So hard to say goodbye...

It's been a long time since I last cried.

Again, another friend is leaving. Not just a friend, but rather a best friend. My kumare had decided to take another role from her company's Europe office. I just sent her off to airport few minutes ago. I thought I'd be able to hold back, but then tears just kept falling and we both were laughing and crying at the same time.

Living away from home for the past 3 years have been bearable because of really good friends like her. We have too many similar interests that made it so effortless to blend. And now with her leaving is like one less friend, one less good listener, confidant, activity partner. Unknowingly there are people who have become too integral part of your life, they're among the first few people you think of when you want to share a good news, and also the first you run to when you have burdens that have become too heavy to carry. When they are away, you suddenly feel lost on how to live a life again without them. :(

People come and go, but I wish I find more of those who really stay. It's quite emotionally stressful to send people off. :((

I wrote this quote in my goodbye email in my last company.. it suits the mood tonight 'We part to meet again'....

I Wanna Sleep Some More!

Recently I read in a Yahoo article that the ideal number of sleep hours is 7. Too little is obviously not good, but I didn’t know that too much of it is also not good and can cause strokes.

http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/heart/articles/2008/07/17/too-much-too-little-sleep-linked-to-stroke-risk.html

I am forcing myself to sleep early every night, but seems like I don’t succeed in doing so. Thanks to all the bad influences that have made this a chronic and unbreakable habit for me lol. I seem to be struggling everyday in the morning. (these were the days before the doomsday project)

Extreme case: I was in the office pantry, half-awake. Normally we have this reflex to turn a mug upside down to make sure there’s no water in it before dispensing coffee or any drink. I did the same, guess what, I forget I had just placed oatmeal on it. Viola, I spilled all the oats into the floor. Luckily no one is around, I silently tiptoed back to my seat like a quiet mouse. :p

Actually my previous job requires to be in office at 10am. Present job is a bit earlier, we should be in at 9:30am. Both are already considered late, normal standards are usually 9am or even 830am here. But hey sleeping 5 extra minutes in the morning feels actually like heaven!

If drowsiness can kill, I guess I would have been dead decades ago.

The biggest accomplishment on my July vacation was that I was able to wake up at 11am for four straight mornings. Thanks to the fantastic weather: no doubt it was raining every single day that added more to my laziness.

After starting to work from graduation, this is the only time I was able to do it again. I’ve always dreamt of a stint of bumming period, but seems like I am meant for a busy life :( Spot the common denominator in the number series...
1st job: May 17 to Apr 5
2nd job: Mar 26 to Dec 22
3rd job: Dec 5 to present

Job start dates…my last day of work is always overlapping with the next job! Pathetic! Loser! I cant seem to negotiate well. Or to be frank, all were unplanned job changes and career shifts, I am not confident people will wait for me :(

My mom used to say, ‘ndi ka pa naman sobrang naghihirap sa pera, you can afford a few days off before starting’. Huhu I also don’t know why I always mess up.

And I wonder when I sleep, can I dream inside a dream and how many layers are possible? Inception mode? I’m afraid to fall into limbo.

Ok ok this has gone way too far as an entry for sleeping.

Don’t take me wrong. I just want to sleep, not die. I still want to wake up!

And nothing happened..

This is what happened... nothing. As simple as that.

After a grueling, struggling, agonizing week of scratching my head and being bullied, this week starts off with all smiles, strangely. I got greeted with smiles by the senior bullies in the office on Monday. In group chats, I received some 'thanks leslie' with smiley icons once in a while. The bullies have become polite. Note that the doomsday project is not over yet.

I have no idea why the sudden change. Anyway I wont complaint, this is of course better. If you keep pushing, you might not like what you see when you challenge my patience limit. How I wish I can do AWOL or submit my papers with the note 'effectively immediately', a friend of mine has done that, I wonder how it felt :p

I felt like a dog! Sinisipa ka the other week, hinihimas-himasan ka nman ngyon, like nothing happened. Not funny. No fun. Do not groom me to be a bitch!

You are such an a**hole

And my career goal in life remains unchanged: retire. :p

Shoot Them All - updated rants

This is the lousiest week. When people make u look bad and can really make you feel you are the most stupid and slowest person on earth.

P.I. i dont know how many times these words kept repeating in my mind (or actualy murmuring them in my seat). Walang santa santa pag sumosobra.

I really cannot understand what this new dreaded task being assigned to me is about. Ganon na lng ba lagi? I dont want to think no more...

Dont pull the trigger please.

*updated*

It happened because my teammate went on paternity leave without handling anything. Unexpectedly I didnt know I am supposed to take over. I dont know at all what is going on. People are really smart ass, and compared to them, I am way way behind. I cannot just grasp things like that in a instant. In the real world, there are always people who are far more intelligent and capable than me. They just can handle anything.

I work in a top bank, pre-merger time, it is prestiguous enough to be mentioned in SATC movie (I didnt notice that before I watch that film in the moviehouse again). I cannot commit mistakes because a trading app that goes haywire means $ losses for the company - my boss told me that explicitly on my first day, because he knew I am not from investment bank background. We have monthly celebration that serves nonstop wine (i dont know the brands) and beer dripping from faucet (Herdinger and whatever brands) and fancy food catering. The best thing is finally I am able to have a real 930am-630pm job. When the clock ticks to 630pm, everyone is like being tossed of their chairs. Staying till 730-8pm already means martyrdom.

But still, the most painful thing is when you dont understand, because nobody is gonna teach you and show you how. Maybe slow talaga ako, ibang level sila. Some months I am very good. In 3 days, I screwed up my name again. No mercy.

Kaya mo yan les.. There's something that I would like to hear more.. 'Cge, resign na!' :)))

Wed night I went out with my good friend, drank too much because I was too upset, and anyway ladies night is all free. 7 shots (vodka, martini are nothing much, but tequilla is the killer) ok first time I knew what it meant to float.

A friend from Manila asked me why I am here and that I shouldnt be career-centered. It was not just about career, or it was never about career :p. Is it for money, I cant say no. Perhaps only people who havent experienced the scarcity of money or the bounty of it, will never know what money is for, ayoko maglinis to say money doesnt matter at all. Whatever your hobby is, sports or photography or travel or even providing for your family, I dont think you can fulfill any of it without money. Is it for exposure? Is it for experience? Anyway, I also dont know how to answer and what it is exactly for. Maybe you can give me an answer.

Loser mode. Pray hard that I'll be fine!

Tips on Domains

I think I have to share and note down my meager knowledge on different domains, before I totally forget again lol.

There are so much more factors to it for each of them, I will just state a few liners.

Point of Sale and Retail and Shipments
This is where I spent the initial almost 4 years of slavery with, a consumer good giant. Basically from a data warehouse point of view, this is none other than reporting of fact and dimension data: in layman terms: sales vs customer vs product kind of thing. SAP Barcode comes into play, different ways of computing for bundled products and promotion, etc. The level of granularity depends on how you want the information to be stored in the warehouse (star schema, dimensional, etc) and the analysis on what metrics to compute of which the top management people are actually tracking and dying to read and monitor. Basic KPI index on ROI, turnover would be among the favorites.

Telecoms
I spent almost 1.5 years on and off a telco company. Simply put there are 2 lines of businesses, the prepaid and postpaid. UDR (usage detail records) will be tracked, to the details like for a customer, how many local and international calls did he make, when (peak or non peak hours) was the call made, demographics, VAS (value added services) like voice call, 3g, incoming, call waiting, data plan, etc and equally important and volatile are the sim states which could be active, expired, terminated, reconnected. Datawarehousing sounds cool, but it is just a fancy tool for Marketing and Sales executive people to dwell and do their fancy forecasts and analysis. (I overuse the word fancy).

Banking: Forex
Ok finally working on an end-user forex trading application, as they say, where the money is, financial market focus. There are different ways of trading: I will state a few
Spots - trading today where settlement is 2 days from now.
Forwards – trading at a future date
Swaps – 2 streams of trading, a near leg and far leg. It could be even or uneven swap
Orders – putting of orders where you specify your own rate, once the market hits your rate, orders get executed as a trade

Aggegrated trading – for fancy trading for bulk trades of high volumes, minimum usually at 1M for an instruction. An instruction can be further broken down into orders, of which the orders further generate a deal. Some basic terms:
Buy & Sell – you are a market taker, taking in whatever rate the market has
Bid & Offer – you are a market maker, if there is nothing to sweep, you can specify the rate and market where you want to put a limit order in.

Market data adapters would be exchanges like Reuters, Bloomberg, etc which are liquidity sources. If a trader places 10M, it can be executed (risk is hedged by the bank) like 5M@1.03 goes to Reuters, 3M goes to Bloomberg @1.05, 2M goes to CME@1.06.

Some more fancy strategies:
Iceberg – as the name implies, you can have a shown amount and a hidden amount when you place your trade. This way the market won’t have a clear perception of what you place.

Sniper – you can put an open instruction at a rate you want. Once the market hits your rates, it continuous snipes for more orders until the instruction amount gets filled.

Just a side note, after working for forex, I get to be asked a common question, so ‘what do you recommend people to trade’. I once get mocked by an outsider folk for not giving a specific currency to recommend. Let me just set the record:
1) the bank’s forex trading application is for high net worth individuals (financial assets not including primary residence should exceed $1M USD) who do bulk trading. I don’t think it is applicable to common people who do small-time trading

2) whatever currency (ccy) you trade, the bank will never lose, it just hedges the risk outside, it will never keep a long position on a certain ccy. It will only earn, and never lose money. So whether it’s 10M JPY or 10M EUR or 10M USD, it doesn’t make much difference to me from my side of the barn. Perhaps it’s not part of the workstream I am involved in. Do not ask me for insider trading tips, if I do have, I’d be quitting job and practicing trading myself.

People tend to over-exaggerate things. Some people would consider trading as the next booming instrument to take over the world’s financial market. Everyone wants a slice of it and dip their a** into it, makes it sound like they are doing something extremely perplex and high-profile. From a practical standpoint, I can say from my few months, trading is like a glorified gambling casino console hehe.

It’s always handy to know a few of the acronyms and jargons and feel like an expert. As they say, when you can’t convince, confuse. :p

What Sh*t is This?

This is probably the first time you would see people blogging about ‘sh*t’ and I mean literally.

I was quite enthusiastic when I learned that it is a medical benefit of my current company to go for an Executive Health Screening package, maximum capped at 500sgd. (15k php). I looked at the packages, the screening center is situated inside a hotel, my first impression is wow. And since fasting is required for blood test, there is a complimentary hotel breakfast afterwards. Perhaps any free food rings a bell. :) What more can I ask?

I took the basic package of 300+, thinking that it may be good to be budget-conservative since it is my first time. To be fair, the basic package doesn’t look like it’s worth 10k php to me! Quickly browsing through, it’s just some basic tests: blood test, chest x-ray and some physical examination. Well I guess in sg, everything is more expensive and thou shall never compare.

After making the appointment, the screening center sent two empty vials to my office for collecting ‘specimens’. The vials here are a bit different, with the stool specimen bottle having even a narrower opening than the urine specimen bottle, I really wonder why. But it does come with a stick in it, you know what I mean… Ok here starts the dreaded part.

I have no idea how some people can manage to fast for 8hours+ and then wake up the next morning and collect stool specimen??? Where did the urge come from?! It has always been a difficult challenge for me to do this. Worst case, I will have to go back on another separate day, uggh.

That morning came, and true, despite shedding efforts, it has been futile. I walked into the screening center, completed all the tests. I told the staff that I am done except for the stool specimen and that I will submit that on another day. She then issued me the breakfast voucher. I came down for my breakfast. It was not buffet breakfast btw, just a simple local breakfast but good (I chose fish beehon). Still, it was fun, I feel like a feeling-executive haha.


Then came the long-awaited urge. I know I just have to swallow some food for it to come. I am on a valid sick leave for rest of the day. To minimize the hassle of taking another leave again to resubmit my specimen bottle, a brilliant plan came into mind. I brought the empty bottle, went back to the screening center and in a ladies room there, thinking how to manage to complete the task. Of course, the rest is history. I don’t want to dwell into gross details. All I can say is that it was yuck, grrh.

The climax: I went to the front desk, ready to submit the pending task. And to my surprise, this is what the receptionist said after like checking my profile for a long 5minutes.

‘I’m sorry ma’am. After double checking, you don’t need to submit anything anymore. The package that you have chosen is the basic one, and it only requires urine sample. You can leave for the day and we will call you after 2 weeks to claim your results’.

I’ve never felt so embarrassing in a long time. I said ‘ok thanks’, threw the specimen bottle in the trash can and rushed out to disappear quickly, all in about 30 seconds.

#$#!!!!#$#$ 'Takte! After everything, you now told me it’s not required, why didn’t you correct me earlier?? I wanna cry haha! And In the first place, why did you send 2 empty bottles to mislead me???? Back in Phil, urine and stool specimen are like too basic tests and are considered part of any screening package isn’t it. It’s your fault!

And after coming back to my senses, I felt that rushing out is actually too stupid. I actually should have asked how much additional do I need to pay and submit those darn stuff! I guess it’s another 20 or 30sgd. But who cares, I should be able to reimburse it! Grrh! I was carried away.

Just for laughs. I’m not going back to you again. Bitter mode! :D

Addiction to Scents

The best way to put a mild scent on your room, I've been addicted to these scents. Highly recommended: Glade Apple. Others are Lavender and Jasmine.

I prefer this than other methods like scented candles or fragrance oil burner. As simple as I dont have to bother about catching fires and it is less messy. And also more economical, for just around 2.5sgd and lasts for around 1month.

P.S. Yup some people use it for bathrooms but I dont mind. :)