Many years ago I worked in the warehouse of a reputable media retailer. I worked as a logistic executive hired by them to also lias with their technology provider. My job was to supervise and lead a project of a migration for the company’s stock taking system from a mainframe based, to web based.
It was a challenging job because the data bank for their new web based system was created by a bunch of foreigner s that weren’t even computer literate. Yes, they used the cheap labours that came from Indonesia, Myanmar, Philippines, and Cambodia etc, to do their data entry. Most of these people didn’t even go to school.
The first day when I did a test on the system I almost fainted. The barcode error rate was as high as over 80%. There’s no way you can use a data bank like this to do your day to day stock taking. So that’s where I came in. I joined their MIS (Management of Information System) team to lead a project of rectifying the barcode data bank so that the whole system can actually be useable. Project timeframe was given a minimum of 3 months.
3 Months was a very long time.
It took me 1 month to rectify the data base and make the system usable again Improving the accuracy of the data base from virtually unusable, to about 85%. I was confident that I could complete the project within time frame and able to complete the migration in under 2 months time.
By the 6th week of the project being kick started, the accuracy of the data base was already around 90%, and so I have advised the manager that all that is left now is to have someone to constantly monitor the platform to ensure further data to be accurate and need a strict control on future data entry, while slowly removing redundant data that are still remaining in the system, whenever it shows up.
So, the project was a success at that stage, until the migration completes, all that was left to do was monitoring the system. My job became easy after the initial 6 weeks of nightmarish OT OT and OT.
One day in the 7th week, a newbie was brought into the department; she was assigned to sit at my place. Yes you read it right, my place. But how? No one told me that someone was going to sit at my place, I was also not designated to a new work station. All of a sudden my workstation was given to another new employee with immediate effect. Where am I gonna sit? I was damn confused. I tried to visit the manager for this matter and find out what’s happening. The manager refused to see me. In 2 days time when this continued, I kinda had a feeling that the manager was being damn cheap and was trying to force me to resign. The project was designed for 3 months time frame, and I have almost completed the project in the 7th week time. The manager got the impression that the job is so damn easy that they wouldn’t even need to pay my salary for this last piece of work to be done, and they can just spent half my salary to hire a high schooler to continue what I have done, and so save a lot of money.
They were trying to force me to resign.
Oh dear oh dear.
Wouldn’t that be shitty.
In the end I didn’t resign, at the end of 2nd month they sent me a letter to ask me to pack up and leave. No reason given, just exercising their rights in the hiring contract. No compensation was given. A bit sad though, I should have read the contract much more carefully. It said if I were to resign I need to repay the company for the salary for the rest of the contract if I decided to end the contract prematurely, but if they were to do so all they need to give me is 1 week notice.
Oh well, lesson learned.
Sky is gloomy, no harm for a little bit of a flash back isn’t it?
P/S: A friend that resigned after me told me that the migration project failed one month later as data bank started to fall apart in the hands of the high schoolers and migrant workers. The project was decomissioned 3 months after I left. The manager was fired. Total cost for that project itself was around half a million. haha... damn my 2 months effort wasted.
Signing off…
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