SmallWOD in English

Movies! Especially when someone watches the same film as me and comes away with a completely different opinion. That’s when the conversation gets good. My favorite film series is LOTR btw

If we grabbed a coffee? Company, organization, system design, culture - eg: what are people incentivised to do in a company and how that will shape the company and its future

Overwatch for me 😂 I’ll complain about it for an hour and then immediately want to play again. Anyone else here play? Who do you main?

Food, for sure. Half my travel plans are just places I want to eat 😂 What’s one thing I absolutely need to try in your city?

A couple of days ago, I was scrolling through Xiaohongshu when I came across unit #17-18 at Poiz Residence. I stopped for a second. That was the apartment I’d lived in when I first moved to Singapore. I’d been its very first tenant. I’d also spent a remarkably productive weekend there—so productive that it wasn’t until Sunday night that I remembered I had work the next morning. It was July 2019. I’ve forgotten the exact date, but I remember the flight: Singapore Airlines SQ833, an A380, landing after ten on a Friday night. Memory is funny like that. The date I started earning a living escapes me, but I remember the aircraft perfectly, as though Airbus might one day turn up to fact-check my autobiography. I’d never imagined I’d end up working in Singapore after graduation. Then one thing led to another, a job came along, and I had an agent find and secure an apartment well in advance. I was starting at Marina Bay Sands on Monday and had arrived a whole weekend early. By any reasonable measure, I’d left myself plenty of room to get settled. I spent my first night in a hotel in Little India. When I went to see the apartment at Poiz, I discovered there really was plenty of room. Most of it was indoors: there was barely any furniture. The landlord had provided a bed and a mattress, both brand new. The mattress still had its plastic wrapping on. I stood in a room that life hadn’t yet made a mess of. That was about to become my job. But first, I needed to bring a few things in. Otherwise, I’d go to work on Monday, come home, lie down on the bed, and have sampled every amenity the apartment had to offer. So I spent all of Saturday furniture shopping. A table, chairs, a TV stand, a bedside table—anything I could get home that day, I bought. I ordered a TV and a sofa. I even bought a balcony chair. You could say I’d given my future life considerable thought. Before I’d contributed anything to Singapore’s economy, I’d already secured my spot for doing absolutely nothing on the balcony. On Sunday, I started putting it all together. Starting a new life abroad on your own sounds like something you could get a little poetic about. In practice, it mostly involves attaching legs to a table and assembling a chair into something you could plausibly sit on. Until then, my relationship with furniture had been limited to using it. We were now getting to know each other on a structural level. I spent the whole day at it. There were more and more places to put things, and more and more places to sit. Everything was moving steadily in the direction of being habitable. By the time I finally surfaced from the furniture, it was evening. Only then did I remember the documents I’d been told to bring on Monday. I hadn’t printed a single page. Shit. I’d spent two days carefully considering where the TV would go, where I’d put things beside the bed, and where I would sit to gaze into the distance. The one thing I hadn’t considered was how to turn up for my first day with everything I needed. Plan too far ahead, and it becomes surprisingly easy to miss the hole right in front of you. Still, this shouldn’t be much of a problem. Fresh from China, I had an almost religious faith in the existence of an open print shop on a Sunday night. It wasn’t as though I didn’t have the files. I just needed a machine to spit them out. So off I went. The first place was closed. So was the next. After walking around the neighbourhood for a while, I gradually realised that starting work tomorrow was my personal problem, not a matter the neighbourhood was obliged to come together and resolve that evening. Local businesses were showing admirable restraint in their concern for my career prospects. Nobody was about to work overtime on my account. That was my first walking tour of Singapore. Other people explored their neighbourhoods armed with curiosity. I was surveying the local amenities armed with unprinted documents. As I walked, the neighbourhood grew a little more familiar, and life a little less so. It turned out that things you never had to plan for back home would, once you moved somewhere else, make a point of waiting until Sunday night to come and find you. The next morning, it suddenly occurred to me that there was such a thing as a business centre. I found one. They could print. At last, things were looking up. Two Singapore dollars a page. Several dozen pages. Normally, I might have cared about black and white versus colour, single-sided versus double-sided. That morning, my relationship with the printer was much simpler: it was willing to print, and I was willing to pay. One by one, the documents that had previously existed only on a screen took physical form. I covered the cost of bringing them into the world. And so I began my working life in Singapore carrying a rather valuable stack of A4 paper. The table and chairs I’d assembled over the weekend finally had a financial support plan that involved actually turning up for work. But starting work didn’t mean everything else in my life was ready to start working. At the time, I only had my in-principle approval letter, or IPA. I hadn’t received the physical work pass card yet. I don’t know how it works now, but back then I had to wait for that card before I could get broadband, a regular mobile plan or a bank card. I arrived in July and didn’t receive it until mid-August. For more than a month, I was already living there, but my life was still checking in, one piece at a time. I kept my phone going with prepaid SIMs. I think they were valid for thirty days, and I had to replace mine once along the way. Data had to be rationed. To watch TV, I’d turn on my phone’s hotspot and connect my iPad. I’d already gone so far as to buy a TV stand, yet every evening the entire household still depended on a single phone for its modest allowance of culture. I paid for things in cash. My first salary came as a cheque, which I then had to go and cash. None of this had occurred to me before moving abroad. Only once I was actually living there did I discover that payday had a second act: they gave you a piece of paper, and then you had to turn it into money. A few days earlier, I’d spent money turning documents into paper. Before long, I was handing over a different piece of paper to turn it into money. Bit by bit, this was how I got the hang of local life. At the time, none of it struck me as any great hardship. The furniture got assembled. The documents got printed. Without broadband, I used a hotspot for the time being. Without a bank card, I used cash. Things came one after another. None of them were particularly big, but all of them were mine to sort out. By the time I’d finished dealing with one, the next had more or less arrived. Now that I’ve come across Poiz again, those are still the things that come to mind. The mattress with its plastic wrapping still on, the table I’d brought home, the balcony chair—and the version of me who thought, that Sunday night, that a quick trip downstairs would sort everything out. If someone had told me back then that I’d miss that weekend one day, I probably wouldn’t have had time to listen. There were still things in the apartment that needed assembling, and documents for the next morning that needed printing. Whatever you’ve got to say, let me find a print shop first. But all these years later, I really would like to see that room again. Just as it was when I’d finished putting it together. The TV and sofa hadn’t arrived yet, there was no broadband, and I had to make my phone’s data last. But there was already somewhere to sit. I’d spent the whole day getting things done, thinking only about what was still left to do. I never really took a moment to sit down.

Hiiiii this is Evangeline! Definitely can talk about my cats for an hour. Missing them from NYC🥹

Gaming, music, and bizarre true stories. One guy demanded millions from the GTA developers, then asked them for a job. His legal threats slowly became a cover letter. That’s the kind of thing I’ll let my coffee go cold over. We haven’t even got to music yet.

Building business... AI... entrepreneurship.... how to be a good leader....

Hey Crystal, awesome post! My name is David and I’m currently based in Edmonton. What I could talk about for hours is how different health care modalities have an impact on our long term health and wellness and how we as humans can continuously evolve with the tools that we currently have.