Engineering a disaster

Sorry, first proper blog entry in a long time. I've been bloody busy, despite having given up on searching for jobs. (Thought process was like: Let's postulate that a fresh graduate will take about three months, on average to find a job. From the middle of September on, I will be in Malaysia for a total of three months. Therefore, by the time I find a decent job, it's time to leave.)

The first thing that came up was that a lady at my dad's church had a sob story about a Form One kid in her science class who was illiterate and taking care of six younger sibs and a mentally ill mother. Turns out that her school is also missing a bio teacher because their bio teacher's wife got cancer and he had to accompany her overseas for treatment...so sight unseen, I volunteered. I hated secondary school, and especially secondary school Biology (I obviously love biology, the KBSM syllabus is another story entirely), so if I hadn't had that whiny letter printed in The Star last week and been given the chance to walk the talk or walk the plank, I'm not sure if I'd have done it.

Anyway, pity the poor kids with a month and a half to go before the SPM and no teacher. More on that later...Thursday was my first day.

The other thing that came up was that an education publisher to whom I applied for an assistant editor job wrote back with a) a test editing assignment to complete and b) an offer of a freelance writing assignment.

I rather enjoyed doing the test assignment...the tricky part was cutting it to below the word count limit. The writing was so horrible I couldn't figure out whether it was really something a client had given them in the past, or contrived. Sample:

These subjects take candidates one step higher in terms of knowledge development and one step closer in understanding the dynamics of business today. These subjects again have one goal that is to provide to candidates carnal knowledge of the internal working of the organization as well as how to survive in the external business environment.

The "carnal knowledge" part had me laughing my ass off, and I couldn't figure out what the writer could possibly have intended until my mum (ex-English teacher, also did some freelance editing before) suggested "intimate knowledge".

The engineering article...is another story. It's supposed to be about different industry sectors where fresh engineering grads can look for work. I jumped at the chance to do it eagerly, but I'd barely gotten started when the "where am I going, and what's with this handbasket?"^* feeling set it. I realized that I'd volunteered to write an article of over 4000 words on a subject which I know EFFING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about. o_O

Summore the contact person had originally told me the article was needed "in about a week" (on a Tuesday afternoon) and then when I accepted the assignment, this changed to "by the end of this week." Damnnnnnnnn... I told her I'd send it in by Monday morning.

The upshot of this is that I feel like a total dumbo and my engineer friend a.k.a. knight-in-shining-email back in Madison is doing the bulk of the descriptions stuff for me and I'm researching the Malaysia-specific stuff.

So far we've come to the conclusion that the person who put together the list of sections to be covered doesn't know anything about engineering either...so hopefully they won't notice.

* Going to hell in a hell in a handbasket, mah.