| Continuing from my previous post, I'll just quickly summarise what have been going on with my life for the past year. As you can see from below, it's absolutely a happy picture. That's right! These are the people whom I am working with at the moment, in one of the leading British building services consulting firm, Hoare Lea. These are my Virtual Engineering (VE) team buddies: (from top left) Jimmy Lee Chee Yue, Tayo Shokunbi, Antonino Saporito, Roy Sim, (from bottom left) Xiang Wei Zhong, myself, Leon Tatlock, Audley Franklin and Graham Cossons. I'll introduce them one by one. 
OK so what does the VE guys do? Well, that's a pretty tricky question because at times, our jobs could be overlapping other specialist groups' job scope. However in general, we are a bunch of people who specialises in applying various building services software, notably Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES), Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), TAS, SAP etc to validate Part L compliance at preliminary design stage. However, at some stage we might even have the opportunity to provide consulting service to design engineer. Yup, that's about it! The men who I was 'stuck' with for exactly 1 year! No regrets though!
Let's go through some fun facts now, shall we?
This pic was taken in January by Jimmy when we were having our combined belated Christmas & New Year Dos at TGIF in Bristol. Not to mention our beloved sempai, Jimmy's farewell lunch! Thumbs up for the food, from me, the only girl in the midst of VE guys.
OK, close shot of the main character, Jimmy, whom I believe was the one who screened my name out to be interviewed initially. A nice HK/Brunei guy who was always there to help me and everybody else. Kudos to him, especially for the Salford School project!! The reason hé left? Probably not about job dissatisfaction, but he's getting married! His initially plan was to buy an IES license and work independantly in Malaysia. However, since that is absolutely impossible in Malaysia as the revenue would never to cover the cost of purchasing an IES license which is worth more than RM120,00, he has chosen to work for IES instead. A wise decision indeed. Otherwise would mean committing suicide voluntarily, looking at our beloved Malaysia's current economic situation, which I shall cover in my next posts.
OK, this, is an interesting one. The smiling guy is my supervisor from Xi An, Wei Zhong and the guy next to him is my mentor, Antonino, who is also my big Italian boss. They are nemesis of each other in the group and both are very firm on their own point of view. Surprisingly they were sitting next to each other on that day.  Wei Zhong is another nice guy who is always willing to teach me about CFD, especially when he was in Manchester 6 months ago. Well, he still does actually even after he moved to Bristol. OK, so this is the CFD master who has been using Fluent for more than 10 years. Don't Play Play! Apart from that as a friend, he always gives me positive encouragements and is willing to share his problems with me as well. Indeed a good supervisor.
Antonino is also another good boss who is always there to offer help to rookie like me. He generally gives us the freedom to do and to express ourselves, as long as it's within the boundary. Though sometimes I'm not good in understanding his accent, I really appreciate his effort in trying to communicate even though it's through phone from London. However, I think it would be better if he's able to do that to ALL members of the team whom sometimes we might subconsciously have neglected.
Why are they nemesis to each other though I think that they are both nice chaps? Main reason is, both of them are phDs and they are at the same Associate level! Antonino prefers a money clean and direct approach where we are encouraged to just do the jobs only within our scopes without needing to waste more time, while Wei Zhong would prefer a more Asian approach that put more importance on the quality of the work delivered even though you are 2 weeks behind scheduled deadline. Not to mention of the fact that he likes to do his research in between working on his projects!!
Roy Sim (guy on the right), is another rookie from Malaysia like me, who entered Hoare Lea 2 months before me. Personally he's also another nice fella who always fetches me to the train station when I came down to Bristol for team meeting. The 'hardworking' guy who is able is to work 50 hours of overtime per month (paid of course). However, he's always misunderstood as the quiet guy and always chooses to express his opinios about his bosses to me after work through msn. It's always better that we try not to be too 'Malaysian' when dealing with non-Malaysians. Oh well ...
Next, the guy in the middle? He's my immediate supervisor, Craig Bowden. I have been 'stuck' under him for a year already. Lol actually that's not a bad thing really. I shall introduce him, as the IES master of the team. At first, he didn't strike as an extremely friendly boss. However, as time goes by I realised that I was actually wrong. He's in fact much more open-minded than a typical British. Learning from the best enabled me to get the best. Since he is also in favour of our big boss, therefore relatively I'm not in a big trouble in anyone else in the team. Well, it's not that I'm misunderstood, just that I will know that there'll always be people backing me up. Lol. Now that big boss has appointed him with more supervision task, he decided to remove the radio in our room so that he could concentrate on work. However, it proved to be futile as he gets bored fairly easily apparently, so he always ended up trying his lame attempt to compose some weird offbeat tunes. It didn't bother me much really, but I believe that it might have bothered him when I commented that his tunes were not 'songs' and all of them were always off-rhythm. Therefore, he decided to blast the whole room with BON JOVI!!
The guy on the left is Leon from London. He's also another rookie but a good one really. Another nice and easy going guy who has got much to offer to the team and the company. Bright future indeed.
The one staring at the camera is Tayo, our latest addition in Bristol. I first met him in the graduate conference where he made some impolite remark. Well, I forgave him because I believe he might have been drunk that night. Anyways, this guy is absolutely KOOL. Why? Because he blasted one of the speakers in our recent graduate training day with his simple comical question, 'how did u know that?' with that sort of typical African American style. The spectacled man from afar, next to Leon is Graham - the ultimate big boss who hired me. He is one of our company junior partners who is also in charge of the Public Health. Reasonable, but indeed a very busy man as well!!
More actions to follow after the lunch! Audley, the placement from London, was rolling the bowl flamboyantly, attempting to score a full strike.
Lol I bet that was the first time Wei Zhong the CFD master encountered difficulties in understanding the fluid dynamics surrounding the ball!!
Well that's the essence of my work environment for now. One might wonder why a process engineer would end up working in a building services firm? Simple. There are just not many choices out there in the UK. However, as long as I know that I am one step closer in fulfilling my dream which I could not even by struggling in my own country, I can't be happier.  |
No offence meant, but it would be a SHAME if u claim to know a great deal about japanese rock and yet not known about this legendary notorious band which have revolutionised the japanese rock music since the 90s!!
What kinda guy is he?! Think he sounds abit like Orochimaru .... LOL!!
