My first day of work in Singapore

My alarm went off at 6:30 this morning. I know I hadn't slept enough last night to welcome my first day at work but I immediately jumped out of bed for a warm morning bath.

Allen and I went out of his rented flat exactly at 8 to go to work separately. Thanks to him, I already knew what bus would take me to the office. The trip from our place to Tampines Avenue 4 took 30 minutes --for which I stood in the bus on my feet for 25 minutes with my legs fighting the pull of inertia (hehehehehe). I got off the bus one stop earlier so I had to walk another 10 minutes to reach Tampines Centre 2 where the HR Department of OCBC Technology Division is located.

There were four of us who commenced employment today (I only remembered Alison from Vietnam and Vijay from India, who both recently graduated in Singapore and employed under some sort of graduate programme by OCBC). The other one is a local of Singapore who was recently working for J.P. Morgan. At last, I met Angela Wong, the HR officer who took care of all the stuff related to my employment (and she is so pretty). She gave us a quick intro on company standards and policies, most of which she said we have to learn in detail on our own thru the intranet. Each of us was handed a big red-white OCBC folder that contains a pair of Phillips earphones, official comapany ID, IT proximity card, company docs to read, and additional forms we need to fill out.

We were all, later, accompanied by Angela to Tampines Centre 1, where the Technology Division of OCBC is housed. I was introduced to Ket Yeow -our project manager (by then was in a meeting), who was the one who did the phone interview with me and approved my employment. As of writing, I haven't talked to him yet about the set of tasks I will be assigned to work on and his expectations of me.

The environment was like that of Misys Manila --cubicles shared by 4, individual direct lines and set of supplies, selective internet access, etc etc etc--except that here they issue LCD monitors (not CRT still used in Misys Manila up to now) and facebook/yahoo sites are blocked! I am seated in front of Nimfa the first Filipino I met after Dawn (IT Division secretary who looks like the Filipino famous comedienne Debraliz) sent me to my temporary workplace. Nimfa resembles to Pam, one of my dear colleagues in PVB (peace, Pam! Nimfa is a charming girl, anyways).

I was oriented by Mei Yee, whom I think is the Team Leader of the Deposit group under Core Banking team of Ket Yeow. I asked her to explain to me the setup of environments and give me an overview of the processes which, according to her, were always strictly observed. The process workflow is similar to that of Security Bank --where all things are documented and always turned over to a different team for next action for security purposes. Developers have limited access, if not none, to user and production environments. Only two test units exist in the development machine, each of which serves a different purpose. Loading of any object to Production is subject to approval and there is a specific day in the week where installation to production is discussed and approved, and another day to take into effect new objects approved for production's official use.

I will now be supporting SILVERLAKE and honestly, I am both a bit scared and so excited to learn this new system and the processes implemented within our team.

Oh, but first, let me finish reading these manuals... I thought I could escape from these stuff...

Ciao!

Note: A task was assigned to me after writing this note and I had to work overtime to finish it... Gosh!!!