit rock bottom. Lots of unheard of things are happening around the world and obviously tech heavy Taiwan is suffering as well.
I’m smart enough to get involved in the high tech industry right before the downfall. I really don’t mean this in a sarcastic manner, I’m actually really quite lucky. It’s next to impossible to find jobs in this industry in Taiwan at the moment. Employees are being made redundant left, right and center, companies are doing away with hand wipes in toilets and turning off the lights in the parking garage and even encouraging employees to buy their own products. There are many more horror stories and I’ve even heard of an alarming jump in suicide rates around where I live.
My company’s policy, as they say, is to try avoid redundancies at all costs. And their way of achieving this is to force employees to take time off. It started off as making us use up our holidays from last year and if you didn’t have any remaining, you would be allowed to start using this year’s. This was around November last year. From December the holidays that we are forced to take off became ones that we wouldn’t get paid for so it didn’t matter how many paid holidays you had, we were going to get a pay cut.
Pay cut it was and I’m taking an extra 5 days off a month, usually on Mondays. And that knocks a sixth off of my monthly salary. It’s an substantial quantity amounting to about my monthly rent for the place I’m staying at! Less orders doesn’t equal less work for us though as our bosses have started to demand much more detail in our work. They didn’t have time for the details in the past. So us engineers just end up having the same amount of work to do but 5 days a month less in which to do it in. It also isn’t quite a good time to be a newbie in the office as there isn’t much work for me to refine my skills!
Anyway, I thought that I’m entitled to a short commentary on this, and it seems now that the title of my blog is getting more relevant. I’m already lucky enough to experience the worst recession in my lifetime when my expenses are low and I’m in no need for cash. Still, those in school and are graduating later this year or next have it even better! There’ll be lots of job opportunities once they get out, assuming not too many companies actually bite the dust and disappear altogether!
We sweated out the graduation ceremony had a really quick lunch and was outta there. Nothing much to write about today. The ceremony felt rather rushed and a totally for show formality that nobody seemed to care too much about. But it did mark an end to our basic training and was in a weird way a rather fitting way to end it. It was quite representative of what the training was all about. A test of our commitment to order and discipline.
My final thoughts about this month in camp:
A very interesting experience. A rewarding experience in the sense it taught us about discipline and in the same vein some good habits, which we hopefully will remember. A rewarding experience in that you get the chance to make some good friends and in our case, maybe even some useful connections that may become useful in the future. On the flip side, there was much too much time spent on doing meaningless tasks and simply wasting away time. Brain cells most definitely died by the millions when I was in there! Overall, I would say I agree with sending guys to military camp for one month but any longer isn’t recommended!
Here’s a quick snap a friend of mine took as our bus caressed itself out of the front gates.
Second last day today. Camp is winding down and all we are doing these last two days is attending lectures on volunteering and going to graduation ceremony rehearsals. The lectures add up to the amount required for us to become registered volunteers. So in other words we can record the volunteering activities that we get involved in.
I had heard that we are getting some kind of special dinner tonight. It turned out to be a birthday party for those whose birthday is in either September or October. We did get slightly better food tonight but it was all cold! The birthday boys also got a card and some stainless steel chopsticks and other cutlery as a present. They also set up some kind karaoke system up in the dinning hall and had some posters on the walls. So we had karaoke for about an hour after dinner. Rather strange seeing karaoke being done in the army.
Tomorrow’s the final day, I feel sorry for those who have to stand guard tonight! Speaking of which, the other night there was this person who actually went around shining the flashlight in everyone’s faces to check if we were in bed. It’s like he wanted everyone to wake up and not sleep well like him!
Some things you’d just see in the military and nowhere else. For example during rehearsals for the graduation ceremony, we were taught how to clap correctly, in military terms that is. It’s all about one thousand people starting to clap at the same exact moment and the same thousand people stopping on the same exact clap. It’s just strange and really unnatural when you listen to it! It’s like d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d. instead of ddd.d..d.d.d.d…d..ddddd..d.d.d.d.d.dddd.d..d…..d…, you know what I mean.
A lot of sick people now, they’re all wearing face masks 口罩. It’s gotten quite a bit colder since we got back from the holiday. You can nearly say it’s chilly in the morning. I’m trying to stay away from these people! Being sick here is not a good idea! Noone is jealous of me now with the fan on top my head every evening.
We also got to see our final marks for the exams we had. It seems rather unfair for the sit up and chin up marks. I think they scaled the marks to our BMI. I was sure that I did more sit ups than some people but I got a lower mark. I guess this is fair and unfair at the same time. But if they’re using this as a measure of what alternative service one should do, they really should test us on how good we are and not how much we improved. The overall highest mark in our squadron, so including all the physical and paper and other exams was a 79. 79 is not even an A. This means that everyone got B or lower. I don’t know the marks for the other squadrons but it does seem that most of us didn’t try hard enough.
Two nights and one and half days more and I’ll be outta here!
