Snippet Of My Life Episode 21 – Endless Wondering

I often wonder: What is your morning ritual at work like?  I once followed the blog sites of a paramedic and a restaurant server and what excitingly interesting lives they have!  Office life doesn’t make great movie story.  If I have to think of one, I think of “Being John Malkovich”.  I really can’t think of any other.

Every morning I spend a quarter of an hour or so taking out my laptop and my personal stuffs from my locker, heading to the desk I have booked one week ago, and waiting for Windows to boot up.  Windows!  What would this world be had there be no Windows?  A more productive world, I reckon.  A less frustrating world, I reckon.

I wonder who came up with this hot desking idea in an office whereby most of us are stationed in Singapore.  So we take turn in bumping each other out as we book our seats one week in advance.  I need a little notebook to keep track of the desk numbers, against the calendar days.  I embrace hot desking system.  But playing musical chair at work is just silly.

So every morning I spend another quarter of an hour waiting for the office applications to load up, clicking through the desk booking system that somewhat looks like the picture on top of this post (pardon my artistic touch), and think: Hmmm … where shall I sit 7 days from now?

And I open up the image of the office floor plan, try to recall which are the seats not to book.  At times, I either get a friendly email from the secretary if I accidentally book her boss’s seat or on the day itself, get reassigned to another.  Some areas are unofficially reserved for team clusters that tend to be more territorial.  We even have a term for those – ‘land mines’.  On top of that, I do have my personal preferences like not wanting to face the toilet door or the meeting rooms.  Everybody does online desk booking 7 days in advance.  I wonder how much time we spend everyday just to get a seat to work.

Something is not right but no one is doing anything.  Similar to how we accept a trash operating system for a decade and more.

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Last week I have converted my car into mobile Wi-fi hotspot.  Thanks to my N97.  So if you are to ride with me, you have free Wi-fi access on the road.  Today’s lunch, I have converted myself into a walking Wi-fi hotspot.  I really want the Internet Radio bad.  So bad that it has to be done at all cost.  I want to listen to Internet Radio in the car, at work, and on the road – like I was used to with my old N96.  Because I have 30Gb mobile data quota to burn every month.  Because I am learning Spanish.  And more importantly, because I like to listen to things that are not what everybody around me is listening to.

So I walked around the blocks, this lunch time.  Deep inside my trousers’ left pocket, my N97 was running hot as a Wi-fi hotspot converting 3.5G mobile signal into a wireless network.  Deep inside my right pocket, my N96 was running hot as a Wi-fi receiver, broadcasting the radio transmission to my earphones all the way from Spain using the Internet connection provided by my N97 inside my left pocket.  And as I was walking on the street, this lunch time, I couldn’t help but to visualize the amount of radiation and invisible action that happened from my left trousers pocket to the right, and in between …

I sincerely hope that my genetic replicating devices are OK, amidst the heat and the radiation.  If Nokia is reading this, please hurry up with the development of the Internet Radio for your newer phones.  What’s taking you so long, I wonder. 

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Ever since I have moved to a different office location, so far away from my friends in town, ever since my team has reduced into a one-man-show, ever since Cynthia has left Singapore for a business trip, if not for the occasion phone calls I have during the working hours, I could theoretically not to speak more than 10 words a day (still need to order food).  It doesn’t take too long to eat when you are alone.  So these days, I have plenty of time to read during lunch.  And because I don’t talk much, I have plenty of time to think.

My life today reminds me of my business trip to Paris long time ago.  Between Friday’s have-a-good-weekend to Monday’s how-was-your-weekend, I hardly had a conversation with anyone over the weekend.  Now, I don’t even have someone to have-a-good-weekend and how-was-your-weekend with at work.

Strange, in a melancholic way.

Fortunately, Cynthia is coming home this Sunday.  What would my life be like if I was still single?  I wonder.