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Thursday, July 09, 2009

Bollywood cures all



An explanation for the title will follow...

Today was just one of the days.... everything just started to fall around me.

This is the lesson I learnt from the day: Never clear a bunch of work appraisals, project approvals and other assignments in the same session with your supervisor. The workload that arises, plus the mental workload that arises, is just too much.

Work appraisal was what I roughly expected. The rest of the work was something else.

Project had to be rewritten [as in, totally] due to lack of substantial activity, rubrics for assessment had to be revamped [as in, totally] because of lack of substantiality, lack of organization, other work that had been done and observed could have been better.

In the end, my supervisor looked at me and asked, "Just how interested are you in your job?" or something to that effect, anyway.

Hm. How to tell her that frankly I'd be happier taking a pay cut if I never had to do all this kind of work ever again? That my one burning ambition in life is to go on contract status and leave all the paperwork crap to someone else?

Sometimes, I don't think I like being promoted very much. Others see a rise in status and a rise in pay and material benefits.

Me, I see the game getting harder the longer I play it. It's as if at the moment that I got the hang of the game, and started to figure out the rules and methods of playing, I got bumped to another level and suddenly I'm running around trying to learn everything from scratch again.

It's as if, just as I got the hang of how to do the main part of the job, other things got bumped onto me and now, having settled one part, I'm now dashing forward again, because the finish line was moved forward before I managed to reach even one foot of it.

She asked me how I considered my abilities, and whether I considered myself 'competent'. I said I still don't understand what are the standards for 'competent'. I said I still considered myself 'developing' because although I was better at some things, I couldn't consider myself 'competent' just yet. 'Competent' implies that you are fully equipped with the abilities to tackle your tasks at hand. It does not mean that you somehow get things done while running around trying to hold everything in your hands at once.

Was it my imagination, or did she had a faint "Hm, I thought so" air as she signed the rest of my appraisal form?

Looking at the stuff I had on my to-do list, the stuff that I was supposedly 'competent' to perform by now, but yet could not perform competently yet, I had to wonder if there would ever be a time that I would be 'competent' to do all this. I wondered what was it about me, that seemed to be perpetually making mistakes in places where others less experienced than me were just breezing through. What am I doing wrong, that even after the experiences I had, I still could not do some things right, while others had no problem performing the same task?

Why was it that even after I made some attempts at efficiency, even then I was still behind everyone else in work performance? [well, perchance it's because my attempts at efficiency are too feebly... inefficient.]

And if I'm stuck in this line for now, then what the heck do I do to level myself up, as they say in gamespeak? What do I do to get myself up to everyone else's standards? What should I do to finally rank among the 'competent' instead of....well, you know.

And finally, what can I do to get myself out of the game? I've learned all that I'm interested in. I've learnt all that I want to ever know. I want to play a different game. I want out.

In the end, I knew I could not answer all these questions in one night. I also knew that I was probably one step closer to hypertension if I kept pondering things that I could not easily solve soon.

I could only think of one thing to do to make myself feel a bit better.

Go for Bollywood dance class at Amore.

Jai Ho!