How I became a teacher

I swore I was never going to teach ever again, not after my stint at J T Secondary School. Indeed that was partly how I ended up studying Engineering in university. My A-level grades were so horrendous. How bad? My JC’s passing rate for Chemistry that year was 99.6%. That 0.4% is writing this article. My best bets to get into university were the dumping grounds of my era - Engineering and Arts and Social Science! I would definitely have been more comfortable going to Arts and Soci, GP was the only distinction I managed after all. Then I thought about the career prospects of an Arts graduate; what can I with a B.A.? Teacher. Nah… Engineering it shall be; at the very least it is a professional degree! I really played the odds though, applying to NIE too, another dumpling ground of that time.

Come November 1999 (or was it December) I also swore off engineering as a career. I finally graduated from NTU after another accident six months earlier; only this time it was metaphorical. I failed a module in what should have been my final semester and turned it penultimate instead. It was costly both in terms of time and finances. I needed a job quick. However, December-January was not the typical season for hiring fresh graduates, so I was open to grabbing whatever came my way.

My aunt was working at Jurong Institute as an admin assistant and they were looking for relief teachers to see them through the usual artificially inflated enrolment at the beginning of the year. Back then O-level students head out to junior colleges using their prelim results before the permanent admission exercise in March after the release of the O-level results. JI was a victim of this process with many students signing up to be in the school for the first term, knowing full well that they were going to leave for the JCs or polytechnics after they get their results proper.

I convinced myself this was not really teaching. It was temporary so technically I did not rescind my oath. The stint turned out better than expected. I found myself able to explain the resolution of a force into two components, and I could relate well with my students. Perhaps, just perhaps, this teaching thing can work. I applied to the Ministry of Education.

Instead of sending me an interview notification, MOE sent the school a permanent physics teacher. They could not keep me and I was to leave at the end of the week. At this very juncture, a church friend was looking for an account executive for his design firm. I cannot remember if he asked me or I asked him, but I ended up working at the firm. The day after accepting the job offer, MOE’s letter arrived. You can’t make this up! They were offering me Design and Technology and Mathematics as my teaching subjects. Whatever the hell is D&T?! They offer me physics that I could teach very well, at least that was what the kids and colleagues at JI were saying. Ah well, wrong subject and wrong timing, I shall give MOE a miss. I didn’t turn up for the interview and I didn’t bother to inform them.

I would quit the design firm after three months and be jobless again. Although I did secure a few deals including a newspaper advertisement for OKI’s launch of their new line of printers. I didn’t have the mindset of a salesperson and still don’t.

This was pre-job portal days and vacancies were advertised in the Careers section of The Straits Times on Saturdays. I had to eat my words again and applied for engineering jobs because they were the only ones that I met the requirements - “Bachelor of Engineering”, “Fresh graduates are welcome to apply”. I sent my CVs using mail, printing them out on A4 paper, then putting them into giant brown envelopes.

I read somewhere that you need to attract the hirer’s attention and one of the ways to do so is to use a different grade of paper! So I printed my cover letter on textured craft paper! Still I was not getting interviews. Looking at my transcript, I wouldn’t interview me either; that or engineers don’t care much about textured craft paper. Then one Saturday morning I saw a different job ad, there was a walk-in interview at the Tangs Marriott hotel.

Saturdays were for me and my ROM-ed wife to go on our usual dates, which mainly consisted of walking around aimlessly along Orchard Road or Marina Square. Tangs Marriott is at the start of Orchard Road. I wasn’t keen on a walk-in interview intrude on my date with my wife but just in case, I brought along a copy of my CV. And just in another case, I wore a long sleeve shirt… but paired with jeans because in all likelihood I wouldn’t be walking into the interview, no need to be formal.

Sure enough we found ourselves at the main lobby of Tangs Marriott and there was a sign that says “Maxtor Peripherals Walk-in Interview”. I asked the wife if I should or should not walk in. She said I should. I reasoned it will be a waste of time, there’s probably a long queue and our date will be ruined by an indefinite wait, we should walk on by. She stood still instead and repeated just go. So I went to the toilet to tuck in my shirt then submitted my CV and waited for my turn. A couple of weeks later, I reported to the Yio Chu Kang facility. Despite my swearing, I was gong to be an engineer. That my job title had the word “failure” was just prophetic!

12 months on the unthinkable would happen. There were already rumours swirling and the sharp downturn in activities was easily apparent. No more than six months earlier, all the production lines were running at full capacity and the test racks were full. The workers manned endless shifts and overtime was the order of the day. Now, they gathered in threes or fives chit chatting, all the test racks were empty.

Then one morning in June 2001, The Straits Times’ Business section headline read “Maxtor to retrench 700”.

The tension in the office was palpable, the air so thick you could cut it with a knife. I put on my smock and headed straight into the lab and stayed there. The entire team was there. I don’t remember anyone doing any work. One of the managers popped a head in and called out a name. She never returned. Then at 12 noon, another manager popped his head in and said the exercise is over. Everyone still in the building is safe, for now. I got out of the lab and saw my boss slam a file on his desk and storm off. We were told to assemble at the staff canteen for a comms session with the MD.

It was the usual retrenchment rhetoric; we didn’t want to do it but in order to keep the company alive, we had no choice but to let our colleagues go. I know the logic - if the company turns turtle, then ALL of us will lose our jobs. 700 is a little more than 10% of the 6000 staff strength, at least a large majority were retained.

It made sense until it didn’t. After the truism was repeated for the umpteenth time, it suddenly grated me ears and pierced an inconvenient bubble: Real living human beings of flesh and blood were sacrificed so that a non-living legal entity called the company could stay alive. The humans need to eat food and drink water to live; the company needs to spit out humans to survive.

Over the months that followed, the futility of what I was doing screamed at me incessantly, louder by the day. The numbers are laughable in today’s context but bringing a 100GB hard drive to market was pushing the boundaries. It was a hard physical boundary, trying to store more data without increasing the form factor. Meanwhile, our competitor Seagate was working on a 120GB hard drive but they would reach the market a few months behind us. Our guys in the US had started work on surpassing Seagate’s 120GB, and Seagate was of course also working on surpassing our surpassing.

How the hell was a hard drive with more storage going to make this world a better place?

I applied to MOE again. Again, they sent me a letter to inform me of an interview. Again, they offered me the subjects of Design and Technology and Mathematics. Again, I thought of skipping the interview. But this time I did turn up. Part of the interview preparations was me going for a haircut. I wore shoulder-length hair back in NTU and it was back at that length after the year spent at Maxtor. My significantly shortened hair caused a stir the next day. Colleagues and bosses asked why I ditched my cool hair. I couldn’t say I was going for an interview but I had to say something… “Split ends.”

On 02 January 2002, I reported at NIE as a GEO 1.2 - untrained general education officer.