After three weeks, I'm well accustomed to the hiss of the train in the morning, the uncomfortably warm press of bodies on either side with their blank, uncaring faces, and the even more uncomfortable mix of odors from the various walks of life that grace our public transport. I spend about an hour every day, each way commuting from what is almost Malaysia to Singapore's CBD.
The people at work are still such a great bunch, even after three weeks of my incessant questions and failed attempts at tracking. They bear it all with admirable patience, even the mild dressing downs that my supervisor (and their boss) gives them for not helping me enough. - not that they aren't helpful, it's more like slowness to learn on my part. I'm learning a lot about different managerial styles, figuring out what is effective and what isn't.
My other interns are great fun, from the likes of Princeton, Yale, and Columbia, NUS, SMU. They are a seriously talented group of people with what, I'm sure, are sparkling CVs and even brighter personalities.
But the tiredness, oh the tiredness!
I get up in the morning feeling like the walking dead at the unholy time of 6 half in order to be on the bus by 7.15am. If I'm lucky, I'll be in the office by quarter past eight, with just enough time to run to Wang Jiao to get an upsized milo or tea. On really bad days, I fork out SGD5.70 for a Starbucks mocha which keeps me coherent until about 11.00am, at which point I start obsessing about lunch. Back in the office by 2, I last about 40 minutes by which time I'm fighting to stay awake, so I carefully count out 20 cents to get me what is effectively a shot of coffee from a vending machine. If I work carefully, expending as little energy as possible, it gets me home, through the mad compression of human traffic, back to my corner of Singapore.
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