On Working our Arses Off

This shall be the, erm, not sure which installment post on the CRP programme that we had in Maran.

See, we have to come up with a report of our visit to Maran. We did some surveys actually. Went into the villagers, knocking on the doors of the house that we had randomly picked earlier, and conducted a 30 minutes survey.

We asked about the housing conditions, their work, risks of occupational hazards and injury, medical expenses as well as risk factors for diseases such as smoking and genetics. We also asked about women's health in terms of cervical and breast cancer, as well as men's health in respect to prostate disease.

Finishing the survey is one thing, but coming up with the report is another thing. We worked our arses off in the conference room in one of the villages that were selected for the survey. Thanks to the headman that we had quite a comfortable place to work in.

Keying in all the datas into the SPSS programme is not as easy as it looks. It was only then that we found out there were a lot of mistakes during our interviews earlier. Insufficient datas. Contradicting datas. Missing link. And what nots. Data managers must've gone crazy scanning through the final sheet before submitting it to the coordinator.

There were a few occasions where the datas were rejected, and well, we pitied the data manager for needing to go through the torture. We also found out that she cried on particular night because the workload and dateline was just too much for any of us to handle.

Seriously I do mean what I mean.

Out of nowhere actually, I was elected as the cheif editor for the entire project of Maran. Meaning, I had to make the final reading of our reports before we send it in for edit by our group supervisors. Reading is one thing. But standardizing and editing is another.

Sometimes I really do wonder how could some of our colleagues pass their English language exams. Can't really quote any examples right now, but grammatical mistakes was throughout the entire discussions, and I was literally re-writing the whole essay.

Imagine that there were more than a dozen essays and standardizing of all the charts to be done and dateline was just one day away. Not that I ever did cracked under pressure, but working under this pressure was enough to make me scream my head off at anyone who got on my nerves. Like, seriosly, not lying.

It was most annoying the night when I was supposed to confirm my registration to the convention as my Maxis broadband was not cooperating. My face turned as red as it was about to blow up, and no one dared to submit their essays to me after I shouted at some random colleague for the lousy grammar that I was reading, while waiting for my Hotmail to load since like, forever. I mean, I never really did appear to be THAT mad and angry in front of my colleagues, not that I ever recalled, but I guess I was just too suffocated and I don't know... Like an erupting volcano...

And you don't even have to get me into giving a feedback about our supervisors. Our advice only comes in 2 days before the dateline, that we practically had to change EVERYTHING in our discussions, and I had to do all my work all over again. Like, WTF?! Where were they earlier? One of them actually mentioned "this is a students' project, don't ask me all these questions." For Christ's sake, we're doing the survey for the department's favour, in some ways.

But then again, I suppose our hard work paid off.

We emerged as the champion for our good performance in our presentation for the general report.

And we were each given a small mug worth 6 bucks.

At least there is something we could look back to. I guess Glog was right in some ways when he told me that.

Editing is still in progress... Tiring and it's seriously wearing me out.