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!
I got to work this morning and they were selling breakfast on the second floor instead of the first. There was a notice saying that they were de-poisoning (消毒) the first floor area. I didn’t think much of it.
Then in the morning we got an email from our secretary saying that we’d get free lunch and dinner today because they were cleaning the first floor area. People were saying that quite a few people got food poisoning on Sunday and that it was from the breakfast. A few people even had to go to the hospital.
So I got free lunch and dinner today, although the quality and especially the quantity wasn’t good! Hmm, our fab already was meant to have the worst food and now it’s even poisonous! Maybe they’ll improve after this incident. I certainly hope so!
Yesterday was our company’s annual sports day. It was a pretty big event with I guess more than 1000 people taking part. Apparently ours is always the biggest one out of all Hsinchu companies. And it’s also probably the only chance that I’ll get to see our CEO this year. Next time I’ll have to wait until the 2009 sports day. The shows put on by the employees were pretty impressive. It shows that our people are either really committed to their jobs and the company or that they just wanted to be better than other people. Nonetheless the performers did well as they had to take time from work to practice. Most people didn’t get a break from their regular jobs as one of my co-workers pretty much had the same work load the past few weeks and ended up staying nearly till midnight many of the days. Next year, this will be me. I was lucky this year that I joined just late enough so that they didn’t make me go take part!
We got NTD 300 in coupons if we turned up so we could buy food and drinks at the the stalls set up around the stadium. You can buy a lot of food for that money. So I went and enjoyed some Taiwanese snacks like 大腸包小腸 and sugar cane juice. There were more people roaming around yesterday than at night markets in Taipei. And with everything under the midday sun meant that everyone was sweating over everyone else!
All in all it was an interesting experience. See picture below. You can tell from the empty stands that mostly it was only the people who were taking part who came. Still a lot of people though, TSMC is a very big company!
Multiple choice test on all the stuff we were meant to listen to during the large amounts of lectures we had. 40 questions, 2½ marks each. I think the test time was one hour, may have been longer but it was plenty. I’ve been writing this diary during most of the lectures so I hadn’t really been listening. Some questions I had no idea what the answer was, the kind that you can’t even make an educated guess. This was probably the first time in my test taking life that I guessed all C’s to questions that I had no idea about! We graded the papers from another squadron after we finished and I guess I got something like a 70. And like last time, for those who were doing the normal substitute service this exam would actually be important to them. I wonder how they were during the lectures, did they all actually listen? It makes it rather strange that us, the people with graduate degrees and the supposedly more studious bunch would be chatting and sleeping during class.
Straight after the paper, we had the 基本教練 exam. The one where we had to do correctly: standing straight, stand at ease, left and right turns, turning around, raising our arms and calling out that we were present, standing in line. I think that was all. We had to do this in full uniform. I could never get my feet to turn enough during the turning actions. Basically it involved spinning on either your heels or the ball of your feet. And this is difficult with badly fitting shoes on rough concrete. Anyway, everyone got through it pretty much without any problems. No turning in the wrong direction or failing to say ‘yo’ when your number is called. During practice these things would always happen.
The third exam we had in the afternoon. It was a sit-up exam. Do as many as you can in 60 seconds. Knees bent at 90°, hands on the sides of your face and a correct sit-up is from a fully flat back on the mat to touching the top of your knees with the bottom of your elbow. I ended up doing 45 I think, which was again about average. There were quite a few crazy people who did more than 60. So from the three physical tests we had, it seems I’m in pretty average physical condition, compared to Taiwanese grad school graduates that is. So I think I need to do more exercise once I start work. I hope I’m not too busy to do so.
Today was also the first day it really rained for quite a while during the evening when we had to go out and rehearse for the graduation ceremony on Thursday. We had to wear the disgustingly smelly and dirty raincoats after we had washed. Not nice at all. I’m mentioned the raincoats before and they just have to really bad smell that I can’t even think of the word to describe. I honestly was close to throwing up my dinner.
PS: As you can see I’m typing this up in November nearly one month after camp and I still feel disgusted when I think about the raincoats. That’s how bad of an experience they were!
