New Year 2006 has come. The office stays the same, the employer stays the same (thank god!) and one employee less. My colleague has finished his contract and now he's back to Malaysia with his missionary activity and oh, he's getting married somewhere middle or end of the year.

My company has bought over another one in New Zealand, a software company and right now my role is changing again. Contract signed and a small raise of my miserable pay (yay). And so, both companies assimilated together which means I'm gonna get more work and more stuff to learn.

With the new merging, I gotta learn back the old skool languages (VB and VBA), argh, and yes, I'll be maintaining these dinosaurs to sell to Australian companies. Be aware that out of 10 times I used this software 2 or 3 times the application froze in front of me. I wonder what happened to the transactions I've made.

My boss told me that there are plans where I might be kicked to New Zealand for a week for "training" and "exposure" of the application they are selling.

Woooohooo! We're switching offices! Now it's *slightly* larger and more space to move around. The downturn of it is, no windows. Damn, now I can't *scan* at chicks that pass by the my office.

The big big boss (old man) decided to inspect our progress of our project development. One day, he called my boss, asking us if we're free on Saturday (!?). We said yes. So it is decided that day to be the inspection day. Oh yes, he's been calling me every other days to check the progress and kept asking me to publish it up into the web so he can test it out before then.

The most funny thing is, the old man didnt not want to take a plane from Brisbane to Melbourne instead he wanted drive all the way here. Crazy it seems, even my boss said so that an elder person driving alone is not advisable. But oh well, he's the boss and it's his Merz. And hence the journey started at Friday night after his meetings and met us at 11am on Saturday.

During the meeting, the old man was sitting right next to me as I demonstrated the application while the rest was behind me, backing me up when there's hiccups. Half of the time the old man gave comments and all his saliva splattered on my arms and legs, and once in a while drooled down from his mouth. Aiks. When he was not drooling, he'll be asking me to repeat the demonstration a couple of times before his mind registered and processed. The meeting lasted 2 hours plus and finally, changes and agreement was made.

My boss is back! Not on Wednesday but today, a day later. He called me earlier telling me he'll spending a day longer in New Zealand, but I have no idea what's he up to. Guess it's a little secret R&R from the big big boss. For the past week, I've been receiving countless calls from unhappy customers complaining  about this company's previous software and its database downtime. I had to take up these calls and get clarification from Brisbane. Imagine forwarding calls and messages all day.

We took the liberty to check out the racing results from time to time to check out my boss racing position. So far he was in the lead (for a vintage car category) and doing well. A couple of days ago, we found out he withdrew from  the race. When he came back we asked him what was going on. He told us that throughout the race the engine burst twice and replaced twice. Didnt ask the details how he blew up the engine but he was still happy he was in the lead.

He told us that his driver is a Formula 1 driver while he, I suspect a co-driver or navigator. They made a deal that my boss pays for the entrance and registration fees while the F1 driver pays the rest. So, the best deal was the engines went burst and my boss didnt need to pay for the repairs. He chuckled when he told u this.

My boss has a passion for cars and speed. Apart from having a Formula 1 sound as his ring tone, he likes to race physically with a car. So this week, from this Monday till the next Monday, he won't be in the office and will be in New Zealand participating the annual car racing competition. That's left my colleague and me in office with the project in development while he and his wife having a fun race tour in the New Zealand country side.

The racing event is called Targa New Zealand at http://www.targa.co.nz 

As he is bridge between the development team and the big big boss, my boss is always the one who does the interaction and communication with the old man. Whatever the old man wants, he'll pass the message to us and we, the grunts execute the work. As for this week, my boss is going MIA, and all calls, emails, requests, demands, bla bla bla is going to be me to handle. I can already imagine how the old man is going to bug me for the next 6 days.

Oh, next Tuesday is Melbourne Cup day, which means an extra holiday for the boss, so he will be back to work on Wednesday next week. Talk about pre-planning.

I had a surprise visit from the boss of my boss in my office yesterday. It was the first time I met the old man (big big boss) which is from Brisbane and to me he's a very demanding person and aggressively expressing his ideas and implementation of these ideas.

We went for a long meeting, with a new project to do. Swinging his arms and scratching the white board with his programmer wannabe codes, he told us of his new idea. This means I have to put my current project on hold and start this new one first. Apparently this new project is some sort of additional component that is able to intergrate with the current one I'm working on. Sounds very grand and full of impressive features, yet almost impossible to do when there's 2 of us. On that very spot, he challenged me a task that his old development team spent 2.5 years to develop and failed to come up a feasible solution. I said I'll give it a try and guess what, I solved the task in 2.5 hours. Funny reaction I got from the old man; partly stoned and partly unconvinced.

Even my boss is grumbling of the old man and his untimely calls. As Brisbane has the time difference of a couple of hours, the old man occasionally called my boss early in the mornings (4am here and 7am there) especially Sundays to tell my boss of his new ideas, "I have a new idea..." topics. Sure it drove both my boss and wife mad.

And now since he is gone back to Brisbane, time to commence the new project. Have to get my boss and my colleague together and brain storm this almost impossible task.

Hmmm, another birthday that I needed to spend beside my friends and family. Today is my boss' wife birthday, yes unfortunately. In the morning, she was coming in to office, holding a bunch of roses, but that didnt tip us off. We didnt know it was her grand day until during lunch break, the boss told us that it's his wife's birthday. So, here we go, a sign.

We asked my colleague's fiancee (hell yeah, he's engaged) who happened to be in the city to buy us a cake. She bought a "fat-free" fruit cake from Myers and it cost us 25 bucks. So, when they came back from lunch, we began to celebrate. The candles are interesting: The wax is carved with a alphabet letter, so she got us the name of the boss' wife.

At the same time, my colleague apparently 'dis-allocated' one of his backbone and went for leave for a couple of days. These few days, he needed to leave a couple of hours earlier to rest and in return, he willing to work off the hours he missed on Saturdays (or Saturday?). I got the best show from him when he started to walk and sit like an old man, grumbling about his pain and I had to pick up things that required him to bend down. On the other hand, I get to eat half of his lunch as he lost his appetite over his injury (he said, "sick people no appetite to eat"). On one occasion I had Sophia restaurant pasta. Yum.

Ohhh finally the day I've landed myself into a new office and new colleagues (and boss). It's been months since I left my former place and get myself in an office in the city.

The office is as 'big' as my bedroom (sadly) and there's only 4 of us in the office. There's the boss and his wife, me and another Malaysian colleague. The couple is from New Zealand and just moved to Docklands which is very very close to the office. I heard they said they are going to be in both places; in office and home (as home office) during the business hours. I think it's an excuse to come late and go home earlier.

On the bright side, the couple is friendly and can be joked around with, though once in a while he laughed only by himself. Oh, he has a Formula 1 racing car roaring sound effect for his mobile ringtone and he'll say "I've got a racing car in my phone" and "there it goes again" every time it rang.

Day 1: I reported myself to work at 9.30. The office was empty with big Dell boxes (oh yes, they buying Dell PCs, servers and laser printer) next to it. I had to unpack these boxes and set up the PCs and stuff together. The couple had to go out to Office Works and Dicksmith to buy stationaries, UTP cables and a switch. Once everything was done, I had nothing to do but playing the Windows pinball. I should have brought along my Dilbert PC game. Later on I was allowed to go home early since we have no Internet to connect and get the documents and software to work.

Day 2: I found out that I am not the only programmer and I'll have a colleague to work with. And this was the day I found out I gonna be a lead programmer. Sheeesh... the job description changed again and I have a heavy responsibility now. Guess what, my underling is a fresh graduate from the famous Melbourne University and he's on a contract basis with this company.

Day 3 & 4: We gotten ourselves some documentation and specifications of our project and now we are starting to work/research some new languages (PHP and a 4GL).  

Working hours are from 9 to 5 basis, but to me the couple has a problem telling time. On several occasions, they came late 9am and left by 4.30pm or earlier. Lunch hour he told us we have half an hour and it took them 2 hours to get back to office!

The best part is today, the couple left office at 12.30pm. So I'm free enough to blog some 'adventures' now.

My former boss (a.k.a Keyboard Virus) and the director have a habit of reading magazines while they are doing their "business" (namely, performing their biological function). Every one in the office knew where they were off to the moment they grabbed their magazines and walked to the direction where the washroom is.

Sometimes, we may joked "Hey, you forgot your magazine", or "That magazine is too thin for you isn't it?" (Yes, the thicker it is, the longer they'll be there).

My former boss (a.k.a Keyboard Virus) has a habit of commenting when we are having our lunch period. Most of the time he loves to comment "yum", the moment he sees food on the table or his lunch. We smiled every time he said that.

On one occasion, we were having our lunch as usual. He was walking down to the break room and saw us. While he was about to head into the toilet, he stared at us and said "Yum" (our break room is next to the male wash room, sadly). then disappeared into the room.

So I joked that he was enjoying his "meal" in the washroom. Can't help staring my colleagues laughed till their food came out from their mouths.

The time has come for me to move on. I'm quiting my job and moving on to another. I think I'm gonna miss the every day laughs at the expense of the management. When I told my boss and the big boss that I wish to go , both showed their emotionless face and accepted my resignation. Guess they are trained to be that way; cement hardened and pale expression.

The new work location is in Warrandyte South which happens to be in Zone 3(!). Hopefully I can hitch a side from one of the colleague. My new job will be leading a team to finish up some projects and boy, I'm gonna lead some students-part-time-developers to do it!

The software house is really inside a house (no puns intended), in the outskirts of the town somewhere near some country side lands. He drove me there and had to get off the main road to reach the house. Met the new boss and his deputy (sounded like a local sheriff thingy) and they were okay people. 

I went a couple of times to discuss about my job and met the small teammates that are supposed to join in. There was this couple came; the guy was a final year graduate for computing/multimedia etc and was suitable for the job. As for the girl, i suspect she came along because of his boyfriend, she said she can do logo design as a hobby, not as a profession and when my boss asked her what she studied, she said film directing. My boss was stoned for a while. Damn funny when I saw my boss opened his eyes wide and well, I can't see if he was smiling or disappointed (hairy mustache covered his face for good).

Going to start a fresh day next week so I guess I'll start my short holiday and enjoy a short break before the work life resumes as usual.

The office's bandwidth has finally exceeded the quota and shaped to a 72Kbps line (a little faster than a modem connection). My colleague told me it was shaped yesterday and I was surprised no one complained about the speed cut. Guess all they do are sending and receiving emails which doesn't take up much of the bandwidth. In that case, I think I horde the remaining 15GB or so this month. Ohhh...some accomplishment to the expenses of the company.

Pathetic thing is they procured a 1.5Mbps line with a 20GB quota for peak hours and another 20GB quota for off peak hours. The off peak quota occurs after 9pm till 6am which is quite useless for a company where everyone shuts their computers after work except mine once in a while. Additionally they paid the same price as ours.

The good news is, the new month (quota resets) is gonna be tomorrow and so, the silent downloading abuse will commence once more ... again

Excerpts of a meeting with my boss.

Boss: Ronnie, is there something going on between us?

Me: What do you mean?

Boss: I mean, are you holding something against me or something? You don't look cheerful when we are having meeting

Me: I'm sorry if I have a moody face.

Boss: Seriously, is it me or ....?

Me: Honestly, I find humour in some people, some I don't.

Boss: There's no humour in me?

Me: No.

The Director of Finance is going away and the company decided to have a farewell gathering (Last Friday) and a farewell dinner in one of the nifty chinese restaurants in Docklands right after the admin meeting (Mondays).  As usual, I gotta get off the meeting half way to rush to my university to tutor hence I missed the dinner treat. That very night, I had a bar of Snickers for dinner instead.

The next day, my colleagues gave me some leftover, packed fried rice that was served during the farewell dinner. Thanking them, I decided to make this overdue fried rice as my dinner. After I cooked my dinner for Ivan and my next day lunch, I reheated the fried rice and tasted the so-called expensive fried rice. Hmm.. pretty tasteless, all with display but not as good as the ones I had during the Big Boss birthday (the former dinner was paid by the company).

P.S. Was hungry that night. I forgot to take a picture before I gobbled up the remaining fried rice. Oh ya, I forgot to mention that the my colleague took a few spoonful before giving me the fried rice and Ivan took a few mouthfuls before I ate the rest. Thanks guys...for the farney looking coloured rice! Bon-appetite!

Just found out that the Director of the Finance (not a department, but rather a branch of a business) is being laid off this week. Apparently he didn't make any progress of "sales" these few months and was told to move on. This was mentioned in the admin meeting to everyone.

The colleagues under him was planning to buy some gift and a card, so they asked everyone to contribute a small sum (again...geez). And lastly they are going to have a farewell party at a restaurant in Docklands next Monday. I won't be joining them as I gonna rush to university for tutoring.

The office was going to have another seminar (to attract waterfish) for property investment. As usual, we were requested to help to prepare the seminar in the late evening. We gotta move furnitures, prepare the chairs and the big TV in place. The minute it was time, the boss kept pestering us to go down to help out. In the end, we went down to help. Guess what, my Sri Lankan colleague and I were the only one doing the coolie job and our boss was nowhere in sight. The fat chump colleague, however was busy doing his work (photocopying documents and talking to the administration staff). Funny thing is, he's ALWAYS very busy whenever there's labour work to be done (Complained a backache...for a 23 year old kid). Finally the boss appeared when we finished the coolie work. Talk about being punctual.

One of my colleagues asked of me to visualise a trophy that to be used for a competition among the branches of the company.

At first, she wanted me to use some graphics tools like Photoshop to do. But then again, it is a 2D image, so it is hard for people to visualise a 3D item on a 2D pix. Decided to use 3D Studio Max. A two-day effort (lazy effort) and they seem to like it, so there it goes. The model looks okay but  I'm pretty lousy with lighting effects, hence it may look slightly weird. Some problem with the reflection as well

My big boss birthday was on the 3rd May. Some colleagues were planning to celebrate by buying him a dinner in a restaurant in Chinatown (Jade Restaurant or something). So what they asked us was, to chip in 50 bucks each for the cake and the dinner. Then my group was thinking, "What kind of dinner that cost us 1K?". We hesitated to give but it's the big boss dinner, so we decided to say goodbye to our 50 smackaroos.

Normally, I leave the office at 5pm, but on that day, I stayed till 7pm until they closed the office and drove me there. I got the fat chump as the driver. Boy, his way of driving reminds me of the days when I was in KL with some car-maniac mates. This got worse when we reached Melbourne city. After moving round after round in Swanston /Bourke Street, we found a parking space. If you wanna live long, you don't want to be in his car. Oh, did I mention that his driving licence is revoked recently for a year for speeding?

When we got to the restaurant, we had a 8 to 9 course dinner (I lost count). Most of the dishes are the typical chinese dishes we usually ordered: Boiled veggies, some chicken, etc. No fish and no prawns whatsoever. The most enjoyable part is getting my hands on the fresh lobsters (since this is my very first time tasting a lobster). Everyone gorged the lobster leaving the head and the tail. I hardly manage to get a decent bite on it. Geez.

When the dinner almost finished, my big boss and his upper executives gave some long speech. Mostly motivations, how they endured for the last few years, why we should contribute and participate more, blablabla.... I would have returned to the apartment by 10pm, but his speech lasted for an hour. Anyway, he's using the same speech during seminars and general meetings. I noticed some of the colleagues ignored the speech and started to munch on the desserts and fruits.

At the end, the big boss paid for the dinner. When we mentioned we chipped in for the dinner, he said donate it for the greater good. Then, as we are about to leave we found out that the money we chipped in was not enough to pay for the dinner. How sad can that be.

Came back aroung 11.30pm and tired, but gotta fix lunch for tomorrow. Thank god for the curry I made during the weekend. I took some and pack for the next day.

Here's some of the stories that actually happened in my office and I would like to share with you guys and gals out there.

There was once a virus infected into one of our servers in the company. So we took some time to identify which one was hit. The virus causes horrible bandwidth spent (our quota is 20Gb per month) and slowed down the network badly. My colleague and I checked PC by PC and server by server to find the infected machine. Eventually we found it and solved the problem.

Not too long after that, my boss came to us and asked us how the hell the virus got into the server. We told him it could be infected when we were tranferring some files (belong to the staff) or during some internet downloads. He said okay and went away.

Later, he came over and told us "I think the keyboard is infected by virus". We stared at him for a moment and argued back. We told him that keyboards are just a piece of circuit board with no memory in it and hence virus don't hide in there. And we got a very funny response, "No no no, based on my 5 years experience in IT support, I know keyboard can be infected. Trust me".

Our IT team decided to hold a training session to train the staff of my company to use web application. So, we prepared some handouts for them to jot notes as well as some reading materials. I was in charge of getting the training done on that day as well as preparing all the necessary notes/ instructions to use the application. 99% of the tasks were done by me, so I thought I'll ask my boss to give a foreword/ message as part of the handouts that to be given to the staff.

I was expecting some quality statements from him, so I emailed him to write up a less-than-300-words message for me. What did I get in return?

Excerpts from his email:
"[Product name] is a new development, an Internet Based Tool to Manage Property Real Estate Sales Globally.  It brings to together various parties which plays a part in the whole Property Sales Cycle.  There are Developers which gives us the Property Listings, the Real Estate Agents to take it off the List, and Administration to Manage and Oversee the whole Operation.  The Goal of [Product name] is to provide an effective tool for Developers in Marketing their Projects, Real Estate Agents an Unlimited Supply of Available Stocks to Sell.  And Administration to Manage the Sales Process with ease."

I was stoned for a moment before deciding to re-write the foreword on my own. Instead of putting his name as credits, I named the team.