They say you meet all kinds of people when you go out into the real world. I thought they were joking. They weren't.

Today.....sucked.

Getting up at 5.30am sucked.

It was the first day of work.

And I almost missed the bus.

I was asked a chinese national if he was waiting for the comapny bus at the taxi stand.

He said 'no, this is where the taxis stops, the buses are over there, by the bustop'

As i turned to the bustop, I saw him shuffling towards a bus that had stopped at the taxi stand. It was the comapny bus.
ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzZZZzzZz.

Reaching the compound 40 mins b4 the workday was scheduled to begin wasn't too bad, except I had no where to go.

I spent 40 minutes in HR slacking, as ppl came and gone, until Grace came in.

She ushered me into a room which I found my contract, the soul binding deathtrap, as i found out soon into the workday.

Signed.

It was as YY had said.

With angel wings, they usher you to hell, under the guise of loving and care, but bluntly put, a stab in the back.

ouch.

Medical center was nothing like an office.

It was, in a nutshell, a desk, a doctor, a dispenser and me.

There was only 1 computer, 1 chair, and 2 proficient tamil/malay/chinese speakers.

I wonder if they taught that in med school.

It was 8am.

The centre was crowded as hell.

Grace was afraid of going back to HR alone and so Melissa tagged along.

Good bye HR. Hello hell.

It was worse than YY's office.

That I was sure.

Because, well, instead of banglas, I get sick banglas, sick chinese, sick, malay and sick foreigners.

All well within germ-spreading distance.

GREAT.

The first job was relatively easy.

Type a number and print.

Easy as pie.

Then came dispensing medicine.

The fun part.

People's lives were in my hand, 1 wrong type of mediciation and it wud all be game over for them. I was playing god, i was playing devil, I was helping to stop overpopulation.
Then came, the weird cases.

If your imagination is really good, imagine being me, seated 2 meters away from a doctor asking a female worker, old enough to be his mother, to urinate into a small bottle.
Coaxing her, pleading with her.

You get the picture.

5 minutes later she returns, having triumphed over her infertile bladder and producing enough urine to be actually significant. And the doctor grabs the bottle, touches a file, and passes the file to me, all in 1 motion.

Lovely germs, really.

I expect to get sick in abt 3 days. or less.

apparently I was assigned there urgently because the previous contract worker there quitted suddenly.(GEEZ, I WONDER WHY.)

I heard a rumour about her quitting because she didn't want to contract chicken pox.

'Nonsense!' the doctor says. But heres a man that spent most of 2 hours applying cream on a worker's highly 'clean' feet.

When you work long enough you become immune. I'm afraid I might not have sufficient time to adapt.

Which brings me to case number 2.

Fancy this. A worker, around 10 years my senior, catching chicken pox.

There.

And then there was the blood in stool, classified as per-rectal bleeding.

Shipyard work is tough.

By lunchtime I was still quite hyped up.

Then. They locked the clinic doors.

No traffic in, or out.

Lovely.

As the rest retreated into a room wif poster-girls-wearing-almost-nothing wallpaper for some R & R during lunch, I stay outside behind my desk, pondering what to do.

Jokes were the only way out.

Thank goodness for yahoo.

And they taught me a very interesting and practical hierarchy.

Obviously, since MY (mainyard) workers had to leave the premises early, they were given priority, followed by normal. But then a boss called.

THE CHAIRMAN.

Not enough medication for chairman. 'Nvm, lets take the medication from the MY workers'

And thus 1 mainyard worker left wif inaqequate medicine, he might die, for all i know.


Then came the torture, the real reason why I don't like working there.

Number 1: No place to relieve boredom.
Number 2: No place to relieve workload.
Number 3: Too much workload and too much boredom.

In the afternoon I had to do data entry.

Never mind that I didn't know what and how to spell the illnesses.( there was a small dictionary on the desk detailing everything from cellulitis to masturbation.(The definitions)

All i had to do was enter the correct terms.

But I wasn't born to be a code breaker.

The doctor, like all doctors, employ a type of handwriting highly similar to jason chua's handwriting.
Illegible Handwriting bearing a striking resemblance to wingdings.

Of course, my brain is not armed with a decoder.

For every entry I had to ask them, making me feel worse, and worse.....

I was glad 4.30pm reached when it did.

And then they asked me.

' Wanna work overtime?'

Stuck.