A week in review: Office, Half day leave on RP visit, Fire evacuation

Much happened this week and I am quite caught.

On Wednesday the company had an exercise. NS guys will furrow their eyebrows at this stage and go "exercise"? Yeah, absolutely right! So SAF. I was a runner just like my good old days in NS and was in charge of ensuring that faxes from and to the organizing group (an external party) were delivered with minimal hiccups. Which is quite simple, really. Which makes me wonder why I struggled through NUS if all I do is this.


Here's a look from my desk to the glass windows. Not exactly very pretty, but I'll love to go to NY one day and see how it looks like in one of those Wall Street buildings. Will it be just as exciting and motivating to see fellow CBDians burying their heads deep in papers?


Fax machine and printer.


I had lunch with KH yesterday at Golden Shoe and I finally tried out this Indian stall in Golden Shoe level 2 that persistently has a queue! (though slightly shorter than the nasi lemak ones further down which are quite famous). It's pretty nice I think, and not too much starch for my liking although it's still unhealthy all the same.


I took 1/2 day leave on Thursday to drop by RP for a social visit as discussed with my future boss. I guess I came at the wrong time, as they had a long meeting that took their lunchtime and by the time they came out they were a little under the weather and most of my future colleagues were already off to perform their facilitations. Anyway I got to see their interesting struture, where instead of having all staff housed under one physical environment, they 'outsource' their staff to pods or staff offices where each pod consists of academic staff from various faculties. The rationale behind it is to motivate staff to interact and come up with interesting cross-disciplinary ideas, which sounds great by me. And they are indeed paperless! While having lunch there, I see RP staff lugging their laptops all over the place as if it's their lifeline (which is, really, cos they stay in touch with their home departments through instant messaging too). I think it's really quite a revolutionary way of working and before one shrugs it off as another version of Blackberry, I think it's quite different as the impression I got was that they are really fully utilizing the benefits of what wireless technology can bring to bridge distances, rather than the Blackberry which is more like a beefed up communications device that still maintains its traditional invasive perception of blurring the boundary between work and private life. That's what I feel, which is very interesting indeed coming from a cultural viewpoint.


On Friday we had fire drill! It''s conducted twice a year and I guess that explained why there was this huge gathering of people at the Raffles Place open area yesterday afternoon. We had to walk down 22 stories of stairs, and I shudder to imagine how people at the Tower Club (level 65) came down. I went round and round and reached the bottom with a slight headache from all that merry-go-rounding. We had complimentary packet drinks (again, as per usual from my colleague BK who has attended 5x2=10 sessions). Not a bad way of keeping fit yeah?

Before I left I told AGL (who came back after all when I thought she had left office without me) that the die is cast. Although I still have my doubts but .. oh well. Nothing's absolute in life! Enjoy the journey!

;)