X vs Y

During one of my holidays, I manager to get together with one of my college mate and friend from KL to have a drink at OverTime. As usual for a graduate, the hot topics we would talk about was our working life. He told me a story that the department he works at has a manager who always checks out of the office late at night, even when the working hours is from 9 to 6. When someone decides to leave the office at 7:30pm, the manager will remark "Going home early today, eh?"

So in the working life, when your contract stated the working hours is 9 to 6, it means you have to work from 9 to 10?

It is quite often you hear your parents telling you the nightmares of the working life, how much stress they have to cope in the office and etc. For us, the young and fresh generation, we walk into the working life hoping to meet a bunch of lively people, (of course sexy OL girls), people whom we can communicate and connect, a place we can call our 2nd home. The last one sounds exaggerated, but what would you call a desk/cubicle where you hide there for 1/3 of your day, and hide your personal stuff under the drawers there.

What we thought of the office people would be...

..Alas, we got greet by bunch of aunties at their grumpy, complaining age. (obviously not sexy, not worth a second glance), maybe a few seniors who thought they know everything. But your worst nightmare has yet to come if you haven't had a manager who is old-school, believes micro-managing is the only way to gain productivity... (just to name a few traits)

What (most) actual office would be...

After listening to many of my friends' stories of their working life, can't disagree that in any office, there will always be someone from the Generation X who thinks work is always the higher priority than personal lives, conservative, works for loyalty, always believes that he/she makes the correct decisions and no one else can defy him... How often do you hear people say "You think that work is stressful? Wait till you get into <insert job here>", "Of course I'm right, because I'm working longer than you do." ...and the all-time favorite: "..That's working life. Suck it up."

So what happens if we don't "suck it up" every damn thing in work? People ain't fools; we know when we first step into the office, we are bound to hardship and countless challenge which we'll struggle to overcome, but we ain't so dumb to treat everything as part of the challenge, forcefully and blindly swallowing it down.

This is why people do job-hopping. We don't leave the company because our main objective to do the usual 9 to 5 is for the paycheck. If there is another opportunity that provides more $$$, we are cocksure to take it. When we decide to leave the company, we often hear "Young people are always like that, job hopping around. You think you can get very far doing that?", "You young people are not even loyal to the company, what makes you think other employers would hire you?". Trust me. There are still people being so conservative to say that. (Thankfully, my current company isn't like that.)

Money pays. Loyalty doesn't. Nobody would pick a candidate just because they have big loyalty to offer on their resume. It is the skills that pays us, not loyalty. If I was given a choice, I would rather find a way to channel a stable income to my bank account (legally), and not work at all. Only conservative, "frog-in-the-well" people would say that is impossible. It's Generation Y world now; we do what pleases us. If that is working out for you, then sorry to say this: "This is working life. Suck it up" 

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