Category Archives: Life

2015 Week 19 Update

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This is most likely to be a 90% work post! The week was the usual home-work-home week…

I went ahead and applied for the position that I wrote about last week, even though the chances I don’t get it is higher than I get it!

I did speak to both my ex-boss and current boss about this – my ex-boss was actually excited about this, but again, the position advertised is slightly more senior to what I am doing. But I feel, I have given out signals here – either here or elsewhere, but in 2015, I am hoping for a career breakthrough!

Another thing I want to write about – though not a rant, I want to put this here, so I remember…

There was this senior person I was working for R, whom I was helping a few months back. Now she continued to take my help and I helped her as I was interested in that field – I thought this was the best way to get some knowledge and experience in the field. She completed 100 days at work and had a review with the regional chairperson and I helped her put the deck together. Around this time, my current boss came on board and one day she mentioned that she had spoken to him about me – about what a great job I was doing, what an asset I am to the department and so on. I didn’t ask her to do that and if she did it but didn’t tell me, I would not know and I am ok with this. After her review with the chairperson, she came by to thank me and also mentioned that she told the chairperson that I helped her and what I great job I was doing. There were other regional leaders on the review, along with her boss and this has been told in front of everyone. Then the chairperson said to tell all this to my current boss and she laughed and said she already did that.

Now last week, when I pitched my candidature to my boss, I mentioned this – when I mentioned that everyone whom I work with always give me great reviews – and I mentioned R saying that she has spoken to him about me. My boss had this real blank look on his face and it looked like R has not spoken to him at all! I felt a bit funny and we laughed it saying maybe she will do that in the near future.

Now I am wondering why R did this? I didn’t go and ask her for the endorsement, but if she didn’t do that, why tell me she did it? I was going to ask her to be a referee for me when I start going for interviews as she is local, but now I may have to rethink this.

Ok, not-rant over! Have a great Monday and an awesome week…

Beat the heat…..the Singapore way….

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Most days the one consistent conversation you are bound to have these days in Singapore is about the weather! We are currently obsessed with it – it’s too hot, everyone says all the time.

The late Mr. Lee Kwan Yew, Singapore’s first Prime Minister post-independence once famously declared air-conditioning to be the greatest invention of the 20th century.
Temperatures consistently hover around the mid-thirties (in Celsius, or around the nineties in Fahrenheit) with high humidity and it’s no wonder that people staying in this sunny island feel the heat….

This is probably how hell feels like, I thought this morning on the way to work. Waking up, drenched in sweat, in spite of sleeping in an air-conditioned room, the moment you come out from a bath, you are drenched with sweat. Getting to work is a pointless exercise as by the time you reach your air-conditioned office, all the time and effort you took to get ready to come to work has come to naught!

With most places in Singapore being air-conditioned, when you actually go to the great outdoors aka the non-air-conditioned spaces, the heat really hits you and completely saps your energy. Without this, you are more likely than to wilt in the heat instead of actually doing any work.

I dream of a time when the whole of Singapore is covered by a temperature controlled dome and we live in an ideal climate! Far-fetched perhaps, but knowing Singapore, this may not be something of out a sci-fi movie, but a reality decades down the line.

In researching for this post, I asked GG & BB earlier this morning if they felt the heat in school. For the sake of perspective, they study in non-air-conditioned classrooms and have around 30 minutes of recess daily (more if they stay back in school after lunch, in which case recess including lunch time will be around 75 minutes) and another 30 minutes of PE in school daily. Both BB & GG were actually quite nonchalant about the heat and said it didn’t bother them one bit while they were in school. Is this the resilience of the young where they seem impervious to heat? Or maybe it’s just me getting old…..

2015 Week 18 Update

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Another humdrum week!

But the next one could be a one with excitement…While typing this post, I was also checking my work email and saw the position that E had mentioned some time back being posted. Only thing I was told it was a manager position, but now has been posted as a senior manager position. I checked the job scope and I am currently doing around 70% of it already. I have already written to the recruiter to say I am interested, and what the next steps are. I am also going to speak to my new boss about this. This is the make-or-break decision. If all goes well, I will be here in this company, doing something I enjoy doing and getting well paid for it with a position I am proud to call my own. If I am not considered for this position, then I am going to start my new job search aggressively. Either way, I have decided this will be my breakout year!

Actually I am very nervous now…..Please pray for me and hope things go the way I want them to go….

Happy Monday people! May this week be great for you….

Why I blog the way I do

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I keep thinking of this every once in a while. I blog anonymously and so none of my readers know who I am in real life. I share snippets from my life, my work and about my children regularly and I rant here quite often about work.

Sometimes when I browse blogs and see the blog author identified in the blog with pictures of their children, I do have a slight twinge of doubt of whether the course I have taken while blogging is correct or wrong? Whether putting up pictures of myself  and my family will pull more traffic to my blog. That’s when I stop, pause and wait till this feeling goes away. I choose to blog anonymously for a reason and everyday what I see online reaffirms that this choice has been a correct one.

I poke around on Dayre, a microblogging site, quite often and recently a blogger there, an ex-Singapore Airlines stewardess wrote her thoughts on the airline, complete with photos of herself in uniform. The post was a good one, well-intended and with the aim of actually showing what the actual work of an airline stewardess is all about – warts and all. It gave all those a greater appreciation of what they did and personally I have decided to be nicer to them when travelling. Anyway, coming back to the point of this post, someone decided her post was very good and shared it on Facebook and so her post went viral in Singapore! She got flak from everyone who felt she had a good, cushy and glamourous life where she could travel the world and get paid for it while they toilet at jobs not so fun…

This incident is exactly why I don’t want to reveal too many details about myself and my family. When I started blogging years ago, the technology available these days was non-existent. Today, it’s quite easy to find out about a person based on simple details. By putting my children’s lives in the internet where nothing really gets deleted, may pressure them in the future. This way, they start their digital lives on a clean slate.

One thing though about all this anon blogging thing is that no one, and I really mean no one who is a part of my life knows about this blog – I can’t publicise this on any of my social media platforms or even tell friends that I blog. Also since both my blogs are linked, I can’t talk about my book blog, which is a bummer

This post is probably more of a ramble than making pure sense, but I’d love to hear what you think about this….

Dreams – A foretelling of Reality?

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This post has been lying in my drafts for a while now. I actually had this dream a few weeks backs and it was so vivid that I actually woke up disoriented. I normally don’t have dreams – or I am one of those who don’t remember their dreams at all or if I remember, it will be extremely fuzzy!

I started using lavender aroma oil around a month back to see if it helps us sleep well – now I am not 100% sure if this dream was a result of the oil being diffused in the room or was it something deep from my subconscious or is it really a foretelling of the future! The dream was so compelling and vivid, that it made me pen it down as soon as I woke up. Below is exactly what I remembered around 5 am the morning after the dream.

In the first part, I dreamt that I was going to the mall to colour my hair around 11 pm. I remember calling my husband to check if he had come back home so he can open the door for me and I don’t have to disturb my helper.

The next thing I remember I am at a Feng Shui practitioner’s office. It’s funny that I even remember the people in the office – the head was a Caucasian with a red face and a white beard.

And then there was this pretty Chinese lady with heavy makeup, especially around the eyes who came to talk to me. I was with a bunch of people and we came to discuss some fengshui for a business of ours. But this lady started talking about me. The discussion was about how much potential I have to become very successful in life and then she asked me my age. When I told her, she said something I could not catch.

Something about the next few years being very good for my career and how I was going to be very successful. She then spoke of some package I should take to ensure this. And even in a dream, I am ever so practical…I said I need to consult my husband and that was the end of that discussion.

Next me plus that bunch of people are in a car somewhere in Sentosa (don’t ask how I know I was in Sentosa which is an island off the coast of Singapore and is used as a large theme park). We are driving to meet another Fengshui consultant – a person related to the one we just saw. Something to do about picking up something.

I still haven’t gone home and have this feeling I should call my husband. Then I see this really gorgeous sunrise – streaks of pinks, golds and lavenders with black birds against it in stark contrast.

I tell the others in the car to see it and start to take a picture saying “My crappy phone will never do justice to this sunrise”. The driver stops the car for a picture and at this point my alarm rang and I woke up. Actually I shut off the alarm to try and sleep more so I could end the dream, but could not do that.

Wonder what this dream meant? Indians believe that morning dreams are a forecast of what will happen and that they come true. I wonder what is my subconscious trying to tell me? I tried analysing this dream using the online dream interpretation sites, but nothing really tells me what the entire dream means. I could only find out what sunrise (new beginnings, fulfillment of goals, new adventure in personal life) and fengshui (search for spiritual balance, positivity) means, but together what do they mean? Any ideas?