The Corporate World

I don't think I'm made out for the corporate world. I think I smile too often, and make sarcastic comments too often. I don't think that those sorts of things are appreciated in the corporate world. Or Monty Python references.

For example, yesterday I was attending a workshop on corporate finance. This is essentially how to read an end-of-year report from a company. So at first I thought this was interesting, but by the time we got to liabilities and the differences between those and just regular debt and expense and another fancy word I can't remember, I was somewhat bored. And as I drifted off to daydream-land, what did I think of but that I was in a large vessel, maybe a galleon, floating out of the window of the office building into a bright new world...as I drew said ship in the margins of my notebook, I began to hear a humming behind me, and then lyrics came unbidden: It's fun to charter an accountant, and sail the wide accountancy... I included these lovely and famous words in with my doodle and showed it to a neighboring intern. He didn't get it, despite his being British. I thought that a pity and told him as such, and demanded he come watch Meaning of Life at some point in time to redeem himself. He agreed to do so. And let's just say the person giving the talk on accounting was not particularly amused. I felt bad for being rude and felt that perhaps I have difficulty staying focused whenever the word 'finance' shows up, and thus one might be able to comprehend my feelings of inadequacy regarding the corporate world.

"But how is work?" you might ask. This week was the first official week of work, and I found myself in three very different situations. One was that I had to help call companies in Xiamen, Fujian in Southern China to schedule interviews. I prepared my script, I said things very clearly, and then the receptionist replied very quickly with things I couldn't understand because of their speed and her accent. I had to give that front up. In addition I tried to do reading put out by the Xiamen government on various aspects of the city and its development, and discovered that I didn't know half the words used. So, in short, situation one is my Chinese is inadequate.

Right now my supervisor is out of town, and so I have been delegated to another team to do work, hence calling people. When that didn't work, they ran out of things for me to do. So I didn't have any work, and sat around wasting time or helping my friends on projects they were assigned in a completely different department. Situation two: boredom.

Today I encountered situation three. Upon emailing my supervisor and asking for work, he told me that there was some confusion about a certain turnout of one of the models, and so told me to figure out what reasoning might be behind that. Essentially I had to find jobs for 2-5 million migrants to Shanghai within the next few years. Unofficially I figured out that half of them would need to be construction workers to build houses for themselves and the other half would be sex workers because that's what happens sometimes, but since I couldn't tell my boss that half of them would be whores I made some pretty charts and wrote up a page on how there would likely be jobs and some logical reasonings that rural GDP wouldn't change. It's all related, though not obviously so from my short explanation. And I think it might be classified, so to disclose more information than this non-information might cost me and anyone who reads this blog their life. So the only real way to solve the question is modelling, which is exactly how we got to the question in the first place, and yet I was supposed to work out a solution. I think this was a test to see what I could get done on a near-impossible task and see how good my problem-solving skills are. Generally speaking, however, I enjoyed thinking in work today, no matter how difficult the task, and think that if this will constitute my summer (rather than either of the other situations) I will be most pleased.

In other work-related news I go to Xiamen on Monday for a business trip. A car is going to pick me up at the office to drive me to the airport and they're putting me up in a 5* hotel. I'm sure I'll have all sorts of news about that next week.

Otherwise to close up I'm putting the permalinks to all my Australia photos for those of you without facebook access:
Sydney
Manly
Katoomba
Canberra and Melbourne
Fraser Island
Brisbane

I'll be putting pictures from Shanghai up soon enough! Hopefully I will post again before the weekend is up, because I've got lots to share! Also, please tell me if something isn't working well in the blog, as though I can post no problem, the Chinese government has blocked my access to view the blog, and so I have to go through a proxy and it is a pain in the neck, so I won't check that things are working very often.