6/17, 6/18 - Work

Long story short, they didn't have much for me to do. Winston and Jason are both away on business.

6/17

At the bus stop, Rachel gave me Korean ramen! For real, from Korea!!

8:30-9:30 Sat around for an hour.

At 9:30, I made it my mission to ask someone if they needed help.

Since Rachel is the only person in the Finance department that is actually in the office, I asked Rachel if she needed any help. She was just like uh... not really... but come sit down and I'll show you stuff!

We spent a solid hour and 45 min with her showing me all of the different internal control files and programs they use, then she showed me her 140 slide powerpoint that she made (and has to make each month). She showed me the company's financials in excel, and how they consolidate it with Hyperion. She talked about all of the problems that are arising after the acquisition of Schramm because Schramm's policies are very different from Akzo Nobel's policies. Also, the managers of a bunch of the other branches don't talk very good English (lol) and also do not feel that accurate financial statements are important (lol). They only care about sales revenues.

Anyways, then it was 11, and I returned to my desk.

Stephanie (head of HR - Asia region) came up to me and asked if I was busy. I said no, and she gave me this 'presentation brief' for me to do.

Boring... it's about human resource management. Who cares about that kind of stuff??

She said it's to 'evaluate my presentation skills,' but it's just busy work... oh well at least I have something to do.

Now I'm researching all this HR structure and whatnot. The excitement is killing me!

Finished my presentation before the end of the day and sent it to her.

For dinner, I had ramen with 2 eggs and some cabbage! Yum!

On the way home, Rachel said that she is planning on going to Korea this weekend.

So, that would mean that 0 people from the Finance department will be in for the rest of the week. So, I decided to go back to Chengdu!

6/18

I was in contact with my parents and and my cousin for buying a ticket back to Chengdu. For some reason my parents think I'm incapable of doing things myself. Well, I had everything ready up to the final screen where you have to enter credit card info and pay... Turns out debit cards in China don't have a CVC code apparently, so I couldn't buy it. But I still was able to understand enough Chinese to find cheap tickets!

Ended up telling my cousin the flight numbers that I wanted, and she ordered them for me over the phone.

The rest of the day was spent killing time and sitting around.

My flight to Chengdu was scheduled for 11:45am on Wednesday (6/19) on Sichuan Airlines. So exciting!