Farewell to Farewells

I truly feel that I have been a valued member of the work community. Today marked the final set of  farewell parties. Thus the total breakdown of various farewell parties is as follows:

• One more formal farewell event with cake and cards and everything
• Two after work beer events
• Two separate dinners arranged by different sets of colleagues
• Three separate farewell lunches once again with separate colleagues both within and outside my own department
• Two ad hoc farewell coffee sessions 
• One farewell ice cream session

Now, if for whatever reason I was not allowed to leave the country tonight at the airport (bear in mind that I had to return my Employment Pass back to Ministry of Manpower earlier today and officially I'm no more a legal alien),  I would not dare to show my face in the office tomorrow. I would probably just hide somewhere, change my instant messenger location to Finland and work from 2 PM to 10 pm just to fool everybody.

UPDATE: I did actually also throw so called house-colding party for few selected colleagues to help me get rid of beer and souvenir vodka, which my company did not agree to ship in a container for some reason.

Quick Zhi Ya during lunch break

Over the past 1,5 weeks I have been even more tied with my laptop than normally and finally my lower back started to protest. Today I decided to pick up a quick lunch from the global fast food chain (I had McSpicy because non spicy stuff starts to taste bland) and then head out for 30 minute back massage next to the office. The traditional Chinese massage feels actually often more painful than good while receiving the treatment, however right after the session I could really feel the blood circulation running again. And thus feeling great I returned to my nerdy kingdom and resumed slouching over my laptop.

Don't worry, it is just a drill

On Friday I had to leave work early due to preannounced fire drill taking place. I was among the odd few who had actually come to the office on Friday rather than working from home due to the same drill. They had announcements on the elevators posted already on Monday asking politely for forgiveness for any inconvenience caused.

Is it just me or isn't a bit weird to tell people before hand that there is going to be a fire drill. I mean of course it is good to practice exiting the building in orderly fashion and convening on designated assembly point so that in a real situation people know how not to wave hands and scream. However, apparently preannouncing makes everybody leave and avoid the hassle altogether. It was clearly agreed to be done on Friday afternoon to cause least amount of disruption to business. It seems to me fulfilling of the mandated process step just for the sake of fulfilling.

At least back in Finland you never know whether it is a drill or a real thing, you should be behaving exactly the same. Having drills ever so often has caused that I often finish what I am doing on my laptop before gathering my things. Occasionally I found myself wondering would it really be worth it finishing "this one last email" just before inhaling toxic fumes if it was a real case. For good or worse I am not panicking.

Not related to 'Pore or Finland, but my colleague told me a funny anecdote to fire drills while working: A fire alarm went off and this colleague of mine started to leave the work premises. This time it was clearly not a drill, but heavy smoke was already coming from the corridor. There was another coworker still on the phone clearly with a client. My friend started urging his colleague to leave the building pointing at the smoke. The following phone conversation apparently really took place:

- "I am so sorry ma'am, but it seems that there seems to be a bit of a fire in the office I am working, so I might need to you to ask to call our number again in a while"
- "What? Is there smoke?"
- "Oh yes, there has been smoke in the office for quite some time now, ma'am."
- "There is a fire going on and you are still talking to me?"
- "But I would like to make sure that you would not mind calling us back again."
- "Get out now! Seriously."
- "How would you rate your call today..." 

"Se taitaa olla vain pora." (Sorry, old Finnish inside Star Wars humour)
(picture from http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/36inoo/)

PS. In continuation to the comments to this old post, I went to see the new Start Trek movie yesterday night (again at IMAX) and was blown away. Plenty of horizontal lens flares and pretty nice scifi imagery.

Quirky motion sensor AKA set your toilets to stun

Quick personal gripe for this lovely Wednesday morning: It hardly comes as a surprise that in this fine city failing to flush a toilet after use is yet another punishable offence (modest 150 SGD compared to say riding your bike through an underpass, which forces you to cough up a cool 1000 dollars if you get caught). Thankfully opportunities for this form of improper conduct has been prevented by installing infrared motion detectors in most if not all public toilets. These detectors practically flush the toilet for you...

...Provided that they practically work in the first place. In some toilets like in our office they have set the detector on extra stringent mode, flushing the toilet repeatedly even during use as a pre-emptive measure to make sure any fines avoided. I can only attest that it can be rather unpleasant (yet strangely refreshing) experience.

Individual among masses

I happened to possess very common first name. According to PRC (Finnish Population Register Center that is -- Not the PRC that Asians would expect) I have 56 426 namesakes, which is quite a lot when comparing to the total population of 5,4 million in Finland. Especially common the name has been for men born in 70s and 80s.

In my work context this commonness of my first name was emphasized due to disproportionate relationship between men and women in my line of nerdy work and also due to the fact that most of my colleagues have been born in notorious time frame mentioned above. This has resulted in more than every tenth colleague in my department being my namesake! I often joked that proper name must have been a recruitment criteria. Just before relocating, the final nail on the coffin of my identity crisis was realization that I supposedly had a doppelgänger portraying the role of Dr. Who from a particular season.

Fast forward to the Little Red Dot under the equator. Here I was awarded a completely new digital identity within the corporate systems and my Finnish identity was laid to rest for the duration of my assignment. In practice I  received for example a new external email address. This new identity is in the form of firstname@company.sg -- no need to separate with last name as I am the only and actually the first of my kind working in this location!

I needed to come all the way here to find my long lost identity. I am currently the odd one out of my department. There is actually only one other European that I know of among my whole extend group of colleagues around. It is funny that for example the security guy in our office building occasionally walks around the floors and every single time he happily greets me with my first name. They really didn't do that in Finland, even though just by guessing they would have been correct every tenth time.

However I have found a new group of names I am being referred to. Occasionally when I have booked a taxi (there is a cool little taxi booking app, which actually shows the geographic location of the booked taxi once the booking has been confirmed), the driver looks at me funny and wants to verify that it really was me who booked the taxi. They all say that they were expecting a Japanese woman because of my first name...

Nothing brings out the Christmas spirit like bagpipes

Yet another quite surreal experience. Today afternoon the whole department went out for a nice Christmas lunch. Starting with the fact that the whole concept of Christmas and Winter feel so much out of place over here under constant sun shine and 30+ degree weather. So there were we in a globally dispersed crowd eating happily excellent Silver Fish Fried Rice (the actual fish and not the wingless insect by the same name, hopefully!) and black pepper onion beef, when in comes a 3 man Asian boy band in kilts who are obviously playing bagpipes to celebrate the season. Even though to my unacquired hearing (you can't really say that, can you?) all the bagpipe songs sound exactly the same, I was actually able to distinguish that they were playing a medley of the original Christmas classics like Jingle Bells. How wintery (yet another made up word for you) is that?

Air locked inside the office

I have received requests to share findings and feelings from the work perspective. This episode provides all the fun and excitement that goes on within office premises in Singapore.

Now having successfully raised the expectations, let me share a secret: office life in a multinational company doesn't really change that much from one country to another. On the contrary, it keeps surprising me again and again how overwhelming can be the power of a shared global corporate culture: Everybody speaks the same language (No, that is not English, but acronym infested Nerdish), they all have a place in the same organizational structure that is replicated in each country, they share the same concerns to a minute detail, there are too many back to back meetings, they share the same tools and processes (need to add that they all have the same warm feelings about processes).

In my line of work I probably shouldn't be as pleasantly astonished how internal IT can actually work on a global level. But I am: same badge works on the doors once given accesses in a matter of seconds, laptop picks up the same WLAN and starts to work directly, printers are all accessible through the same system and as mentioned all the tools used are indeed the same (although finally having a freedom from claiming my hours -- how sweet is that!)

Obviously there are also differences. There really aren't that many occasions where I would get to speak Finnish. To the extent that I found myself thinking in English also outside the office. I work in a truly multinational team with colleagues from India, UK, Australia, China, US and naturally Singapore. We venture out for lunch much later than back home where there are people standing orderly in a queue waiting already before the cafeteria opens at 11 AM. The security seems to be also tighter around here. Accessing a bathroom that is shared with another company in the same floor of the office building is a space craft air lock type of an experience with interlocking doors which cannot be opened at the same time (I just anticipate the first time I will go to the bathroom and realize that I have left my badge on the table <-- this is the excitement part promised in the first chapter). 

Finally there is the matter of number of hours being spent at the office in a day. There was a recent study published in Europe which demonstrated that Finnish people are among the group that spends the least time in the office compared to other fellow European office workers. In Singapore the tendency seems to be more of an Asian approach with number of hours at the office being a value in itself. Once again the company culture seems to have a veto right with the focus on the outcome in all the countries.



As a teaser for the next episode: it will feature various dangerous animals which lurk around when I'm sleeping.

First day @ office

Even though 5 hour time difference did not mess up my head too badly, in the morning did not feel adventurous enough to start finding my way to office with public transportation, but jumped into a taxi. The hotel I ended up in is located far away from everything else but my office -- still it takes 15 minutes with a taxi to get there. Taxis are relatively cheap mode of transportation compared to the way things are at dear old home country. However expect to get myself orientated around public transportation the soonest.


Realized pretty quickly that with wearing a suit I was way overdressed. Not only doesn't the local business attire expect a jacket but also it’s unbearably hot outside with a jacket on. Inside I could do with a jacket actually because the aircon is tuned all the way up to a setting resembeling the weather during mid-winter in Finland.

As part of a major global company, there is a process (or typically several) for everything, including for relocation. There were number of colleagues from HR department running me through different forms and practicalities. By the looks of it, I'm hardly the first one to go through these activities.

As for the actual work activities, the relocation practicalities have been fortunately taken into account. Therefore, for the first 2 weeks I will be having the needed freedom to run on different errands.

Kicking things off with succulent shrimps

A challenge was set forth for me to blog my experiences regarding backing my stuff and relocating from wintery Finland to sunny Singapore (hence the title of the blog). I have been pondering on the challenge for a week and finally realized that if I don't start to document the peculiarities during the first weeks, I will loose my childlike sense of wonder sooner rather than later. Thus here we go...

Great Adventure is about to be embarked, yet I cannot shake the initial feeling of discomfort. The final words of my 6 year old son, just before I left my old home, were “Please hold me tightly, Dad, just one last time”. I will migrate myself first and my family follows me after a few months when I have settled in. But I have to wonder what have I just thrown myself into?

Then again on the very first evening dipping into hotel's infinity pool way above the roofs of nearby buildings and watching planes coming in closer and rolling out their landing gear almost at the touching distance makes me feel that I’m not in Kansas anymore -- or in Helsinki for that matter.

First experiment into eating out was obviously a positive one. But then again is there any real possibility for an epic failure when it comes to food in a city of whose habitants’ favourite pastime is eating out. It has also been said that there are absolutely no reasons for not eating well in Singapore. On the first evening it was Peranakan cuisine (let me google that for you: “Peranakan or Nonya cuisine combines Chinese, Malay and other influences into a unique blend”). Amazingly succulent shrimps with aromatic and spicy paste served on a bamboo leaf. Good stuff. This is, indeed, a start of an adventure.