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Absurdity of Work

I remember that Friday evening, fresh into my job, my manager unloading a multitude of tasks on me at the last moment while she quietly made her exit. Sitting there raging over my situation, I had came to a conclusion that perhaps Singapore was not the place for me. The country somehow seemed to possess a backwardness in thought that did not sit well with my ethos and I started making plans for my own exit.
Almost 5 years later, that Friday would repeat. About to wrap up a rather tiring week, out of the blue, my Manager would assign an 'urgent' task without any justification whatsoever, a task that had me raging as it would have me chasing people I have never met to provide me information as soon as possible though I had little authority over these people, which ranks among my least favourite activities. Though this time I was no longer in Singapore but all the way in Berlin, Germany, a country that I had chosen for its reputation as respecting an employees boundaries.

However truth of matter was, sometimes in the way the people thought and behaved in the corporate workplace, Berlin and Singapore did not differ a lot. Here too, I had faced my fair share of workplace politics, bad managers and late evenings. It was not just me. A close friend of mine from the US had dreamt for years to come to Europe and had left her job behind to eventually move here. Just weeks in, she had left her job in the German company due to a toxic work environment, her belief in Europe shaken more than mine.

On hindsight I wonder how much I have been deceived by greener pastures. Perhaps there is no such thing as a perfect workplace, there is no such thing as the perfect job and there is no such thing as the perfect manager. While there are extreme cases of toxic workplaces which we should avoid, we might have to contend with systems and people who might never live up to our expectations. Corporate cultures leave a lot to be desired but its perhaps the price we pay for having that steady income in our bank account every month. The key is to learn to detach from it and go with the flow, learning to never bring work home after the clock out.

How exactly to do that though remains a mystery to me.

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