On my last day, and I'm talking about it.

My office is situated on the 15th floor of Menara Luxor, one of the 4 towers that dominate the Tropicana skyscapes. Until today, I'm not sure if Tropicana is an area of its own, or a part of Damansara, but you get the picture it's somewhere around there. It's a rich man's area. Lots of nice houses to see, fancy cars, and golf courses. Luxor is a direct selling company that has gained enough wealth to purchase its own building and lease it out to others.

The department I'm working in has 4 divisions; 1 being pre-sales (which I'm a part of), 1 being after-sales and 2 more that I forgot....marketing? My job position is known as a Field Tester. Big name, not so big job. What I do is fairly simple, yet tedious.

Everyday, I come in at 9 am, set up the handphones I'm supposed to test, and test it all day till I go back at 6 or 7 pm. Before any Motorola phones are brought into the Malaysian market, it has to undergo major application testing in my department and get a passing approval before it is launched. In Field Testing, there's only 5 of us doing the job. 1 Senior Supervisor, 1 Junior Supervisor and 3 coolies, me being one of them. All of us do the same thing. We get a phone model with a test sheet of about 1000++ test cases and we're given 10 working days to complete all the test. During this time, the main thing is to find out what's wrong with the phone, report it and get it corrected. So, it's mostly software errors. After we complete the tests, a new software with all the corrected editions will be installed into the phone and the previous errors are gone over again to make sure it's really corrected. It's tedious and can get rather boring, especially when you're halfway through test #500+. And at this point, you wish you could smash the phone to bits. Sometimes, the simplest things like using a bluetooth headset and not being able to hear anything does occur. So, it cannot be taken for granted that if I were to send out an sms to multiple recipients, all of them would get it. Every single thing you can imagine using your phone for, software-wise, must be tested and be proven that it will perform. If not, a report has to be lodged. If we miss out any important things here, sooner or later, the customer who bought the phone will be after us with major complaints. In a way, we play an important role of ensuring that everything in the phone works like it should.

How I really wish we could do hardware testing, like dropping the phone from the 15th floor to see if it can survive the impact or maybe soak it in liquid detergent for 2 days and check it if still works afterwards. Or maybe, beat the crap out of the phone with a sledgehammer and see how many beatings it can take before there's nothing left of it. I wish.... Then at least I get to don on safe glasses and maybe glove and boots. But the sad fact is, I'm stuck at the desk the whole time, 'playing' with the phones.

The perks of working here is that you get to really test out the latest phones in the Hellomoto (the buzzword of Motorola) collection. Some phones are so cool you could pee in your pants playing it. Urm ,that didn't sound too right. Anyways, there are some really neat phones to check out from Motorola that will be hitting our stores pretty soon. Since, I'm still an employee of Motorola, for another 20 minutes, I wanna do some promo here a bit. Motorola phones are really sleek and neat. Their design is really thin and comfy in your hands. You don't have the bulk that you get when handling a Nokia of the similar range. The interface is getting better. More user-friendly and accessible. The key thing, it looks good to the eyes. You see it, you feel like having it. When it's in your hands, you know you gotta buy it. Okok. I'm done with the promo. Just be on the lookout for the new Hellomoto phones. The only sucks thing about it, is the dictionary function in the sms section. Until now, I still struggle using it, maybe coz I've been a Nokia user all my life. Other than that, it's fine by me.

If you get a really 'canggih-fied' phone to test, the test case can touch 2000 cases. So crack your heads at it. If it's a really low-end phone, maybe 400. It varies.

Today is my last day. 10 more minutes on the clock before I leave this place for good. It's sad for me. I'm starting to like this place and the people. But it's only a 1-month contract job. I can renew it next month, but another opening came up and after praying, I decided to go for it. Working here no doubt is nice, but this contract position-thingy makes things a little more interesting. Being a contract job for a month, you're not sure if you will be hired the following month. And I wonder how long do I have to work here I get to become a permanent staff. Or will I ever be a permanent staff?

Ok, it's time to start packing. I gotta go.
Gooodbye, Hellomoto.