My first day of work

13 June 2011

After I bought a new SIM card on the second day in Haryana, I started working on Friday. We arrived at 9.30 am and only a few people were in the office. We met our colleague, Bupendar, who was in charge of stock. He was very friendly and we knew from him that people here brought lunch to work (which we did not do on our first day of work) and that the working days in our company is Monday to Saturday full day. Wew... Welcome to India J but we tried to entertain ourselves by telling ourselves so many times that our company is much better and much more interesting than some other companies :P I would say that ‘cognitive dissonance theory’ can be applied here (will talk about it at other times).

We were waiting...

Tk..tk..tk.. (imitating clock sound even though there were not any clocks)

Tk..tk..tk..

Jin Fu started opening his excel file, planned what variables that he was going to key in for optimization of production, and wrinkled his forehead. As an Industrial System & Engineering student, he was 99.99% sure that he wanted to work on production schedule and optimization as written on letter of intent. At the same time, I started walking around the display room where we were sitting and waiting. The company has designed LOTS of products: various types of bags, wallets, bins, cushions, and even the company used their own products, such as the lampshades from HRP, the floor mat from recycled tube, and the coaster, also made of recycled tube. I walked from one shelf to another shelf, looked at the label of each product, and tried to familiarize myself with the pattern of style and color that they used.

12.30 noon

I was hungry. Everyone was hungry, but how could you have a lunch break when you have not even started working??? But when Mr. Gaurav came, we asked permission to have lunch first and talked to him later. He also agreed and he told us that Mdm Anita will meet us on Monday to talk about our projects so we could just familiarize ourselves with the company and the production processes for these TWO days (read: Friday and Saturday).

Lunch!!

We only brought biscuit. We walked out of the office, immersed with the heat of Haryana. Wooohooo.. Welcome to North India in SUMMER! Quoting Shankar, “Once you put your hand out of your house, feel like burned already :P” Well, it was still tolerable on the first day, but when you had to walk WITHOUT any direction in an area which was only filled with half-constructed-factories and an EMPTY stomach, it was quite demoralizing. But wait! We found a tiny mama shop!! We tried to ask the lady in the ‘shop’ (it was only stack of bricks making a square shape) whether she sold biscuit, but she could not speak English. We threw our eyes throughout the ‘shop’, and yeah..there was nothing.

So we gave up. Menu of that day’s lunch: BISCUIT! Yeay! JJ

After lunch, our supervisor was very busy, so we decided to familiarize ourselves (again). We came down to the packaging room and I tried to say the only sentence that I could remember, “Ap kya nam hai?” which means, “What’s your name?” and the workers who were packaging laptop bags from tube introduced themselves and I also introduced myself.

But after that... nothing happened..

I was envy with Jin fu who seemed knowing what he would do during the internship. Among all the things in the letter of intent: calculating fair wages, preparing production schedule, preparing sample range, preparing trade shows, none of them sounded like psychology-stuff (actually this one is obvious). I meant, none of them were sounded like “me”, and I knew nothing about all of them!!! Arrggghhhh.... so we could not wait for Monday to come, to meet Anita, and to start working...

Oh btw, a little bit of promo here.. I’ve decided to make separate blog for posts in Bahasa Indonesia. It is http://fpatrycia.wordpress.com. But somehow I could not log in from my phone, so it was still empty. Hehehe.