Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Well... 4 plus months have passed, and my internship with Compass is drawing to a close.
I've gone through 48 different vendors from 11 different countries, and as my boss Yves would like to rub this in in the same sentence whenever he talks about my turning down his permanent job offer - handled US$16million worth of procurement for a contract worth near US$50million. I have also gone through 2 parties (1 at Swiss Club and 1 at Raffles Marina), boarded 2 ships, seen 1 rig up close, drank countless beers, got wasted once, smoked my 1st cigarette, helped a colleague drown her phone in the sea and accumulated countless other memories.
To mark my 2nd last day in Compass Energy, i thought i'd take a mini-photo-collage of what a day in my working life was.

A very sleepy me trying to be photogenic at 7.30am.











1, 2, buckle my shoe,








3, 4, lock the door...











This is how i lonely i get after the PSA Building stop.
Imagine how heart-stopping it must've been for me on my 1st day of work 4 months ago when EVERYONE except me got off at this stop - yet i knew this wasn't my stop, what could i do but sit there and hope the bus would continue chugging to my eventual stop - wherever that was...




On the left is Harbourfront Centre (Yes, with the u in there you damn yankees)








To the right are the Harbourfront Towers, never figured why they wanted to call Tower 3 Keppel Bay Tower. U can catch a glimpse of the cable cars if you look hard enough. Oddly enough the tourists who drop by find it enough of an attraction to take thousands of photos of it, blocking the way for busy cubicle rats like us.



I call this The Secret Garden.
This is taken from the windows of the lifts up to office, its a nice 'rooftop' garden on the link between Tower 2 and Tower 3 (oops i meant to say Keppel Bay Tower).
No one seemed to be able to figure out how to get there though.





There was a lady in the next door office (never got her name sobz) that the guys whisper around that she's pretty cute. If we were to go by the ratio of office size to pretty ladies, what happened to all the temptresses in our office?
Then there was that girl from Neptune Marine when they still shared offices with us... Life in office never was quite the same after she left huh?


This is now affectionately called The Graveyard.
Its as quiet as one since virtually everyone's at the yard, and its as cold as a cemetary too. You gotta rejoice for the view though, who wouldn't want to see the Merlion everyday?





This is our other meeting room.
I've actually secured deals here, Big L has an incriminating photo of me performing acrobatics with 1 hand on the phone and the other hand operating my -equipment- by the urinal.
Due to the proliferation of the internet and the likelihood that impressionable children may have access to this site, i have chosen not to post that photo - if you somehow obtain that photo through other means, remember, this stunt was performed by a professional. Do not attempt this at home.






Due to the limitations of my camera phone, the little lights from the cable cars are not visible in this photo - I could've photoshop'ed them in, but my conscience got the better of me.






The Terminal.
ter·mi·nal (tûrm-nl)
adj.
1. Of, at, relating to, or forming a limit, boundary, extremity, or end.

It also marks the end of my day, but aptly, the imminent culmination of a very fruitful internship that I am honoured to have partaken in.



The same integers that herald the beginning of a work day
are also the same cardinals that conclude the cycle.







More importantly are the lessons i've learnt and memories I take home with me,
and this is a tribute to the awesome people at Compass Energy.




























To the other awesome people I unfortunately don't have a photo of:
Lily, Sarah, Yana, Susan, Joseph, Karl, Hendrik, Dirk, Jamil, Yee, Teng Leong, Naj, Kalyan, Ann, Rahul, Satchit, David, Jack B & C, Blandine, Nitin, and everyone else I've not had much chance to work with as you have been attached to other projects or areas.
Last but not least, who can forget my buddy Big L :)

Dr@n|xX at 11:24 PM

Saturday, August 05, 2006

I’ve not blogged for ages yes I know…
I guess I out-grew that blogging craze, especially since I’ve owned this verbalsewage blog for quite a while now…
Or perhaps I’ve matured so I’ve stopped spouting nonsense (nah I doubt it), partially from the fact that I managed to slip under the radar twice, once at Attica where the minimum entry age was 25, and my colleague’s brother who was also 23 like me got checked but I didn’t.

The other occasion was last night at Velvet Underground where me and D’s UOB clubbers went through a fantastic ruse to actually switch bags, undo my polo-T collar all in order to make me look older than I actually am, but perhaps merely succeeding in making me look like an Eskimo asking for directions from a camel in the Sahara. Met a couple of their friends who were significantly older than me, and the ironic part was that almost all of them thought of me as their age. Guess that moustache I sometimes am too lazy to shave does have some use after all haha

I haven’t seen my family for quite a while, and the last time I saw them was only for like 2hrs max, but that’s another story for another time.

Recently thought about some of the funnies I had with my family… guess it’s another sign of aging lol

My mother always had this fantasy (call it whatever you want) that we would eat at a restaurant, just her, my sis, and me, and my dad would happen to come along and eat at the restaurant without noticing us yet, and my mum would take the chance to order as much as possible and the most expensive stuff on the menu and then finally tell the waitress “Put it on that gentleman’s tab.”
It nearly happened once when me, my sis and my mum were eating an early dinner at some kopitiam, ordered and the food had just came when this man sat our table and said hello. My sister (about 5yrs old I think) yelped with joy realizing it was my dad, so did my mum actually since I think this was the closest she’d ever get to that fantasy. She wasn’t particularly satisfied that we ate at a kopitiam where the most expensive item in there was the 20 pack of Marlboro’s which did none of us any good coz no one smoked.

My mum used to kick and scream whenever it came to seeing other kids play around in cars. It pissed my mum off to no end when she sees other kids in other peoples’ cars jumping around, running from across the centre to get to the front and back, do handstands with their feet on the side windows etc. It pissed her off not because she felt the kids needed disciplining, or that it distracted her from driving. Nope none of the possible explanations most people can think of, rather, it irritated her coz she always wondered why her own kid couldn’t do it. My sister was an absolute klutz, and the minute the shackles we call seatbelts are removed she’d run around, jump around and then fall down followed by incessant wailing, which ends up with her being shackled again by a very distracted and disgruntled driving-mother. All this would happen within the short span of no more than 4.39 minutes.

Yep sounds like I should find a chance to not club on a weekend and visit my family instead.

Wonder why I willingly subject myself to it really, give up a good clubbing night (see above) for a weekend of nagging for not going home more often, of not having graduated yet, of not having found a job yet etc. Life is weird sometimes. Shrug.

Dr@n|xX at 2:35 PM