Or in other words: get out of my way so I can get better at something I care about.

I know some people back home are wondering what I’ve been doing in Taiwan for the past month so I thought I’d spend sometime capturing it now.

My godmother (mom’s older sister) and my cousin (godmother’s son who we’ll call Jacob), own a 便當, or fast food, restaurant. The menu is mostly traditional home cooked type of stuff, but they also sell fried rice, fried mi-fun, fried-noodles, and other rice/noodle plates. Most of the orders are to-go and packed in lunch boxes.

Since I live at my godmother’s place, Jacob typically wakes me up @ 8:30 in the morning to go to work. We hop on his scooter and we get to the store by 9. From 9 till about 11, I’m washing and cutting all sorts of vegetables such as bitter melon, cabbage, bok choy, carrots, winter melons, pumpkins, bean sprouts, etc. I’m also making sure that the tables are clean, that the tables have utensils, and that the floor is swept. Around 11, I start prepping the lunch boxes. I start by packing the soup, usually 32 to 36 containers. Then I start prepping the lunch boxes by filling them up with rice and a hard boiled egg. Around 11:15, the madness starts as I help fill the lunch orders: three vegetables, one meat per order. I’m also taking orders from customers who eat in.

On a really busy day, I help pack about 40 lunch boxes during rush hour which lasts for about an hour and a half. During rush hour, I also bus the tables and restock the rice, plates, lunch boxes, etc. I also tend the “cash register”, which is basically three buckets of coins and bills. Next to taking orders from a customer with a thick Taiwanese accent, making change is the hardest thing to do because of my unfamiliarity with how much things cost and the NTD currency. A couple of times, I’ve given more back in change than I’m supposed to. Thankfully I can’t be fired from this job.

Around 2:30, we head back home and take a break. After a much needed shower and nap, we’re back at the store @ 6 for the night shift. The night shift is never as busy as the day shift. Sometimes I wonder why the store is even open at night. We close shop at 8. It takes us about an hour to wipe everything down, wash all the things that need to be washed, and restock the supplies. Unless family is over, like when Big Uncle comes over sometimes for dinner, we’re usually out of there by 9:15.

I’m usually at the store 4-5 days out of the week. Why do I go? Well, first, it gives me something to do. There’s only so much shopping, eating, and relaxing to do in Taiwan. Second, it gives me an opportunity to practice Chinese, not just with my godmother and Jacob, but with customers, some of who are entertaining folks. Third, talking to my godmother also gives me a chance to hear stories about my mom’s childhood and other memories my godmother has about the old days, all of which is golden. My cousin, who is pretty much the older brother that I’ve never had, also has a bunch of stories to tell, mostly of family gossip and sage words on life. And fourth, having worked in restaurants before, and having both my dad and grandpa worked in the restaurant business all their lives, I know how tough restaurant work is. Having an extra set of hands lessens the burden for my godmother and Jacob, a temporary relief from their tiring daily grind. I don’t collect a salary, just lunch and dinner and the sense of satisfaction of putting in a hard days worth of work.

I’ve got some lessons learned from this internship at the restaurant, but I need to go find those z’s. Thankfully I’m only at the store for a couple of hours tomorrow. I leave you with my script for dealing with customers.

來！在這裡吃還是帶走？什麼菜？什麼肉? 75! 謝謝你，再見！

Come! Eat here or to go? What vegetable? What meat? 75 dollars! Thank you, bye bye!

Needless to say, I liked the movie and so should you. There is at least one subject matter in the film, which touches on everything from family values, government, and work place issues, that everyone can relate to. I’m too tired to construct anymore sentences  so I embedded a clip of the movie below. Looks like youtube has 13 more clips which could very well be the entire movie. Enjoy please!

For 2010, it all depends on what happens in the next three months. My admission decisions to Smith, Owen, and Broad will basically determine which fork in the road I take, business school or what-next. I know which path I want to take, but it’s not up to me once my apps are submitted.

The common thread between both path is that they’re both uncertain, even the business school path. Although I know in general what to expect, there’s still a lot of unknowns. What is of greater concern is what happens if I don’t get into bschool this year. I still haven’t figured out a solid plan B yet. I tell myself, “One thing at a time. Get through your essays and interviews first, then wait for your decisions, then figure out what to do next”. Sound self-advice, but I want to be ahead of the game here because I dislike sitting idle when it comes to my career.

All I can say for certain is that the next two to three months will be very antsy times. I’m going to try and take my mind off of what might happen by throwing myself at mt biking, reading, traveling and maybe rock climbing/mountaineering.

Now that I’ve piqued your interest, this is what a typical day is like out here.

4:45 – Yes! 30 more minutes of sleep
5:15 – Alarm goes off. Sigh. Snoooze.
5:20 – Ok…. better get up. Get dressed, pack up, make breakfast (microwaveable frozen breakfast sandwich or hot pocket).
5:45 – Wait for Ng in the lobby and take off for YPG.
7:00 – Listen to “Make it Rain” for the 100th time on Ng’s “gangsa” CD. Get to YPG. Nap in the car for ten minutes.
7:30 – Safety briefing, “Don’t touch the wildlife. Don’t speed. Don’t pick up shiny objects…. ”

From 7:30 till about 18:00, I do the following things:

- Use the porta potty
- Hydrate
- Eat
- Code
- Stare
- Work on essays
- Walk around
- Watch the “fireworks show”
- Talk about school/Alabama/work/vacation/eating
- Learn about things I’ll forget
- Oil dry skin
- Look for wild life (snakes, giant ants, road runners, coyotes, hawks, etc)
- Surf the net
- Incessantly check my email and worry about the work that remains back at home
- Put on my jacket
- Take off my jacket

18:00 – Drive home. Try to answer toughest question of the day, “What’s for dinner?”
19:15 – Eat dinner. Go to Target or Wal-Mart if supplies are low.
20:30 – Get back to hotel room. Call TL. Clean up.
23:00 – Call TL again. Fall asleep with TL on the other line.

I’m supposed to “lead” a team of two out here while I’m out here. It’s tough work trying to make these guys eat every two hours so they won’t get bored but someone has to do it. We actually have a real job to do out here and all joking aside, it’s been a good experience so far. I’m trying to make the most out of my time here since this is probably the last time I’m EVER coming out to Yuma.

For the rest of the month, I’m going to be out in beautfiul Yuma Arizona where the sun always shines and the desert sand is smoking hot. I’m not sure what I’m doing out here other than if I didn’t come out here, I might not have a job for the rest of the year. That doesn’t sound good but it’s the reality of an economy that has supposedly hit rock bottom. The days are going to be long but at least the work seems easy from what I’ve gathered. Crossing my fingers that things stay this way, especially the weather which has been surprisingly cool.

School

I finished the first and third essays for Smith over the weekend and sent it off to Tiff for review. The first essay is the goals essay and is applicable to all the schools. The third essay is the optional essay and again, it is applicable to all the schools. Thumbs up to me for getting that first draft done. Hopefully Tiff doesn’t rip the essays to shreds. I’m also having my resume reviewed by TL who has already redlined the hell out of it.

Some of the better guides that I have used to help me with my essays include: Montauk’s Big Book, Mba Game Plan, and The Techie’s MBA Guide. If you only want to buy one book, get the big book. It is the encyclopedia britanica of the mba guides.  MBA Gameplan is good too. It’s got a really good guide for the Top 30 schools that’s worth a look if you need todo a prelim run down on schools. The techie’s guide for mba is written by the people from www.accepted.com. It’s OK. It walks through a fictional engagement between an Indian technologist who is working with an accepted.com admission consutant. I found most of the material applicable to my case, but since I can’t relate to the fictional character, some of the value is not lost.

On the GMAT side of things, I spent an hour with a MGmat tutor on Saturday going over strategies, assessing my practice test results, and doing some problems to illustrate some review concepts. One thing that I thought was interesting was what the tutor said after he asked me why I was taking the test again. I gave him my reasons and he said “fair enough, but realize that the GMAT is just one data point. if you can, focus on essays because those are just as important if not more so”. he talked to me about his experience and how even though he got a 770, he got rejected by the schools that he applied to last year. Food for thought. I’m certainly regurgitating and chewing it again.

On a work related note… minus McCombs, I got all my recommendation provider forms sent out. I’ll be putting together a briefing that I’ve put off for a while for my recommenders to help them out with the forms. My manager also told us that he highly recommends taking vacation before the year ends because of the reason I sort of alluded to above, but also because we’re supposed to be crazy busy starting next year. I’m going to take his recommendation and plan some school visits as well as taking the last couple of weeks of the year off. Owen and Broad have “preview weekends” in November that I’m planning on going to. Similarly, Smith has a couple of class visits/info sessions that I’m thinking about as well, though they’re in the middle of the week so TBD. I looked over the itinerary for the preview weekends @ Owen and Broad and it looks packed, especially Owen’s plan. For Owen, we can also schedule an evaluative interview, though I’m not sure I’m ready for one yet. It seems like there’s a lot of value that can be extracted from these school visits and @ the very least, I’ll be able to notch East Lansing, Nashville, and College Park/DC on my travel belt.

OK time for bed. Even though it’s PST here, we’re working EST hours so i’m way past my bedtime. Booo. At least we get two free beers from the hotel everyday to comfort us after a long day in the sandbox.

Work

I have to get out of the office. One of the most frustrating parts of being a software engineer is inheriting a module and having to make enhancements to it. The problem is that, like the dungeons from the Prince of Persia, there are numerous trap doors and dead ends waiting to get you. You think you got it right, but it comes back from testing as FAILED. And it’s always FAILED in capital letters. The testers like to make sure that you know you FAILED by screaming at you in the SPR. Worse yet is when the feature FAILS during a demo and you look through the code to find out that it FAILED because it went through a code path you didn’t even know it could go through. And then the boss gives you a disapproving look to top it off.

On the bright side, I’ll be traveling next week and will be gone till the end of the month. This will be short but needed respite from sitting in front of the monitor and hacking away at code. Of course, in the back of my head, I know that I have a bunch of crap to do once I get back, plus who knows what else is going to be broken while I’m gone. Hopefully I won’t find my replacement sitting in my cube when I get back.

School

I started with my Smith essays. There are three essays, two required, one optional. The first essay is the standard goals essay. The second is a choice between writing about what I would do if I didn’t have to work or what company I would want to lead. The optional third essay gives me the chance to explain why I’m worthy and that the school doesn’t need to worry about me dragging the rest of the class down.

I’ve gone through about twenty different iterations of the first paragraph for the first essay. The difficult part is finding the write structure. I know the story I want to tell, but I haven’t found a good way of telling it. I’ve tried outlining, brainstorming, writing different parts of the essay. Nothing has worked yet, but at least I know that once I have the structure figured out, it can be applied to the other four goals essay, modified of course. I’m looking forward to writing the second and third essay. I really appreciate the schools that have essays that allow us to be a little more creative. The third essay hopefully will be applicable to all five schools.

On the GMAT end, I’m hooking up with a MGmat tutor on Saturday to go over a game plan for the next test. That’s right, I bit the bullet and I’m getting a tutor. I really didn’t want to but Tiff highly suggested that I do because I need to see the test in a new way. The first meeting is going to be an hour and we’ll see where we go from there. Usually the third movie of a movie series is the best, unless you’re talking about Godfather. Here’s to a better performance than Sofia Coppalla in Godfather 3.

As you can see, there’s something to look forward to every three hours. Most notable is the walk, something that was missing from my previous schedule. The addition of the walk has made a big difference. It’s like the Pong breaks we use to take around 3-4 back in the good ol’ days of Pedro. It helped alleviate the “stress” of being cooped up in our offices and the strain of staring at our monitors like zombies.

Apparently I’m not the only one that has discovered the walk. The walk I go on is on a park like jogging trail that the company built along the perimeter of our campus. People take full advantage of this nice perq, especially in the afternoon. There hasn’t been a time where I don’t run into somebody whose out there as well to escape the doldrums of work. The walk is also the only time you can ask another guy if he wants to go walking without it sounding gay.

BBall (NBA) – I can’t take it anymore. I can’t remember a season that has given me more grief than this one. Someone on the radio said it best when he described that Lakers as being contagious to prosperity. Against a good team, no lead is safe. Against a team without its superstars (aka the Rockets), a lead is supposed to be safe.  With the Lakers, no lead is EVER safe. I’m on the edge of my seat the entire game. I guess that’s supposed to make it “exciting and fun”, but one can only ride Goliath so many times before puking.

Van Gundy’s face said it all after LBJ knocked down the game winning 3. What do you do? It was nothing but Epic.

Work – My current task has me localizing our applications. This is by far the most tedious and painful task I’ve worked on since joining this group, although it’s a lot better than writing user stories. But still, there’s little joy to be found when your SPR fails because the word “Login” can’t be translated on Google Translate. Would it make any sense to translate it as “Log in”? The users going to be like, “WTF is this ‘inside the tree’ button?!?!”. As it is with most of my SPRs, FAILED, lol.

Coffee – I stopped drinking coffee this week because I’ve been having PVC. Diagnosing myself by doing a google search isn’t the most ideal thing, but this has happened before and the treatment was to cut back on the caffeine. I’m also pretty sure that it’s the excess caffeine that caused the PVC because when I was drinking coffee, I had been drinking two cups of coffee + tea + diet coke which is a wee bit more than the recommened allowed daily intake. Suprisingly, I wasn’t anymore amped than normal and I was sleeping well. The PVC has gone away and I’ll probably jump back into brewing some joe next week. Mmmm, coffee!

GMAT – absolutely disheartening when there are no tangible signs of improvement. I feel like my foundation knowledge is a lot stronger, yet I’m not able to convert on the MGMAT CAT tests. I’ve got about 5 weeks to go so it’s getting close to show time. I’ll start taking the GMAC tests soon as those are supposed to be a more realistic gauge of the real thing.