The Day Designed to go Wrong...

Hi Everyone...

Today was my 5th day in Singapore and my 4th day at work. But the day started off with a sour note. I woke up late and realized soon that I was going to miss my meeting with the Asian Region Head (The senior most official who has sponsored my stay at Singapore!).

As expected, I was late by half-an-hour and was made to wait for another hour before meeting the person. The first thing he says "Your attitude needs to change!". I felt internally, "Oh Shit! Not this guy at the least - the person who would ultimately be writing my professional assessment for the project from the client's side." But apart from this incident, I like this person. He is a German and an authoritative figurehead who realizes the position he holds and wields his influence accordingly.

During the day after finishing my interviews with the four Singaporean Managers, I went back to my Singaporean colleague who is working with me, only to realize that we aren't getting appropriate responses from Japan and Korea because the cost center managers in these locations were too stubborn to accept a better point of view from others. So, Evina (my Singaporean colleague) and I decided to accept their less-than-efficient work (Japanese were much better than Koreans) in the interest of the mid-day deadline. If we were to argue or try and convince them, then the deadline would certainly be missed! A second set-back for this day, which had already begun with a sour note!

I thought that I might just grab a quick lunch and looked out for "Krishna", another Indian, who had recently been transferred from India and knew the Indian eating joints in the vicinity. He took me to a nearby restaurant serving North Indian food. Only after walking for 10 minutes to reach the place, we realized that the queue was so large that it would take us at least 15-20 minutes of standing in the queue before we even reached the food counter! I was already getting late for the deadline and so decided to dump the lunch for the day in interest of time and rushed back to the office leaving my colleague Krishna standing in the queue. So, no lunch for me today...Crap! My stomach had started growling and I had wasted about 20 minutes of my precious time...Another set-back! Now my mood too was becoming truly surly!

But anyways, after getting back to my desk, I decided that the remaining work of consolidating the 46 excel sheets of work into a single excel sheet should not take me more than 1/2 hour and that we should be able to miss the deadline by about 15 minutes, which was quite acceptable. But things on this day were not to be so easy! The job took me 1.5 hours and when Evina and I finally managed to finish off the deliverable by 3:30 pm and send it to Switzerland (headquarters of Clariant), we were about 1.5 hours later than what we had promised.

But luckily for us (thank god for small mercies), the late deliverable was not noticed at all since the team in Muttenz (Swiss Capital) was itself running late! So the deadline was extended by another half-a-day! Anyways, this did not help my mood, when I was informed that Evina was being given a compensatory day-off for having worked on the previous Sunday since she was an employee and was required to work only for 8 hours for 5 days a week and that there was NO compensation for me since I was a consultant and was expected to put in extra hours ! What bull-and-crap logic is that !

But the day was not finished yet...After office, I went to "Plaza Singapore" to get a SIM Card to call home with, but reached the place only to realize that the authorized shop of Singtel (the most popular telecommunications firm in Singapore) had run out of SIM Cards ! Wow ! How bad can a day get. But GOD is NOT so forgiving... I was hell bent upon buying a SIM Card today and so after dumping my luggage in my hotel room, went to "Mustafa Stores" (It is the Indian Supra Bazar, if there is any format of that kind of retailing, with everything from Gold Jewellery to toothpicks being sold at this one-stop shop for Indians!). Here I at last got my SIM Card. Though I had to shell out S$28 for it in cash, which I was already running short of, I was happy to have a local mobile number of my own. The shop keeper took the money and activated my card and then after I was going out of Mustafa, I realized that he had loaded the wrong calling card on my cell phone! I rushed back to the sales person only to be informed that the calling card that I was looking for was out-of-stock and so instead of informing me about the same, the person merrily loaded my cell phone with another Singtel card, which was much inferior to the one that I had initially planned to purchase! So, here I was stranded with S$28 less and with something I did not want!

But if you are thinking that my woes were over for the day, I would consider you to be an optimist! After I reached my hotel room after a good South Indian dinner thali meal, I called my home and talked at length knowing that the calls to India were quite reasonable even while using this "unwanted" calling card. But towards the end of the conversation of about 6 minutes, I realized that I had depleted about S$9 or approximately one third my limit! Oh Crap, how could I have let this happen? Well, I had forgotten to dial "019" in front of the India number, a requirement for utilizing the discounted charges for international calls. Instead I was charged at 8 times this charge per minute by the government of Singapore - I felt really cheated now!

This has happened a few minutes before I have started writing this blog...which I hope to end now and go to sleep, lest my saga of bad luck for the day continues...Bon Nieu (Good Night!)