Survival Report 2025-10-23

Ever since I began working as Service Engineer, I couldn't free myself from duties to sit down and properly write a blog post about my new job. I always came home tired and (more importantly), I wanted to play games. Well, I am still awake at 12am now and not feeling sleepy yet. So I think there's no better time to write down what's happened in these few weeks.

My new job is going well, mostly. As I am still a newbie there is not much work to do, that's expected. I had to answer to a few incidents, but that's about it. I spent other time mostly cloning images onto new machines using Symantec Ghost. My teammates have an enormous amount of tickets on their hands though, so I guess I will also be overwhelmed by support tickets soon. Speaking of which, I have a 5 people team, me inclusive. My teammates are relatively young, though I am not sure if I am the youngest one.

When I say my job is going mostly well, it really means something bad happened. Apparently, some users (or one or more of my teammates) complained that I interrupted them mid-conversation, made a big deal out of it and told my team leader. For me, I really do not understand why that's a problem. I only interrupted to ask questions, then form a plan to solve their inquiries in my head. Perhaps people see this as being impolite. I can't really put myself in their shoes in this one. It's really annoying Asian people hate being interrupted, like the teachers did in classroom.

Then people also reported that I smelled very bad, both body odor and bad breath. I knew for sure I have bad breath, I have several cavities formed by dead wisdom tooth because of displacement. What I did not know was that I smelled really really really bad after heavily sweating. I only thought I smelled like people who exercised. What people described instead, was sour and rancid. This is not normal even for people who sweats a lot.

The last problem I described above brings some good news. I started immediately eating healthier after hearing people complaining about my body odor. It's only begun for a few days, but I can already feel the impact. Before I adopted a healthy diet, my face and nose always become oily after every gaming session and waking up. They are still oily, but it's drastically improved comparatively. Even though I haven't adjusted my sleeping schedule yet, I noticed that I had longer sleeps before I wake up mid-sleep. My sleep score from my Garmin watch has increased beyond 50 as well.

You can't maintain a (relatively) healthy lifestyle without exercises. Fortunately, from where I get off the MTR to where I work is a 10 minutes walk. This amounts to 20 minutes if I also choose to walk to the MTR station when I leave work for home. I tried running with my mom and it's a disaster. We had a ~45 minutes 4km long session in Tuesday, 5 minutes in and my breathing is already becoming strained thanks to asthma. In the end I spent less than 10 minutes running, and walked the rest of the distance. She suggested I brisk walk instead, because my ankle isn't used to running, and is prone to damages if I run.

And that's my survival report for October. I will update my Now page soon. I am not sure if I can keep posting my cats, but I had been delaying for weeks now, I will try to this weekend.