I Sat On A BUS.

“To see the world in a grain of sand………..”

Here’s A Useful Thing To Do When All You Can Do Is Sit…

Ride a loop in a public bus.

As in, my answer to what to do if there’s not much else you can do cos you’re sick but not like, hospital or bed-ridden sick…. Learn a new bus route. I mean, I couldn’t even write, last couple posts, so I decided to go up to each driver of the different buses in the terminal and ask if they stopped along the way at any of the places I wanted to go (having heard preliminarily that nothing goes). I got various responses ranging from: a) “HAAA? NONO No go No go. <switch back to Cantonese> No bus from here has that stop on their route LAH.” b) Stoney S.T.A.R.E. <crickets chirping><sea of straight-faced locals continues to board all around you> (Erm.. erm… ok ok never mind <beat fast retreat before he drives off with me still on the bus>) c) “Hmm? You are sitting, right?”

Pop quiz for you guys: Which bus driver response is best ah?

(This is from, “Do you know the time?” As in, when you ask a question like “Do you know the time now”, you can get as an answer a) “yes” or b) “it’s 9.03am, this is not the bus route you want, and you have 10 seconds to clear out before I drive away with you still on board.” Both are working answers, only one is useful. (No, scratch that, answer a – “yes” also useful. For lighting a freaking fire up your butt to work harder. You see ah, answer b gives you everything you need. You need to buy the grouchy bus driver coffee haha. But once you realise you are getting answer a, you will maybe go and find Doraemon HKD 10 watch from 7-11 to take with you on the bus so you don’t need to keep asking this person.)

Welcome to the World of What Happens When Aileen Has Too Much Caffeine. O-or, in other words, FIRST CUPPA IN ALMOST A WEEK, BABY!!!

So anyway, armed with whole grain bread (in case I get hungry and can’t find something that won’t give me cramps) and unable to turn an elegant phrase, knowing it’ll blow over eventually but feeling like this is such a waste of space and time it SUCKS, I Sat On A BUS. Because unnecessary waste kinda really bothers me. Being sick is a waste of productive time. Excess food that may go bad is a waste. So I need to find a way for it not to be a waste. Find someone who needs it, to give it to. Because which would you rather have, rotten excess food or a friend?

Took me more than a decade living here before I recently started exploring bus and train routes. (And yes, I have Uber. Never used it because just so happened they’ve never been available where I needed them and the premium sometimes I find a bit much.) For me navigating public transport is this whole new very useful skill. HOLD that thought and revisit when you reach the asterisk at bottom of the post. And yeah, yeah, do the “L” on forehead thing. You have no idea how many things I find so new to me, and now I’m almost 40.

So anyway I took a Hong Kong bus all the way round! <bows> #feelsocan #MissSuaKuComesToCentral. Next stop: Starbucks. Barista. See, I never had one-a those jobs that most people did while they were schooling – my parents wanted me to study. And do all the extra curriculars. The rule was, I get the ECA I want after I do the one they want. This means….. LOTS of ECA 😀 (Obviously, like many typical children, you feel the need to veer sharply away from what your parents think. Doesn’t matter what it is. It’s Newton’s Law of Parenting: Even If Something Makes Perfect Sense And The Kid Knows It, The Kid Shalt Vigorously Opposeth It Because It Is The View Of – Yuck – A. Parent.)

How this makes post is There Are No Small Lessons (Or Small Work). Only Small People.

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ps: ** One thing I learned from being in all those bank mergers: the knowledge you gain is yours. And you can take it with you. No one can take away skills you acquire, make you unlearn knowledge you gained, or affect the character you choose to develop. Next time you leave a place, don’t take the stationery, take the lessons. Those are yours – to serve your next Boss better.

pic from dailymail.co.uk

May it not be an evil one, dears 😀

No skill is useless, no job beneath you, and there is always something to pick up. The day I learned that the wife of someone I know of (who is really successful today) once took a job during college clearing the garbage in the cafeteria was the day my impression of her skyrocketed. (Aha! Some of you already know who she is! Especially if you’re Malaysian :D)

My ex-colleagues one of the places I worked used to affectionately joke about how the big boss of that particular dealing room who was an older guy would wander out of his office,deep in a document he was reading, look up and see his secretary not there, and without batting an eyelid proceed to the photocopy room to do his own copying rather than have to wait for her to get back. I think one reason he did that was so he would always know how to work a photocopy machine, no matter how new-fangled they got 😀 (Have you seen how hi-tech some machines that used to do simple tasks are nowadays? Look at the smart phone. It’s uh, not a phone. It’s Everything Else That Btw Also Can Be Used As A Phone.)

I hated my accounting degree, I felt my parents forced me into that field and I simply couldn’t see myself an accountant or auditor for the rest of my life. But the audit skills would save my back countless times when I had to trace trades. (Oh, and especially if you hate something, make sure you learn it extra quick, do it extra well – and then RUNNNNNN!!! 😀 Because if you do it slipshod you may have to go back and spend even more time on it. And remember, you hated doing it first time round. That once almost happened to me. I will never forget, as an undergrad, how I felt when I (wrongly) thought I failed a most-hated core paper and would have to repeat it.) Back then I obviously never heard of Investment Product Pricing and Execution and never knew of all these wonderful Lego-y building of complicated derivatives via simple derivatives which eventually took up the large bulk of my working life and which I loved.

My first gofer bank job, because of said accounting degree, was to print out all the financial statements of the gadzillion listed companies on Bloomberg, then input them into a probability default calculator that has since been bought by the rating agency Moodys. Supposedly there are accounting items you have to translate into the financial statement format Bloomberg’s input screen uses, but mostly it’s very, very boring grunt work that no one else wants. It’s whole sheaves and sheaves of financial statements that you have to slowly key in. And because of inconsistent formatting and potential Garbage In Garbage Out to blindly importing everything into the calculators’ database, you can’t simply extract it, it has to be done manually. Do it happily, it’s not even clearing the garbage in the cafeteria in front of your college friends, and it really comes in useful after all.

The bosses then let me have all the superchim research papers behind the aforementioned probability default calculator. Because of my “lowly” accounting degree I didn’t have the skills to understand all the engineering math easily, but I came back to the empty office to read – a half a page a night was all I could manage to understand, sometimes – and j-ust barely enough to be able to learn a wealth of things when I was allowed to be a fly on the wall at meetings. Slowly, what the quants said in meetings started to make sense. It eventually became enough to be able to speak intelligently about the structure of CDOs or Asset-Backed Commercial Papers at future job interviews after maybe couple years. (NO non-disclosures violated hor.) So, don’t waste the gofer work 🙂

Now back to “bus skills”. Know why they’re more important than you think? Because someday you are frantic not to be late to pick your child from school after a meeting runs late and there will be no cabs but bus after bus will pull in and out of the stop near where you are frantically waving your arms up and down in an effort to fly to your child and you will be unable to procure that red and white automobile with comforting red “vacant” light in the windscreen. And then you will  look up at the sign in the bus stop and hopefully think: Hey. I know that route from that time 2 years ago when I sat the Chi Fu-Central-Aberdeen loop.

Good weekend, dears 🙂