Work @ Slavery Inc

Dear Emma,

Been quite sometime since I last blogged. Quite busy with work, not busy working at work but rather adjusting to the new work timetable.

For starters, my work starts at 9am and I need to endure the f*cktasticuclar federal highway route to my office. My flexi hour benefits only is opened to me when I reached the 6 month "I'm confirmed" mark so I have to drag myself from dreamland to work as early as 6am in the morning. 1 hour to do my morning rituals... eat, caffeine, bath, jerk off, etc and leave my house by 7am. Then cums the long 1 hour 30 minutes drive to office.

This is without a doubt the part of my new timetable I hate the most... Why? The reality is I can reach my office in around 30-40 minutes, the rest is the result of jam. And what frustrate me the most is the fact these jams are really a result of yours truly "Malaysian Selfish + Retarded Drivers". You think that everyday also same problem, most drivers will get smarter and drive at the appropriate lane or dun "slow down" when they reach the hotspot, but noes... same unbelievable sh*t everyday... And dun even get me started on the authorities. Most of the time, where they are needed most, you won't see them, where they not needed most, they will be there "creating" more jam! You'll see shit like traffic police parking his motorcyle in the middle of the road causing a massive jam... At bottom necks like exits from federal highway, Kelana Jaya exit after Sunway Bridge, you won't even see these f*ckers shadow when there's a need for someone to "saman" a bunch of these selfish retarded drivers... The most common problem often occurs a exits from main road. The typical MO is left lane is for exit but the exit is jammed, hence causing a long queue so so mother f*ckers wan to jump queue by driving in the middle lane and cut queue from there. This result in the middle lane to also get jammed causing even middle lane cars to cut into the fast lane. End result every lane also jammed. It always stump me why I can drive faster in the left lane compared to the fast lane leading me to believe in the idiot-icy of Malaysian drivers that are too lazy and selfish to drive at their appropriate lane. And those onlookers when a car breakdown at the emergency lane, sigh... I wish I had a big foot truck so I can *crash*

Moving on to my new workplace, parking is rather easy to find and my company does cover for my parking fee so no biggie. My office however is located at the 18th floor sometimes it can be quite slow in the leave especially when there's a lot of people stopping the lift in between the floors. Office is very nice, but I'm not too keen on the open seating concept they implement here. My team mates however sorta sits at the same place, so no biggie. Coffee machine, tea, biscuits, tv, xbox, locker... Lunch here however is rather dull affair. Not much tasty food unless you're willing to fork out $$$. One super perks however is a lot of department (Sales, HR, Audit, etc) is located in this office, so quite a number of pretty chicks running around in this office which is a welcome change compared to the nerd rage programmer gals... Culture here is so far quite positive...

As for my team, 3 batangs including me. One of the batang used to be my ex-collegue a few years back. At the moment my team manager from the US is here to manage us for a month before another expat will be send to manage this bunch of monkeys. Good news is this expat is a girl, at least it's not another full sausage fest affair. The 1st week, they arrange sorta a orientation for newcomers and even arrange a brainwashing bootcamp on the 2nd week. My manager then gave us access to some online tutorial materials to self read to prepare ourself for the task that we will be assign in the future. Sadly our first task is to add some functionality to the existing project built process which is more of a configuration and rnd work rather than programming. Quite tough as we're still wet on the way they build their built (which involves using Clearcase, Ant, Jenkins and Sonar)... Get to play with Ant and Jenkins but I'm not fond of configuration related work, if I was I would already be a System Administrator rather than a Software Developer de. My great virgin trip to Virginia, US is said to on the mid May. Also have chance to experience another version of scrum implementation under my US manager, a rather eye opening experience.

Security at work however is a pain in the @$$. My company is REALLY paranoid on security. Imagine needing to go thru a proxy to browse anything on my laptop even when I'm connected to my home network, my browser is configured in such I need to connect to their intranet to be able to surf from their network. Development is entirely done on another VM, so my laptop is actually a terminal to connect to my development area... And the policy of using 3rd partys jars/software... sigh, everything also need request permission... A lot of overhead, especially in development...

I'm still having problem adjusting to my new timetable especially the 3 hours daily up and down travel time. I feel just burnt out when I reach home. I try my best to go to the gym so at least I exercise a bit but found myself just too tired at times and lazy. I also suffering a lack of appetite to do the online training material due to this.

So my overall conclusion on my new timetable is a above average rating... While I enjoy the new environment and more managed software development process, I do have to distaste on the lack of opportunity to try out the latest tech and bloody chore to travel to work daily.