Having always been a bit different (some say VERY), I naturally gravitated towards the self-employed/freelance/entrepreneur world.

Once I found it, of course.

My first foray into the working world was as a part-time admin assistant in the F&B department of a local country club. It was a holiday job, just before I started studying in Temasek Polytechnic (Biotechnology!)

The job came through an introduction, so I got it pretty easily. And because there were 6 months between getting my O level results and the start of my polytechnic course, I had plenty of time.

I found soon that I likely wasn't entirely needed, because most of the tasks were straightforward and I finished them in short order, thus ending up with a lot of downtime.

One of the tasks was supposed to take over a week, but I got it done in 2 days.

Unfortunately, being in an office environment at a low ranking job, and partly because I was introduced into it, I couldn't look like I had nothing to do even though I really had nothing to do.

This was extraordinarily hard.

I couldn't sit around reading, and there were no modern mobile phones with ready Internet access. The computers here weren't exactly very fast and there just wasn't that much on the Internet in those days anyway.

Within a couple weeks, I was completely bored. I didn't have the autonomy to spend downtime the way I wanted to, and I didn't have anything challenging or interesting to do.

I left after 2 months to preserve my sanity.

I am thankful to the person who got me the job, because I did learn a number of things, and it gave me a number of stories to tell since then.

It also taught me that I needed to find work that I could pour myself into and that I really couldn't stand tedium.

Also, I'm thankful to the person because I earned enough to go LAN gaming every day for the next 4 months (If you remember when this was a huge thing, you're likely of a similar age to me. :p ) before my poly course started.

Yes, I was a gamer. And through gaming, I learned a lot of very useful principles for designing learning programmes (again, a post for another time).

If I could go back in time, I don't think I would have changed this bit of my past, boring though it was. I feel that it had great formative value.