It was my first week at a new office. As most first weeks go, this one was quite boring, because there was nothing much to do yet. My boss took us out for lunch on my first day as a welcome to me, and we had Thai cuisine and home made ice cream for dessert. The sales girl actually asked us to taste the flavors before making our choice, and I tried about six before settling on salty caramel cheesecake and chocolate. Yum!
There are six of us on the team including the boss, and we are all girls. Two are Singaporeans, one is Malay, one is Indian, and two of us are Pinays. Rowee has been very helpful and friendly to me, and when she welcomed me to the office, my first question was, “uso ba ang OT dito?” She said no, one hour is maximum, just to satisfy yourself, and that what was good here was that there was no stress. Whew.
I like the job description. I grant access to the bank employees for around 70 applications which get raised via tickets and not through emails or calls. We also get to test new applications before they get launched live, so I will learn a lot of new applications. I have two monitors and my own phone and though they have restricted access to a lot of internet sites (like Multiply), I don’t mind because what is my personal laptop and wifi at home for?
We get free mineral water and soft drinks in can and other drinks from the vendo machine. We get fruits every Wednesdays. We have dress down Fridays. The office is inside a huge mall so that I can run errands or go shopping during lunch breaks. My boss and teammates are very nice and they eat and laugh and chat a lot. They are warm like Pinoys, the only difference is that they speak in English.
My only issue so far is that I live so far away that it takes a lot of effort and time to get myself to work each day. My normal path composes of 15 minutes walk to the MRT station, purple line train ride for 15 minutes to Dhoby Gaut, then red line train ride for 5 minutes to City Hall, then 20 minutes walk (passing 8 sets of escalators on the way) to Suntec City Mall. For someone who was used to taking a 30-minute jeep ride to the office, this is definitely a major change. But we’re moving to a permanent house soon, so who knows.