Jobun the Blogger

Last weekend I watched the Wachoswki Brothers’ adaptation of Alan Moore’s – V for Vendetta (the movie), directed by James McTeigue on DVD. I have never read or even knowing that the movie was based on the original graphic novel. The movie delivers a moral story that a dictatorship will not last longer, because hatred, revenge, and rebellion always come in between. Who on earth could bare to live in a country where racial and sexual discriminations were in place in such a way to control people (although I know some countries that are still having problems with racial & sexual discriminations issue), and even worst privacy abuses. Imagine our real life was like in a Big Brother TV where our every conversation was being taped, and our every movement was being monitored.

The baseline of the movie is about political issue and human right crisis, and I was expecting less action-like movie. But the last part of the movie where they showed the slow-motion fight scene has amazed me (although for some viewers that scene was the lamest part of the movie). The matrix-like fight scene never bores me.

Ever since I started working with this company, I have seen a lot of unique behaviours of people. Although sometimes I found them funny behaviours, but they were also insulting ones.

Dealing with customers face-to-face had never been in my agenda in my previous working experience. My past roles were always behind-the-scene person who never dealt or even never want to deal with customers directly. This time, I can’t seem to get away with it, since I was being promoted and took over a team leader position. It’s good to be promoted, but it also requires mentality changes. For a non native English tongue like myself, I have found it really challenging. Especially dealing with difficult customers who like to nag/push/whinge/yell and even worst insulting. To avoid any depressions from my side, I always put these kind of customers in the last queue process. The more they whinge, the more likely I put them in the last queue unless the problems that they are currently experiencing, are very urgent and require immediate attentions.

A simple question that always comes into my mind is that ‘are we really that bad in serving customers?’ or ‘is it purely the customers’ behaviour itself?’.

For anybody out there who wants to share the same experience, and may want to contribute advices or opinions or even stories, I will greatly appreciate it and very much welcome.

I have never fell so stupid in my whole life until what happened yesterday at the office. The company that I work for has almost 80 webservers everywhere around the world, and more than 20 webserver machines in Melbourne, Australia. I mostly responsible for those servers which are located in Melbourne.
Since the company launching a new product which is like a wizard of website builder, my life in the office has never been so relax. Lots of customers rang up, and asking hell lot of questions about the new product, and purchased the product via the telephone. The thing about this product was that, we didn’t have a facility to create the users’ account automatically, everything must be done through manual inputs. Yes, I know, it is pain in the butt to do those manual entries.

Apparently, since my job description is a developer working for Innovative Department, I don’t have to do all those data entries. We have a department that does those data entries. Well, here is the story.

One of the guys from that department came to me asking for my help to create him a system that can automate all the data entries, and so I agreed. It took me half a day to develop the system to go live in production. Not long after the system went live, the same guy came back to tell me that another problem had occured. The problem seemed to be from the mail server, he claimed that the mail server stop functioniong ever since I put the system to live, and so I agreed again to look into the problem.

As a software developer, I usually have a lot of windows and servers admin panel opened. Because of this bad habit, the stupidity began. Let’s assume that the server which had the problem is called .37 server, and the server which had no problem is called .12 server. Instead of working on .37, I unknowingly worked on .12, and got my ass on this server. Because of working on a wrong server, everything looked slightly different, and some configurations were missing. My head was sweating because there were quite few customers in that server, and I screwed the server up (so I thought). In my head, I didn’t think of solutions about how to fix the problem anymore, but to think about how to talk to our customers that we screwed up the server, and apologise to them. We were worried to death that day.

Suddenly, I began to realise something was different about .12 server. How come it didn’t have the usual structure like any other servers, and so I checked the IP address of this server. Realising that we were working on the wrong server, made us looked like an idiot. I just laughed to myself so loud that I actually fell for my own stupidity and the bad habit I had.

I got a moral lesson from this experience that I should look before I do. What a day…what a day!

Another friend of mine is leaving Australia for good. It is sad to think that we will hardly see each other again, but we must support her choice of leaving Australia to seek a better career and future in her homeland. Considering that she might be really busy preparing and packing her things before leaving Australia, we decided to have an early farewell dinner in a Thai restaurant called Thai Taste located on Johnston St, Collingwood. We had such a great time together, and I wish you good luck, and all the best for whatever you do or want to do.

P.S: Thanks again for the circus tickets. We really had fun there, didn’t we?

Friday, 04th August 2006

Happy Bday 29th for Libun. Schedule for dinner – Korean Hometown (Oakleigh). Ordered meals: Korean Special Bday Fried Noodles, Chicken Bulgogi, Pork Bulgogi, Seafood Eun-Tang (taste like kimchi stew but full of seafoods) and lots of Korean side dishes.

As for dessert we had two kinds of bday cakes bought from David Jones. Cookies & Cream with Chocollate Topping, and Strawberry Cheese Cake.

Saturday, 05th August 2006

We booked a restaurant called KoKo, a fine dining restaurant at Crown Casino. The best thing about eating at this restaurant was that we got a complementary vallet parking at Crown Casino. Sound great, hey! The interior of the restaurant was so stunning. We ordered a lunch set C, we decided not to choose the teppanyaki lunch set, considering that we did not really like teppanyaki that much. I wasn’t sure what the others ordered for their lunch set, but all of them was delicious. As for me and lala, we ordered Hotate Misoyaki (freshly baked scallops with miso cream…very very mouth watering entree), and Namagaki (fresh oysters served with ponzu dipping sauce) as the entrees. I loved Hotate Misoyaki, but lala loved the Namagaki instead (because of their freshness I guess). For the main courses, we both ordered Sushi & Sashimi Platter. Again, very delicious.

Hotate misoyaki	Namagaki	Sushi & Sashimi Platter

Finally, we had green tea ice creams for the dessert. Sorry, I don’t have the photo, but you can imagine what a regular green tea ice cream looks like.

Not long after having lunch, we went down one cafe bar called Cervo, still at Crown Casino. I was feeling hungry, because it wasn’t a big lunch for me. So I ordered Bruschetta (toasted crusty loaf with dice italian tomatoes, with spanish onion, fresh basil and black pepper powder), and a flat white coffee.

As for dinner, again we headed down to another Japanese restaurant at Lonsdale st called Izakaya Chuji. I ordered Katsudon, Sukiyaki, and YuKe (raw beef). What a day!

Saturday, 29th July 2006

To begin with, I have started my liking to Williamstown (Melbourne) ever since we had those crepes in Breizoz. There is one restaurant called Sam’s Boat Shed in Williamstown located on 3 Syme Street. We went there for having a late dinner, because we were still stuffed with those meals we had in a Malaysian resto in South Yarra (Bakut Teh, Assam Laksa, and Oriental Pork with Eggs)

Anyway, I am not gonna talk about the foods we ate at the Malay resto, but the Sam’s Boat’s Foods instead. The resto is located near the Williamstown beach, close to the dock where people parks their boats or I can simply say it is next to the Quest Williamstown Hotel/Accommodation.

The resto is pretty much looks like a hut from the outside, and the inside interior/design is more like being in a boat. There is a mini bar right in the middle together with the cash register.

Well, enough with the brief description of the place itself. Now let’s talk about the foods we had in there.

As for the entrees, we had a mouth-watering Prawn Bruchettas (toasted garlic bread with tiger prawns on top),

and tasty Potatoe Skins (freshly baked potatoe skins with melted cheese and crispy bacon plus sour cream on top).

There were fully-loaded entrees, I must admit. My stomach was already half-full, and yet the main course hadn’t turned up. Luckily our wood-fire smoked salmon pizza was consider small. We managed to finish it all (with a little struggle though).

Planning to have an apple strudle for our dessert earlier, but no way – we couldn’t take it anymore. So we cancelled our dessert and I ordered a red-wine by the glass instead.