Vigil

Firstly, thanks for all the well wishes. I've never gotten that many fruit baskets before.

I've taken some time to reflect on the happenings over the past few days. Based on discussions with the doctor, he was telling us when the moment my wife stepped into the hospital, every one was too worried to take her case because at that point in time, her blood pressure was just too high. There were also chances of both going away instead of just one.

I guess I must thank god, for I truly believe that god must have sacrificed my daughter to save my wife. Maybe now she will reduce the amount of nagging to me to compensate for her "new life" :))

I'm still not out of the hospital. Thank god for wireless broadband, my wife will still be under observation for another week. The doctors want to ensure that all complications are taken care off.

Me? Of course I'm sad. But I've still got the odd conference calls and responding to emails to keep me busy. I get like 300 - 400 emails a day, and sometimes, not checking for an hour generates 30-50 emails. Not checking for 6 hours generates 100+ emails! Just too taxing!

Sadness

It mains me to account this, but the last few days have been the saddest for a while.

It started with a routine check up on Saturday at my wife's Gynae. There, the doctor suddenly said he could not detect any heart beat from my daughter in my wife's womb. That started a whole panicky chain of events.

We were so devastated, we quickly rushed over to Damansara Specialist for a 2nd opinion. There, the doctor also confirmed the lack of a heart beat.

It hit us like a big sledge hammer. Why Why Why? Only a few days ago we could feel the baby kicking and turning.

We went home, still sad (because the doctor said after hearing such news, we did have a few days before deciding to take the baby out).

Then we decided to rush off to a Goddess of Mercy temple in Puchong. We frequent this temple and the lady there could go into a trance to "give advise". There, she advised us that actually, the baby's heartbeat was very faint and therefore undetectable via ultra sound. We were also advised that if we took the baby out soon, there was a slim chance.

So back we started driving. Now my first gynae was in Ampang, the 2nd opinion doctor was in Damansara, helluva closer to my home. So we started a whole bunch of frantic phone calls to see if we could switch doctors and you know, the question of ethics between doctors came up.

But to cut a long story short, we managed to switch doctors, and abt 7pm we checked into Damansara Specialist Hospital. Our intended doctor unfortunately had some appointment in Rawang, he couldn't come over to take the baby out. And worst still, all that panic and rushing around set my wife's blood pressure shooting above 160. So the doctors said the first priority was to calm her down.

There she went into ICU, to bring her pressure down. And after a night, the next morning, we wheeled her into the Operation Theatre. I was praying like there was no tomorrow but at 930am, the doctor pulled out a lifeless baby girl from my wife's womb.

Honestly, I didn't feel that sad then.I felt so angry at how things turned out. Angry, puzzled.

It was only the very few hours later, around 2pm, when the painkillers all wore off on my wife, when we wheeled my daughter, 35 weeks old, into her mom's arms that I cried so much.

God bless my daughter. My wife and I had picked the name Jocelynn for her, meaning Joy, but it was never meant to be.

Two

ok.. someone said I shd stop spreading rumours over yahoo.. but here's what I heard... There's one FS partner who already tendered.. he said "because I'm making room up there for others"... I'm like, my arse.. as if anyone is so noble...

My theory? With so many partners up at the top, there's bound to be pressure in such a small market. So probably some partners got pressured to "go to a new country" and possibly some of these partners rebelled.

Just a theory.

Anyway, I also heard there's a number two! And I'm not talking abt my kid...

News!

You heard it here first! A Malaysian FSI partner has resigned! And he's keeping it hush! He's probably not who you're thinking off!

Who? Who?

cannot tell lah!

Undo

The past week, I've been inundiated with calls and emails from at least 2 partners from the firm I used to work for. They have been trying to convince me to come back, with the promise that the firm has now recognised its shortcomings and are making alterations to the consulting model in order to fit good folks (i'd like to think so) like me back into their world.

The way out? A new "Specialist capability" which allows you to take a more deeper Subject Matter Expertise Role, that also allows you not to follow the typical consulting career path of having to sell to save your soul.

It's interesting... But I'm quite immune with some of the promises the firm has made in the past. Also, the new "specialist capability" allows you to land at max a Senior Manager, which I disagree.

So we'll see. I guess I'm nicely piqued after getting pissed off with so many of my colleagues that I work with now, on their incompetence and on the amount of bullshit and red tape flying around...

Redtape

This is another frustrating thing that I'm facing. Because I work in an organisation that is large and convoluted, sometimes I need to follow long winded processes that are just analystic.

For example, getting Microsoft support for Production issues.. I have to send an email to this one US fucker, ask him for permission to raise a ticket to Microsoft etc.

And he had the cheek to respond like this:


Please list each of the production issues. We reserve incidents for critical production down issues as we have a limited number of incidents. We would much rather first try to resolve internally, helps us all learn.

I cannot provide open ended access to Microsoft, I have to manage incident use. If this is a database issue, xxx will manage it. Our Premier Services contract is to support CoXXX, not to support a vendor. Even if what that vendor impacts CoXXX. They should open their own incident since they are supporting us, I'm not supporting them. The India example is the sort of thing we don't want.

I'm like, fuck, hello.. I'm having a production problem here that needs fixing.. u want me to try it out on my own first to learn? Dick head!

Bitch!

Some of you may have seen my yahoo messenger status saying "yes, I admit, I am with a client. And most of the folks I work with are idiots!"... It is utterly true!

Writing about all this will take eons. I'll probably take it slow over the next few posts to explain why I feel that way.

Firstly, the folks who I work with are all ego-seeking incompetent folks. They somehow see us young blood who actually "do work" as threatening their position. Like this one woman who I work with who handles Operations and Infrastructure. She was so insecure with a lot of the work that I was doing because I was "go go go" whereas she was "let's take it slow" that she wrote this nasty email to me:

"
Please cut down your number of emails on HK. I understand that you are trying to push the project along, but you need to realize that no one has come to us in the beginning if the May time frame is ok for us to commit. You know this date now is quite impossible to meet, based on the network and Mssp lead time requirement. We are trying to work out when we can commit to a more realistic date by working it out with xxx. It seemed to become my monkey now, so just let me and xxx work on this with the facility people. By sending numerous emails at thi frequency will not help a DAM thing"

I'm like, what the.. it's YOUR fault that things are delayed, and now she's tai-chi-ing things away?

BITCH