- Reservist-
The new Downtown Line has really made it extremely convenient for me to travel from my home to the airbase in Changi, what used to take me slightly over 2 hours has now been reduced to a 90 minutes journey. The traveling is now better but doing Guard Duty hasn't really gotten any less dull, especially now that the ICTs have to do sentry duty.
When the sergeant presented us with the Duty list, I felt my soul left my body, that rush of pure sian-ness to find out I had to do three 6 hour duties wearing a vest and carrying a rifle while standing under the Sun just completely killed my mood. Luckily, that was only for the first mount, the next 2 mounts after were slightly better, but still far from an enjoyable experience.
I actually felt super old, despite being one of the youngest in the ICT group, when I found out that the current active Platoon Commander was actually the same age as my younger sister. It was great to be under him though, because he allowed the ICTs to just book out of camp whenever we were done with our duty, so that meant we could just go out and have dinner or for the lucky ones who live nearby, just go back home and sleep the night away in the comforts of their own bed and air-con room and then return the next day, granted they didn't have any night shift that is.
For my reservist, I actually interacted more with the active solider than I did with the other ICTs, so little that in fact, some of them don't even recognise me when they book in at night to do their duty, one of them looked at me and went...
"You are a ICT? Why hadn't I seen you before?"
He is like the friendlier one, the rest just kinda ignores me when they see me and I also do the same. When a group chat was formed on Whatsapp, everyone was pretty active in it, except me and my friend. When I actually asked a legitimate question in the Whatsapp Group, none of them bothered to reply, there wasn't any..
"I'm not sure leh, must ask Sergeant"
"Sorry bro, can't help you there, also not sure"
I just hope for my next reservist call up, I will be grouped up with a different bunch of people.
Oh, and I also managed to get like some Excellence Award thing, so that was great. It was really just the ICT sergeant pulling his strings to grant me that reward, so it wasn't so much an Excellence Award for me, but more of a Connections Award.
-End of Reservist Stuff-
Recently, I went to apply for more job openings after my reservist and was able to score 2 job interviews, both of which I had attended last week.
Earning a standard fixed pay every single month, working overtime, not being paid enough to justify the amount of effort I have put into the project and being stuck in a monotonous cycle of working in a cubicle is honestly a very depressing thought. That is why I decided to actually be more open minded and started applying for Sales Designer positions, despite what I may have said about it in the past.
On Tuesday, I was actually an hour early for my first interview, and instead of actually going for the interview an hour early and show the boss I am someone who arrives early and never late, I just went to the toilet and attempted to take a long dump, contemplating about life as I stared at my bag that was hanging from the hook on the toilet door. When I realize there was nothing coming out of my bowels no matter how hard I squeezed, I left the toilet and decided to take a walk around Fair Price for a while before giving up and just headed straight for the Design Firm.
The first thing I noticed as I entered the design firm was that almost all the employees working there were girls, there was only one male worker and he was seated all the way at the back of the office area busy talking on the phone with who I assume are contractors.
I walked up to the girl that was at the front desk of the office space and told her I was here for the job interview, she grabs the necessary forms that was required for me to fill up, led me back to the showroom area where I had come from and told me to fill up the form. I struggled a little with some parts of the form, such as my family member's birth date, my education information, my past work experience etc, and it took me a whopping 15 minutes to actually complete the form, it takes me about half an hour to complete an exam paper on average, so this really took a while. I did my best to complete what I could and passed it back to the same girl, then I went back to the showroom area and just waited till the boss was done talking on his phone.
The boss came across as a little unfriendly, he wasn't rude but he just didn't really make the effort to appear welcoming, which was what happened back at the old design firm I worked at with all the other senior designers, they weren't unfriendly, but they just didn't make an effort to at least come across as an inviting bunch, which made me feel like an outsider for the 3 whole weeks I was working with them. Anyways, when the boss came up to me, he briefly introduced himself and at one point, I thought he was coming in for a handshake, but it turns out, he was actually pointing me towards the direction he wanted us to go for the interview, which was in the direction of another table at the showroom, so I grabbed my bag and dragged it along with me, as I was about to lay it down on that other table, he goes....
"No, we are going out."
He leads me to the Ya Kun Coffeeshop at the other end of the mall and we had a brief conversation as we made our way across the mall, the whole time as he was talking to me and asking me what I had been working as prior to applying for this job, I noticed that he was struggling to pull his pants up, but not enough because for the entire journey, I was just staring at his butt crack as I was following his lead from behind. It's not just his pants that were low, even his underwear was worn low, so that ass crack of his was very very prominent that it just stopped being a tease, it's almost as if he's wearing it that low on purpose because it's trendy or something.
When we finally got to the coffeeshop, he begins introducing to me the way his company works, and as someone who has had some experience as a sales designer before, I sort of knew how the whole thing works, I never actually told him I was a sales designer before because then I will have to tell him that I only lasted for 3 weeks and that would probably lower my chances of getting hired by him, all I wanted to know from him mainly was how much commission I will get, what my basic pay would be like, and how many days in a week I had to work, and also if I had to attend those exhibition, which I really hate.
So here is what he offered...
1. The commission will be 50% of the total profit made.
This is actually quite high, compared to the other companies I have visited in the past.
What a lot of people don't understand though is that when the designer gets 50% commission, they are only getting 50% of the profit and not the overall cost of a project, that means if a project cost the client $10,000, the profit margin would be around 20% of that, which is about $2000, split that in half and that would mean the designer would get $1000 commission for that project.
In order to get a commission that would match the current salary as I am drawing from my Dad, I would either have to close three $10,000 projects or one $30,000 project every month.
Now this really sucks because that means my earnings will purely be relying on commission, with the other companies I had interviewed at, they would offer me at least $1,200 - $1,500 basic pay, of course with a much lower commission, but I would honestly prefer basic and lower commission than having no basic at all, basic is really important for the first few months for Sales Designers because there will literally be $0 in commission during the first few months, a project takes anywhere between 3 weeks to 3 months to complete and handover, maybe even longer depending on the scale of it, and it will take even longer before the commission actually becomes substantial, having zero basic means I will essentially be eating grass for the first few months.
Well, maybe I won't be eating grass, I do have a substantial amount of earnings from working for my Dad, but I probably won't be able to get as much Starbucks, Bubble Tea and Awfully Chocolate cake as I would like.
3. I have to pay a $50 admin fee to the company for every project closed successfully.
As if not having a basic pay and taking 50% of the profit isn't enough, there's an additional $50 admin fee that needs to be paid to the company, I really don't understand this part at all. Instead of rewarding the workers for closing a project successfully, like the previous company I worked at where they actually reward the workers with an extra $800 for every project deal made, they are making the designers pay.
4. There isn't a need to attend any exhibition.
Awesome. I really hated standing outside the Booth and pulling customers in, it's annoying when people do that to me, so I can only imagine how annoying it must be for the customers who are just trying to walk through the Exhibition Hall constantly getting harassed by dozens of Sales Designers.
5. I am not required to use AutoCAD OR 3DS Max.
I haven't used AutoCAD in a very long time, and was never really good at it in the first place, so being told that I didn't have to use AutoCAD was awesome news, and 3DS Max, I'm now average at best. That means I can continue using Illustrator to do my space planning.
So despite the lack of a basic pay and the need to pay a $50 admin fee every time I successfully close a deal, everything else being offered to me is actually quite alluring and its really making me consider taking up the job if I get chosen for it. The boss said that I will hear from him next week if I am considered for the position, next week being this week, so fingers crossed, I hope I can at least get a call from him.
I had a second job interview about 2 days later, which was for a design firm that does Exhibition and Events design, something that was quite different from the normal residential and commercial design jobs, and it also happens to be something I was kinda interested in after hearing it from one of my friend who is in a similar field.
The office was located at the Jurong Industrial Estate, which was a huge pain to get to because there's this drain that separates the Industrial Estate from the main road, so instead of being able to just walk across it and reach my destination in 30 seconds from the bus stop, I had to take a bus from the Jurong Point Interchange, and let it drive me around the drain, there was a lot of bus and train switching that I really didn't enjoy at all.
When I finally reached the place, after being lost for a while trying to search for the office unit, I realize that once again for some reason, everyone in the office were girls. There was no guys at all, even the boss herself was female.
It was pretty much a similar form filing experience at this company, I spoke to the girl closest to the entrance that I was here for the interview, she points me to another girl and then the boss directs that girl to send me to the meeting room to wait and fill up my form.
As I was led into the meeting room to fill up a form, I started to notice that there were a lot of female apparels lying around the place, mannequins dressed up in skirts and blouses, a pile of clothes were strewn on the table where I was seated, there were hangars after hangars of just dresses and gowns scattered everywhere, it was all really weird but at that time, I thought, maybe they were handling a fashion show project and were given the apparels to inspire them to come up with a design that would fit with the theme of the dresses.
So when I was done with my form, this time taking as long to complete as the last interview, the boss walks in wearing a mouth mask, she apologized for her condition, telling me she was sick, and proceeded to do the interview with me, the entire time half her face was covered, so I didn't know how she really looked like. She looks thorough my forms and starts asking me about my work experience, my computer software skills, what she expected of me, and then she started explaining to me what the company does....
Turns out when I googled the company, I had been led to a website that did not belong to them at all. The website I had visited prior to applying for the job is an Exhibition and Events Company, the company I had applied for on the other hand is a Fashion Company, all the girls in the company are fashion designers, they are not Interior Designers, even the boss herself tells me she isn't Interior Design trained, so she didn't know how to use the softwares like AutoCAD, that's why she needed to hire someone for the Interior Design department who knew, and one of that someone is me.
Like I've said before, my AutoCAD skills at this point is pretty much non-existent, I would need some serious brushing up to be even half way decent at using it again, and if the boss herself doesn't know how to use AutoCAD, should I actually have any problems with the software in the future, the whole company will essentially be fucked.
She really didn't sugarcoat the position when she briefed me about the job responsibilities and what it would entail.
Things like working overtime would be normal, having to go to site almost everyday before and after work, projects that they handle will only have on average a 2 weeks window and just a whole bunch of other stuff. And then she kept asking me if I was still interested in the job after hearing all this, of course I wasn't, I mean I kinda lost interest when she told me I had the wrong website when I searched their company, this whole interview has been a mistake from the start, and then to throw all that at the end just kinda made me want to get the hell out of dodge.
When the interview finally ended, the both of us got up from our seats and I was stuck in this "Should I shake your hand or should I not moment", and I think for a second, the boss also had the same dilemma as me , but alas we didn't and she ushered me out of the office from the other exit, telling me that I should hear from her next week.
I have gone for many interviews, and I have screwed up many interviews, when I don't want a job, even though I don't actually say it to them in their face, my body language and facial expressions usually do that for me and I can say confidently that I will probably never hear from her again.
Even though the 2nd company is technically closer to my house, it being located in the West and me staying in the West, it actually took me a significantly longer time to reach it purely because of how inconvenient the location of the office was.
The reason why I was early for my first interview was because I thought it would actually take me a while to reach the place, since it was located in the Northern par of Singapore, but I actually ended up being an hour early, that was how long I actually overestimated the travelling time and also how quick the travelling time was to reach Thomson Plaza from Bukit Timah. Amazing really.
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