First Job On the Road

After a whole month being on beach doing nothing but occasional training, I became so anxious that I would even do volunteer work. I volunteered to help with an internal project in Singapore for which I wrote a short movie script, I was having so much fun especially because the movie is going to be outsourced to an external movie producer, and we've decided to use one famous male actor from Singapore (whoever he might be, they will have to decide after the audition). Just after I finished my movie script and was so excited to join the effort in deciding the actor, my staffing coordinator decided to put me on a different project! I was completely uninterested in the content of the new project but I couldn't say no.

So this new project is in a tiny, remote village in Netherland, there's not even McDonald in the village. There are only 2 people in my team, the team leader (let's call him TL) and me, the rookie. TL is a happy newly wed German guy, very nice and easy to get along with. The only thing is -- among all the remaining pleasures one could find from this tiny village, eating is not one of them because TL is on diet! Imagine we eat cold sandwiches from the vending machine (a Dutch sandwich vender, not a Japanese one!) for lunch, then on our way back to hotel we drop by a gas station and I get another cold sandwich and TL gets a bottle of water.. TL said he would be fine if he just watches me eat in a restaurant (since we need to work together till around 10p every day) and I hadn't been so cruel to that yet. However, there are still 5 more weeks to go and I think I'm going to do so from this week onward.

As a new rookie, basically I know nothing. At the first time we visited the production plant, TL looked at his cell phone (the cell phone clock) and said something about the bottleneck of the cycle time and I thought to myself: My God! Where is he looking at??

Basically I couldn't even tell which one is the real machine which one is not. It was the first time in my life to walk into a production plant, and believe me watching machines work is not one of my hobbies. And I'm not a very concrete person, for example some people prefer having a product that they can touch... I never have a problem of not touching any product.. I'm always perfectly fine with abstract thinking. I actually prefer not touching any product. :P

But it turned out to be an extraordinary learning experience for me -- learning something that I neither know anything about nor having any interest, but I'll have to learn in a short time. In just 2 days the machines are like my pets already. I know exactly where they are (I'm not kidding, it's hard to remember!), how they work, and what they're making. I also enjoy talking to the workers (imagine the on whole floor I was the only female.. I get all the attention that I ever deserve! :P)

TL is so lucky to have me in his team because someone like me comes only 1 in a 1000 times. I'm entitled as an "associate", but I have no business background, no mini-MBA training, I can't even do excel sheet! (I do have a phD in statistics but we used professional softwares, not as dummy as excel..) This means anything I need to do for this job, I need to learn from scratch. I didn't know EBIT, I didn't know how to build pivot table either. The good thing is TL is also 1 in 1000 type for Germans, he is the most patient guy I've ever worked with, and whenever I have questions for him, he literally dumps all he knows to me. Now I really believe when this project is over, I will be nowhere near rookie anymore.

I had thought a new rookie like me would only add little value to the project. However, I think so far I've added great value already because although I literally know nothing, I can handle client relationship very well. The important source of information that they weren't able to get in the previous week before I joined the project, I got them all within 4 hours. According to TL, I'm very good at "motivating the clients". Well, the truth is these people who are struggling in a dying company (the company burns money 10 times faster than it can make) need very little motivation from anybody.. they know their whole future depends on this.

One funny thing that let me fully realize how Germans think -- TL decides that the team (he and me) will have a good no-work life style for weekends (because we work very hard Mon-Thur). So Friday afternoon after only 20 phone calls (he's from Hamburg office and I'm in Frankfurt) he said: you should go home at 5pm. I said ok fine. Then there's a party in my office and I went away from my desk to the party. By the time I went back to my desk it was about 5:40pm and there was a missed call from TL at 5pm. I called him back and asked him what's up. He said "I just wanted to check whether you left the office already and I was happy you were not there!". It made me laugh.

So despite the project is about boring production and the village is too tiny, it is a fun project that I can learn a lot. I mean, compared to my other colleagues -- eg, one colleague is doing a project in a village in UK now, there's nothing but McDonald. He told me every day he faces a touch decision: to eat at McDonald or to skip lunch. Another colleague has been doing a long project in Lybia, during the Ramada he could only eat bananas in the toilet.

The timing is also very good. It will finish right before the Christmas holiday. Officially I can't take any personal holiday during my first 6 months, but what else I can do if I can't get on any project? (there are no projects startig in dec). So I have very legitimate reasons to take holidays.