The Office - Kenyan Temp's Version

This blog was due like a month ago. So, this is where I spend most of my life for the past one month and I'm already complaining about the annoying drag that is the modern corporate lifecycle. Months before I landed this job (read internship) I would have given up a limb just to get it but now it seems I would totally have been begging for a limb refund.

So what do I earn? The lowest intern rate I've heard to date anywhere in Nairobi; .. basically 5 dollars a day. Even for a continental bank like this,that's some serious staff under-appreciation. But I'll call that a pro because I didn't even receive a single cent while at Jubilee Insurance and I know a lot of my pals simply enjoying the working experience and getting no guap.

Second perk? Tea and Porridge. I'm not even a porridge guy but I guess you just find yourself taking whats offered when its all that's offered. This kind of mentality you only get from peeps who were raised in the projects...yes, and that is yours truly.. Third Perk, the occasional sympathy transport arrangement for workers clocking extra hours,which is a taxi voucher signed to Kenatco taxis when I happen to be chacking the office at 9 o'clock onwards. Now, I do recall it being mentioned in one of the numerous multi-interviewer interviews I had to go through that I would be required sometimes to push extra hours on the job because of the enormous work loads but I didn't think that 'sometimes' was an nonoperational utterance to entice the meek inexperienced job seeking undergrad lamb that presented itself so humbly yet ultra-eagerly to the slaughter. Which hence brings me to the cons.

Well, I don't know what they told you before you got your first induction into a working environment but I have a huge feeling they didn't secretly construe to turn you into the proverbial bat. To date I could somehow claim to have fit the role of a semi-vampire, a Mungiki clerk of sorts. Yani Ive become fully inconspicuous to the outside world. I only get out in the light of day on my lunch break which I take full advantage of until that Safcom operator (read- my boss) alerts me that I have reached the grand-time threshold (read -I have taken too long to get back from my lunch break and nikizoea nitapewa a non-returnable unlimited one-off lunch break ;yani ,get fired.). So humbly I return to my desk till the clock hits the seventh digit and then proceed to execute my exit.

Then there's the anti-idleness campaign policy which has been severely integrated into the entire organization with special ''thanks'' to the IT department who have configured a network that detects Facebook or Facebook resembling website users and diligently cuts off all internet access to suchlike employees (or maybe just me ,cause among the most junior of workers) hence diverting their attention to more business related thoughts, specifically business they were employed for in the first place. So, now I cant leave the office by any means fathomable, physical or cybertronic. Kumurder madot com, thats all I can say. I'm the only intern on the 13^th floor so idle chat with the rest of the super-busy staff is kinda out of my territory ,though I had managed to find a relatively idler dude to babble with when I was working in the risk and compliance offices ..well, not anymore after they decided to take me back to Administration to work right under my bosses eyebrows. Great!

My only mental escape route from the ferocious teeth of redundant boredom now are the blogs I write ,mobile Facebook and maybe a few flips through today's paper. Depressing ,just depressing. And lets not even get into the sexual-psychological trauma of an entire day of redundant data entry and data tabulation and data arrangement... you don't get more molested than that.

So my fellow brethren and sistren in the actuarial intern's market (dysfunctional as it is) trying to cope with the daily emotions of overworking ,under-appreciation and lack of self fulfillment, remember that that lame office desk full of paper to photocopy and file is just another step in the ladder to some serious fortunes up ahead on the journey to success. Till the next scoop.