The New Company

After the farewell, it's the new beginning.

I've worked in a Malaysian Chinese company before. After more than a year I moved to an Indian company. I've been under a German company as well. This time, it's an Hong Kong company.

Of all the companies I've worked for, this would be one of the companies that...hmm...can't really tell. It's like working with the people from the TVB series when I hear them talking.

Today is my 2nd day at work and I'm still struggling in setting up my laptop before able to start learning the system.

The first day of work, I was busy installing and installing and installing. I was also asked to join their conference call with our HK colleague, though I have totally no idea what were they discussing about.

It could be torturing yet entertaining communicating with Hongkies. There are lots of things to learn from them, even the simple ABC have to be pronounced differently. R is pronounced as aelloww, F is aeffooo and W is dabiooo. To them, almost every alphabets has to be in 2 consonants.

Just after attending that 1 hour of conference call, my vocabulary in both English and Chinese have slightly increased. The call was wholly in Cantonese. So, while he was presenting the system, I could hear him repeating 'tek jeok' this, 'tek jeok' that, and 'tek jeok' etc. Based on my analysis after speaking in Cantonese and studying in English for so many years, 'tek' literally means 'kick' and 'jeok' means 'on'. Putting them together would mean 'kick off' or more precisely, means 'trigger'.

As for my English lesson, I can summarize everything as following...

"I need to CUST this page so that it can GEN a DIE-LA-MIC LEE-POT for you to DEM tomorrow."

The above statement was said in Cantonese except the capitalized bolded words. If you can't figure out the meaning, the words are customize, generate, dynamic report and demonstrate.

Creative, right? Even our to-lah-or-not-to-lah philosophy have to step aside.

And no, I'm not teasing nor complaining about Hongkies language. Please don't bombard me. It's just the different accent that I'm trying to point out here, though we both speak Cantonese.

I lurvvveee cultural differences.

posted by Survon @ 9:22 PM,