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silliwilli01
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Name: william
Country: United States
State: California
Birthday: 5/8/1983
Gender: Male
Occupation: peon
Industry: Engineering
Message: message me
Member Since:
12/16/2002
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| So two weeks ago I went to a friend's friend's party. Was supposed to be a "wine & cheese" event. Not having been to one before wasn't sure what to expect. But for the most part it was pretty much wine cheese + talking to people. But as with most social events its make or break based on the people you have there not so much what you're doing and what the events called.
Luckily the people at this particular gathering were cool. So lets see the line up was. One indian guy who works for GM and is uber jovial and energetic. Then you have the ex-military guy who served in Iraq, but specialized in communications so was doing IT work setting up internet phones, etc for the troops. Then there was the host who was a gal from Northern California, Pittsburg ish area. into green-tech but currently working for Honeywell which I mistakenly assumed was a tupperware company...... =P silly me. And last but not least there was the 37 year old lady who had a law degree from NYU. Had practiced for 7 years in the legal department of Time Warner. Was making a crapload of money but was unhappy with life. Decided to say f-it, quit went back to school for guess what.... eastern medicine.
But yeah that last person left a big impression. Its funny how our generation feels we're entitled to some sort of feeling of fullfillment from work. There was none of that a generation ago. a generation ago people felt entitled to getting a bi weekly pay check for work. A generation before that people were probably happy if they didn't lose limbs on a day to day basis. So where do we come along and expect our 9-5 to give us some source of elightenment and self satisfaction? I dunno but its definitely refreshing to see people who are examples of hey well if i can't find happiness in my prototypical successful job i'll go look elsewhere.
Anyways, the following Monday I met up with a friend of the lawyer lady who happened to be a successful restaurant owner in Shanghai. He owns a place called mesa manifesto in Shanghai. Supposedly two other ones too but I didn't catch the names of the other two. So this guy's story is that when he first got out of college he started a clean-tech company. But 20 years ago there really was no steam behind that movement yet. So he decided he wanted to get into the food / service industry. Guess what his first gig there was? A sandwich shop in Jankarta.....
So cleantech - sandwich shop - mesa manifesto.
nyu law - time warner legal firm - chinese medicine.
my list reads
pixelworks.......................................................................
looks like i'm due for one more stop in job fullfillment purgatory b4 reaching the promise land lol =P. Still.... gotta get away from this one first.......
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| so ..... i'm sitting here at work. its 8 minutes till 7. for some reason most of the people are out of the office early today. usually monday's people stay late. I'm listening to music from my laptop and I only just realized that the headphones I'm using are way too old and cheap haha =P. They're a pair of free headphone + mic set which came with a copy of Guild Wars which I bought when I was in Portland for the summer during my internship 4 years ago. and that got me thinking about the significance of 4 years.... high school, college and now 4 years at this same company. wonder whats the next set of 4. I don't think i can be in Shanghai for 4 years. That seems excessive.
lol boulevard of broken dreams is playing right now. Anybody remember the k-con from way back when with it? geebus.
Actually I think the fact that my ex-coworkers who I play basketball just discovered texas hold'em has a lot to do with it. just reminds me of all those hours spent at Tony and Allen's place.
My expat friend complains about the cyclical nature of having other expat friends. The fact that everybody is always in transit and moving on to something else. And the thing is its cyclical even when you're not an expat. I think the average span is.... well thats not important.
haha okay time to go, hitting up a movie at the Shanghai international film festival....we're catching Yamagata Scream. Look it up. I think its the Jap equivalent of Shaun of the Dead. We'll see.....
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| 1. traveling by train is pretty ritzy
2. cept when the old lady next to your bunk decides its okay to spit on the floor in the train like how she would have done anyways if she were outdoors.
3. beijing = traffic pretty much between the hours of 7am - 10pm.
4. saw devin harris in tiananmen square
5. saw devin harris enter the forbidden city from a small side door
6. saw the various gardens
7. saw the boat that was supposed to be China's navy in the 1800's...... its a lot smaller than you'd imagine
8. saw the great wall, its a lot more touristy than you'd imagine, steeper too.
9. ate a lotta ducks. Look up Liqun if any of you are ever in Beijing. Have fun finding it =).
10. beijing nightlife doens't exist on Friday nights apparently.....
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| So when I first got to Shanghai, my roomate took me to one of her couch surfing events. No laughing cause the event revolved around playing boardgames. Anyways the host of the event turned out to be a guy from socal who happened to also have went to Cal. Then it turns out that the guy also happened to be an EECS major. Thing is he was CS. Started going to these trivia nights on Monday nights with that guy and some of his friends. Last thursday we were at a club called C's and while we're talking it turns out that the guy also happened to live in 1755 Spruce while at Cal. Haha he appearently lived in Herman's room on the bottom floor next to the kitchen =P. Apparently we moved out spring 2005 and he moved in fall 2005.......
too weird....
That and the fact that I ran into my other roomate and his gf at two separate bars on two separate nights.
I think if you're in Shanghai long enough you no longer get surprised by such events / revelations anymore.
Shrugs.
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| I think one of the things that frustrates me most about engineering is the fact that things are never "plug and play". I'm starting to come to terms with the fact that to be an "engineer" really means to make things work when they don't "plug and play". We're not really paid to "design" even though that may be your title, we're paid to make the various square pegs fit into round holes.
Anyways this post isn't another work gripe, rather I think its just something I noticed this weekend that made me think of work and how I should adapt my thought process.
So this weekend I went to Hang Zhou with an ex-coworker and his college buddies. Most of them are married / have fiances / girlfriends, this put the group at around 20 people. Long story short at the end of the weekend, we were getting ready to go home. We decide to leave for the trainstation an hour before the train departs. Ends up we missed our train by 5 minutes. Now I don't know how people normally respond to situations like that. But I know more than my fair share of people who would start saying things like "zomg why did we take the bus instead of a taxi, why didn't we leave 10 minutes earlier, who's idea was it to _____, how come we didn't do ____, etc etc etc". But the group of people I was with were not like that. They rolled with it. We got in ticket exchange line and contined the conversation we were having on the bus. There continued to be laugher, if nothing else there were more jokes about the situation. We ended up having to sit around in the waiting room for another hour and a half for the next available train. Nobody was frustrated, nobody was silently brooding, or grumpy. It was just amazing to see the whole group just collectively say "eh no biggie".
I brought this up with my roomate and she says that in China you really do learn to "roll with things". There's just so much more unpredicatability that comes with all the construction, the masses of people, the work in progressness that IS China. She says when she first got here she'd plan things out to the minute but soon got away from that. She says the way she approached her work projects took a similar evolutionary path.
And I guess thats the moral..... gotta roll with things better at work. Laugh it off and find a solution.
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