Happy Thanksgiving!

Greetings from Taiwan and Happy Thanksgiving! Some of you have asked if I was able to eat any turkey here, and the answer is yes! I enjoyed a full thanksgiving meal at an expat bar with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and yes, even pumpkin pie. It was a bit pricey at $700NT ($23USD) but it was a nice change of pace, and I met a lot of new people, including a couple of Texans! Hopefully they can make it out to the UT/A&M game watching party I organized at another expat bar tomorrow night, so I can finally get the Taiwan Texas Exes network up and running after all these months.

Christmas Creep

No, it's not some fat perv that annoys you during Christmas. For those who don't now what Christmas creep is, it's the progressive creeping of Christmas (or any other holiday) decorations, songs, ads, etc. well before the month of December (or respective month). I thought living in Taiwan, I would be immune to this. Unfortunately, it's just as bad here, if not worse. Exiting the MRT mear my house back in October, I heard some Christmas songs blaring from one of the many shopping malls. Again a soli two months before Christmas, and even a month before Thanksgiving, the Taiwanese were already exposed to the creep. A near majority of the people in Taiwan are raised Buddhist, so the meaning of Christmas is lost to them. So to find such an an abundance of Christmas decorations for sale near where I live was quite surprising, and even a bit nostalgic. Christmas is not officially observed in Taiwan, but up until recently, the day was a holiday, coincidentally because the Taiwanese declaration was signed on that day back in the 1950's. Rest assured, even on Christmas day, it'll probably be warm enough for me to wear a short sleeved shirt and khaki shorts.

Privacy, please?

No one ever really wants to use a public bathroom, let alone go number 2 in one. But when you do use one, and inevitably, we all have to, you would expect to get some semblance of privacy. Well, that's the US way of thinking. You get almost none in Taiwan in the public restrooms, with cleaning ladies cleaning the urinal next to you when you're doing your business or mopping the floor and getting some splash on you. I figured that was just in public, but oh no, it's the same at companies as well. Regardless of what's going on, those cleaning ladies barge in and start cleaning away. It's like the US Postal service slogan, "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" but for cleaning ladies. I half expected them to knock on the bathroom door to offer me an industrial roll of toilet paper. They do it to the girls room as well, but at least they are the same sex. Although I'm pretty sure that a male cleaner would get hit or slapped if he went in to the women's room to try and clean it if a girl was in there.

ACCESS DENIED

I had my first taste of dealing with the ASUS corporate structure today, and let me tell ya, it's all about CYA over here. I happened to have two separate issues at around the same time which set me back about two hours of doing work. The first issue I had was with my work badge, which was a temporary "Overseas Visitor" badge. These badges not only get you onto the campus, but what floors you have access to (ASUS HQ is 16 floors). Also on the card is an allowance for lunch and if you work OT, dinner. With an OV badge, I got 200ntd a day, which is about 50% more than what the locals get,but all dumped into the card's balance at once. My coworker likes starbucks a lot, so in addition to the breakfast/lunch/dinner meals, he would get some coffee from Starbucks, which start at about 100ntd. This put him over his monthly allowance a bit early, and we had to go through HR to add more money to it from my department's budget. But they figured since it happened to him, it would happen to me soon, and I should go ahead and top off my card. This is where the fun begins. Apparently, I'm classified as a contractor/freelancer, which means I don't need to be in the office and can technically do the job from wherever I have an Internet connection. Because of this, they change my badge access from OV to visitor, which means my floor access is restricted to 4 floors. Oh yeah, I can't use the super convenient rear entrance for employees, and have to go all the way around to the main entrance for visitors, an extra 5 minute walk. HR was so adamant on this because of my status and was unwilling to change, even though I've already been here a month and I'm doing the same job as my coworker, but he was a transfer from Singapore. Another coworker had been helping me out translating all the stuff I didn't understand, and he was annoyed as well. Apparently, after we got back to our floor, the HR department contacted our director and lodged a formal complaint at us and the "attitude" we showed towards them. The HR department, and to an extent, the entire corporate structure here, is so ass backwards where it takes a mountain of paperwork to get the smallest thing like adding a pittance of an amount to a card. Companies should enact a "common sense" rule besides the rule, "is this good for the company?".

That was run in number one. Number two deals with the MIS department, or better known in the states as the IT department. There's an entire floor dedicated to just IT, and it's crazy the amount of people they have to support, since there's about 3000 employees at HQ. Not long after lunch, all of my inter/intranet access was shut down. Not knowing what was going on, I checked with my coworker, and his access was still up, so I moved on to my translator friend for some assistance. I checked my Ethernet port at my cube, since I'm quite familiar in dealing with various levels of IT. he called them up, told them what was going on, then finally gave them my port number. They talked for a bit, hung up, then told me that my access was shut down to "unusual activity" with a google account. As it turns out, there were over 4600 requests to a google site that they were not familiar with, way more than any other person in the entire building, so they shut it down as a preventative measure. Turns out that 4600+ requests were from my google voice extension I was using in Chrome. I use it to communicate with a few friends here and there, but even when I'm not using it, it still autochecks every few minutes. I went up to the IT floor, they asked what I was using, and I showed them, and they just asked me to disable the extensions, which I was fine to do. After that, I was on my way and back up and working. Since they don't have gvoice phone numbers here in Taiwan, they saw no need to shut down access to those ports. I sure showed them :) I don't have the extension running anymore, but the access is still there, so feel free to send me a text if you're bored ;)

I had posted another version of this story from my iPhone, but for some reason I can't find this post, and another I wrote, so I'm re-publishing it. Most of it is was written that day, but the last little bit was finished just now, as I was mid thought when the MRT got to my stop. Maybe it'll show up again, who knows.

Changing Seasons

Ah, fall is finally upon us here in Taiwan! That means I don't need to take a shower two times a day and its cold enough to where I don't need to turn on the AC. In many aspects, Taiwan winters don't differ from Austin, or Texas for that matter. One aspect that is different is the humidity. While cold, dry Canadian air blows southward, the cold air from China still has to cross over some ocean, so it picks up humidity and dumps it in Taiwan.

Hot or cold, humidity and I just don't mix. Yes, I won't be sweating very much, but when I do, it'll still be miserable and take forever for the sweat to dry off. At least now I can expand my wardrobe and dress in some long sleeves without excessively sweating. For now, the weather has been perfect. Highs in the mid 70's lows in the mid 60's. It's funny seeing Taiwanese adjust their clothing to the temperature change. I first noticed this when I visited Taiwan in the winter time for the first time back in the late 90's. Anytime the weather dropped below 70, the locals bundle up in their thickest winter coats, like the ones you go skiing in, all for 69 degree weather. I would often get exasperated stares when I wore khaki shorts and a polo because they assumed I was crazy and would freeze to death. I don't know how many times I had to tell my extended family that no, I was not cold. In fact, could they turn on the fan and point it in my direction? It's really easy to spot a foreigner in the winter time, just look for the ones wearing what normal people in the US wear at 75 degrees.

In other news, my friend Nicole paid me a visit this past weekend from Texas! Even though I just saw her not more than a month ago, it was still nice to play host and have some familiar Texan company. She flew in on a Friday afternoon from Hong Kong and left this past Monday for Beijing. I went to more touristy/site-seeing places in those two days than I have the entire time I've been here in Taiwan, and packed in a good amount of fun. Thanks for stopping by Nicole!

I didn't get my afternoon nap at work today, so I'm getting groggy as I write. Until next time friends!

Writing as a profession

I consider myself a fairly intelligent person, but most of that is read and self taught, not natural intelligence where someone picks it up and automatically gets it. In that same mold, I'm not terribly creative. I'm a creature of habit, going back to the same tried and true things over and over. Very rarely do I stray outside my comfort zone, and when I do, it's usually in the company of friends and family, so there's always a semblance of support nearby.

Where am I going with all this you ask? I think one cannot truly realize their maximum potential unless they are put into a situation where they are forced to survive, beit physically or fiscally. Someone I once met told me when you being able to afford to eat depends on you being able to sell something, don't just think you can, you'd better be damn sure you can lest you starve. Which brings me to my current state of mind. Having never done writing for a paycheck before, I have a newfound respect for journalists and bloggers alike. While I am fortunate that I'm writing on topics that interest me for the most part, there is the occasional bit of writer's block where I just don't have the creativity to come up with a coherent thought. Sometimes all that's needed is a refresh in scenery, instead of being chained to a desk with a computer. To the other writers out there, what other tricks do you have to overcome your occasional lapse in thought?