You Know You're Overworked When...

- you're really happy you don't have to go back to work on a public holiday

- you're so happy that you don't mind staying back really late on the eve of the public holiday

- you're so happy that you're amused and not annoyed when the boss goes home and then comes back to the office just BEFORE you're ready to go home to get you to do something very urgent

- you've been in the office everyday since Nov started, except Sundays because it's Sabbath day and God says you better not skip church.

- you've lost 3kg

- you don't eat right anymore, and you have to remind your technician that he doesn't have to skip meals just because you're skipping meals.

- you buy in food for the technicians on Sat because they don't want to eat too

- you get easily spaced out after work because you don't sleep right anymore and don't get to clear the sleep debt on weekends.

- the usual project timelines have been thrown out the window and everything is accelerated, everyone's stressed to the brim, and colleagues around me are chanting "Do not worry abt tmrw, for today has enough troubles of its own"

- you're drinking a packet of chocolate milk and going into a management meeting until your colleague asks "you're going to meet the management with that??" and you realise it's not very professional.

- you're thankful to work on a Sat because you can get work done without distractions.

- you're amused when you're doing something for A and B messages you to do something for her, and just as you pick up B's work, A messages you for an update for A's stuff. So you put your hands up and do C's work instead.

- more projects are coming in and the project names are starting to sound like bad words in Hokkein. My colleague and I are blissfully unaware of what it means until another colleague asked "Do you all know what it means in Hokkein????"

- your boss holds a meeting and is talking over the speaker phone to the overseas office when the phone suddenly rings while he's talking

- you suddenly remember what Alex, one of my first American customers, old, smart and very cranky but we slowly grew to respect each other (he tried to hook me up with his son in Boston!), once told me:

"Meetings are a waste of time. They are for pple who don't know what's going on and pretend to know what's going on and like to listen to themselves talk"

- you also recall what FLUF (fat little ugly fella) once told me when i told him i had to stay behind to finish some stuff up.

"Don't let them do this to you." fluf advised, before breaking out into a guffaw and then moving on to a story of how he pulled a calf out of his preganant cow that morning.

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For all the stress though,
can't say it hasn't been fun at some level.

it's satisfying to complete what you set out to do,
satisfying to solve stuff,
and the best of all,
be grateful for the team spirit and friendly jibing to keep our sanity.

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Emcee-ing for Kev's wedding on sat.
I finished the script and forwarded it to my co-host to do up the chinese part.

he emailed me back.

"Are you the chinese emcee? cos my mandarin is quite bad."
"you mean you're not the chinese emcee??? My mandarin is bad too! How??" I emailed him.
"How??"

So after several "how" emails,
i forwarded the script to Poot to translate (thnx Poot!).

Now we'll figure on sat whose chinese diction sounds ok enough to host in mandarin.

My first mandarin hosting gig!

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time to prepare the emcee script for a church event.

Just emailed the organiser.
"You're gonna break the entire audience into 3 groups to play this game? so there are 50 pple in one group doing role playing????"

this is gonna be fun....