And suddenly... I was employed without knowing what the job is

Readers, if you have been wondering what I am doing daily, since I never posted anything about my daily lives, I am going to tell you now. As you may have read in my first post, I just graduated from high school, and is in a long holiday before going to university. It begs the question: how do I spend the time waiting for university to start? Well, to be honest, I do feel like quite a slacker; I did not get any permanent job, go for some guitar or coding classes or whatever to make my holiday, so called, "a time well-spent". How on Earth, then, do I spend my holiday? Actually, as it turns out, the long holiday may have its busy periods in between. As I have written earlier, this month (May) is going to be one of the busiest month of the holiday as it is when scholarship interviews likely to take place, so my days were (yes, WERE) spent preparing for commonly asked question, aside from my daily dose of coding lesson from www.codecademy.com (try it, if you are interested to start learning coding. It is really good for beginners and self-studying!) and gaming (Skyrim, at the moment). March was also a busy month; it was the month when we are supposed to register for the local universities, and thus naturally a month of making essays as well as submitting applications and documents, if requested. April was indeed quite a vacant month, I would say, if not for the "SUTD offer mess" which I have decided not to write here.

Once in a while, my dad would give me some projects to do which have something to do with whatever he was doing as a job, so I (not so happily) obliged, such as designing posters, brochures, banners, inputting raw data for some research purposes and processing it to a small extent, and a handful others of ad-hoc jobs, if you know what I mean. (No, not the Mr. Bean if you know what I mean) No pay, no nothing, by the way. And now, as the title goes, I am, out of a sudden, employed by a clinic owned by my father's friend without the slightest idea of what my job description is. There is a little background story so that you would understand the circumstance I am in.

I am not so close with my father. Everything he does (like, literally, almost everything) seems to get into my nerves. I mean, it is not like he is doing something normal and out of a sudden I will break into an outrage, but whatever he does, he does it in a way that I cannot fathom why, and sometimes with some ugly repercussion on others. Or sometimes, it is the way he talks that I do not like. Maybe it is because when I was much younger, he used to be a really authoritarian father; if anything went against his will, he would throw a fit. Perhaps, that is why subconsciously, hearing him talking would induce a certain negative emotion in me. He is no longer like that though, which is why I sometimes wonder why I am still so rude to him. I tried to change this subconscious reaction by trying to be nice to him, but it just feels sooooo very extremely unnatural, difficult, and embarrassing, even! I really fear the power of subconscious mind, having the power to give me some negative suggestions even when there is nothing negative in what and the way he said. 

One (not so) fine day, he (my dad) asked me to make something similar to what I previously did; the data inputting thing I mentioned merely on passing. This time, it is connected to a research done by him in collaboration with his friend who owns a clinic where the data was drawn from. I was told to make the physical, raw data into digital form. I used Google's service Drive to create a form and filling in the data, and Google Drive would nicely convert the input into an excel-ly table form, which could be processed using most of data-processing programs like Microsoft Excel (duh) and SPSS (google it please, I can't remember what it stands for) Apparently, the clinic does not have a digital medical record; as in, the patients' medical record is only available in physical form. They have patient database all right, but it only contains the patient's particulars like name, address, age, and phone number. So, upon hearing my magic of digitalizing the research data, apparently my dad's friend want me to do the same thing for his clinic database. I thought, well, making such a form would not be much of a problem, but as it turned out, my father suddenly told me to actually work there  as a staff. I was like, wtf? Making a form like that does not require me to work there full-time. If you have used Google Forms before, you would know what I mean. The essential thing of making a form is knowing what the data is for. I feel that a meeting or two with my dad's friend should suffice and one or two days of making the form would finish the business, unless they ask me to actually input the data - again, from scratch - of patients from, perhaps, more than 10 years ago, which amount to more than thousands. I mean, uh, if you need someone to input such a thing, it is better to employ more people with low qualifications, right? It seems that I fulfill that requirement (I am a high school graduate, technically, though I am already accepted into NUS and NTU) and thus, they (my dad and his friend) ask me to do it as well. There are more. Upon realizing that I am using an external service (ie Google), my dad's friend straight away abandoned the system, saying that Google could take the data and thus not confidential anymore. You know how doctors perceive patient's clinical data as a very secret confidential as if it is a classified national secret or something. Indeed he has a point; Google and some hackers could take it and sell the data if they actually realize that there is such a confidential information among the sea of other crappy information inputted everyday on Google Drive. I hope you get what I am trying to say, but the thing that irritates me most is that I end up required to input the data MANUALLY into the excel-ly table file. Oh well.

There are many, many problems if I am to be employed there.

1. The dates of my interviews are not known yet

As I have written here, the only scholarship provider that has contacted me is IDA (check here for the somewhat more information, though not much). Most likely, according to the previous years, more will come around mid-May (scholarships from the universities, that is). Therefore, I could not possibly receiving a monthly salary if I do not even know when I would be present and absent. Moreover, it is like I just started working for two weeks, then I am asking for a leave with indefinite date of when I would return (I planned to stay in Singapore over the weekend after my IDA interview so that I would not need to go back and forth every week).

2. I will only work for less than two months (as in total, from May to June) or even lesser (taking into account my off-days)

May, as I said in my first point, is an interview month. June, as I foresee, would be a month of administrative matters. July is when the orientation camps are held (at least for NUS).

3. My interview chances may be jeopardized

As I said above, I spent my time preparing for the upcoming interviews, which you should have known by now how important it is to me, by looking at my low level of English as exhibited in my blogposts. Indeed, I initially thought that more interaction with people may be a good change from looking at the monitor, arranging strings of sentences of answers for probable interview questions. However, whether the benefit of more interactions outweighs the cost of less time preparing for the interview questions remains to be seen.

4. I do not like it!

Well, I go to college for a reason, please! I want to avoid doing such a mundane job such as data entry like this! World has funny ways to get you into the position you do not like, however hard you try to avoid it, it seems.

5. I would lose my playing, coding, and blogging time =(

Well, I placed it as my last point because it is the least important reason. But still, as a teenager (I am 20 this year, but it is not my birthday yet so I am still technically a teenager) playing games like Skyrim is what keeping me sane from the deprivation of social activities (most friends overseas getting a job, no car and lazy to take public transport to go to the rest of the friends' house staying in my home country. Trust me, you would not want to take public transport in my home country). Coding is just a head start so that I would not be left behind too much by my competitors, while blogging is connected to my third point.

So yeah, that is one preview of how my life has been so far. Please give comment about it, I am sure the older ones would be so itchy to give me tonnes of advice but too lazy to write it. The younger ones, maybe you can share with me some shitty experience you have on your first, first day of work. That reminds me that today (or rather, it is already yesterday now) was my first day of work, and there is some shitty stuff happening, but I am too confused now to tell you in chronological order. Even the above information is not told in chronological order, which makes me at the mercy of your advices, calling me ungrateful, "take it as a lesson" kind of advice and so on. If only you know how little information I know before I am going to work that day, you would understand why the title is as such. As for now, I must go to sleep because tomorrow I need to go to work. The more complete details about my job may be found on one of the subsequent posts. So for now, good night!

PS. sorry if it is not a post about Skyrim. That one is in progress. Pinky finger promise, I would post it soon!