I started my career with a company called 3Com, soon after finishing my B.Com and when I did not want to pursue M.Com..haa.. haa… there is no relation with my degree and the company name. In fact, I was working on the Computers and Networking over there instead of utilizing my Commerce background. It just happened that I was surrounded with Com and incidentally, I joined a company called CalCom after leaving 3Com… 🙂
Life in 3Com was like an extension to college. Fun, friends, parties, seminars etc… but after 2 years of working with 3Com, I was retrenched along with 2 other people because the company was trimming down and we were the youngest people around. I was hardly 22 years old then and it was a traumatic experience for me. I was given a 3 months’ notice period and in that period, I applied in our parent company of 3Com in Singapore for a job in the technical line. And, this was done even without the knowledge of my boss. It was so adventurous and thrilling that other than couple of my friends, nobody even came to know about this whole thing. I wanted to take a revenge on my boss and wanted to see his face when he got to know that the Retrenchment was actually a good thing for me… 🙂
I had my interview over the telephone and cleared it and was asked to appear for a face-to-face interview in Singapore. They were paying for my tickets and stay… Wow, it was 1998 and air-travel used to be rare those days and foreign trips were even rarer.. And for a 22-year old girl, it was like a dream-come-true.. My middle-class parents did not know how to react and contacted some relatives over there to take care of me when I landed.. And, there I lost the opportunity to stay in Le Meriden in Singapore… 🙁 .. I arranged for visa, tickets etc and then told my boss about it.. He was stunned but did not say anything.. I did not get the desired expression which I was expecting on his face and felt sad.. 🙁
On the day of boarding, my parents and brother came over to the airport to see me off and they were more thrilled than me… but alas, I could not get through immigration as my passport had ECR problem… 🙁 I had to come out of the airport, and the day being Saturday, had to wait till Monday to get the ECR temporarily cleared. Believe me, that weekend was the longest weekend for me that I have ever lived.. Monday morning, we went to some Regional office and got it cleared and I left for Singapore on Tuesday.
Anyways, it was the best trip that I have ever had so far… Spent 2 weeks in a distant relative’s house in Yishun… watched movies alone in theatres, saw them book tickets on phone which was a wonder that time while we had to stand in queues in India outside the theatre to do advance booking.. 🙂 Visited Mustafa in Little India and spent so many hours there and was amazed to see how the shop was open for 24 hours a day… did a lot of shopping there, in fact, used most of my retrenchment money in buying chocolates and gifts for my parents and brother, traveled by bus, MRT, everything there was such a thrill… Saw people withdrawing money from a phone-booth shaped box on the main road and used to wonder how they could do that. ATMs in India had not started that time.. :-).. Used to walk till the shopping mall nearby, save the bus money and eat French Fries with that… 🙂 Went to Sentosa Island with the relatives and had so much of fun that I was dying to tell my parents about all the adventures.. I have visited Singapore many many more times after that but the first trip was the most memorable and the most adventurous… After all, it was my first free trip… 🙂
Yes, of course, attended the face-to-face interview too, which I did not clear 🙂 but who cares… 🙂 When I think of that trip, I still get goose-bumps…
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