Jobs

A recent article about how students from poly pair up with University grads created some unhappiness amongst some of my peers. Something the author wrote struck a chord with me. It was about how poly grads are willing to go thru much more hard work than University grads by taking up odd jobs like sales asst and the likes.

Personally I don’t wish to partake in this issue because I feel it’s like comparing 2 different genres of music, say classical music and rock. It’s at the opposite ends of the spectrum. However, I did some reflection and realised I did a few shitty jobs along the way to know not to belittle people in those industries.

After my o levels exams, a few of my friends managed to hold down jobs as sales asst. They were short-staffed at that time so I eventually ended up joining the fray. How hard can a sales asst job be you might ask? To me it was more physically tiring than anything. Surprised? Well there are a few ground rules you need to observe and one of those is no sitting as it reflects on the image of the place. So imagine standing a full 12 hours, only resting for lunch and toilet breaks.

Another thing that one needs to put up with, are the customers. Customers are always right, even bad ones. They scold and mock you just because they can. So today whenever I see someone being treated badly by a customer I can’t help but empathise with them. Unfortunately it’s all part of the job but if I knew better back then, I would have given those customers a run for their money.

As I was earning such meager pay for going through so much, I decided to "play punk" and switched jobs with minimal notice. Next I went to work as a warehouse asst. It had better pay and surprisingly not as demanding. But I stopped as I wanted to take a break before getting my results. Working there I got to see how parcels were being handled but on bad days where there are few lorries full of consignments to be cleared, one can work 24hrs a day and still wont be able to finish it.

When tertiary education started, I didn’t work all the way until my 6 months internship came by. The first month was to be the crappiest experience one can ever have. I worked at the then Singapore satay club. What they had initially wanted us to do was to implement a pos system for their stalls in the spirit to track their daily takings much more efficiently. What we eventually ended up doing was to be stall asst selling things ranging from satay to making kopi peng. He (the boss) envisions us starting from the bottom to really understand the business. It was stupid for someone to say that to students going through internship as we didn’t want to be there as compared to someone having a passion for it and wanting to learn more about it.

We got out of there not before having much struggle and trying to prove to the tutor that it is no more than a ploy to exploit cheap labour.

I do suppose most of us have our fair share of experience and stories to tell. What's yours?