Thursday, July 31, 2008
For all those of you whom I haven't told yet, I'm working at a polytechnic processing MOE bursary applications. But thank goodness, today is the last day and then I'm out of here and back to my "nice work", before my brain degenerates and my soul dies.
I'm no stranger to working in this poly, but doing administrative work (in my previous stints here, I did writing for the school newsletter and website) has made me realize a few things.
1. Students nowadays can't follow simple instructions.
It doesn't matter if you remind them to submit the proper supporting documents by the deadline through email, posters, leaflets and online announcements a gazillion times. If they don't want to read your instructions, they won't. And that's why it's part of my duty to call students up and chase them for missing documents. If I had things my way I would have simply junked their incomplete and late applications into the recycling bin, but molly-coddling the students is the way things are done here.
But sometimes it is really bewildering how the students here can be so thick-headed. The instructions are organized in tabulated form for easy comprehension. If your parents are employed, I want to see the payslip. If they are unemployed, I want to see their CPF contribution history. And then I get students giving me CPF statements for working parents. I seriously think there is some special function in their brains that makes them see each section in the table merge into each other like an abstract painting.
And there are the really idiotic people (let's not mince words here) who can submit the online application without the hard copy supporting documents, or even worse, submit the documents without the online application. I don't see how you could have read about submitting one thing without seeing that you needed to submit the other. Perhaps in addition to their capacity for higher level abstraction, the students have selective vision as well.
2. It appears that secondary school English language teaching has failed. Some of the students don't seem to understand that a self-declaration LETTER of one's income should NOT look like the following:
Name: XXX
Occupation: Self-empolyed
Income: $1000 a month
Reason why income documents are not available: Self-empolyed
And there's no signature at the end of the letter. Sure I'm taking your word for it that your parent's income is $1000 a month and not $100 000, but this is way too perfunctory.
3. My calling.
Ploughing through stacks of bursary applications for the past 3 weeks has made me realize what I consider my "real work", "nice work". It frustrated me deeply when I couldn't read my book, as I was often dragged off to one place and then left there with nothing to do, while my book sat waiting for me in another place. It annoyed me when my reading kept getting interrupted by phone calls from parents who call 3 days past the deadline for submission thinking I can make an exception for everyone. It irked me when I couldn't fully immerse myself into the world of my book with aunties walking in and out of the storeroom I sit in trying to have inane conversations with me. And it deeply saddened me that I wasn't doing justice at all to my book by dropping off after 10 pages every night after getting home tired from work.
So this is what the famous "working life" is like, and frankly speaking, it scares me. The very possibility that I won't be able to read and think about books for the next 40 years is unimaginable. The thought of wasting away in a cubicle staring at numbers on a computer screen everyday frightens me. I don't want to end up like the aunties outside my room who can talk about nothing except chicken rice and Ginvera moisturizing gel to alleviate their boredom. In order to get my "nice work" in the future, I'm really going to have to work hard for it now. And so it's back to the library next week.
kaoru said at 12:55 AM
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