Manpower without manpower!

Actually, manpower job was quite a "saikang" one. Most of the jobs like discipline, WIT, ICT, Pay, Promotion... All under manpower. Coming to the "brigade" office, my upperstudy Clement said, "Welcome to the manpower family." I did not know what it meant but slowly I realised that manpower job requires lots of patience, passion and enthusiasm.

I slowly took over the jobs as SOMP (Staff Officer Manpower) and realised that there were a lot of things that I needed to learn. From maintaining daily operation of the "brigade" to how to charge a person, all these directives we must know and they are always changing. However, I slowly learnt that oneself alone could not handle so much tasks and the only way to resolve this is to rely on the fellow men around you.

I treated all my men as my friends to the point that they requested me to be more harsh on them. Well, I believed that we should work as a team and I was only there to guide them along. After all, we were also NSFs, what for to tekan them? Hence, I adopted an open policy in the office. Fortunately, this was accordance to my boss's family policy for the office and everything went quite smoothly between us. However, occassionally, there would be some disputes and politics in the office, but fortunately we were able to overcome them with the policy.

Handling NSmen was also not an easy task and required some techniques. As they were older than me and should have more experience than me, I had to respect them. Indeed, I have learnt a lot from them, especially on the current situation in the society. One reason that I have changed my university course eventually was because of their advices. However, sometime we had to reason with them like for the common case IPPT, we need to reason with them with a strong point. By the way, IPPT/RT defaulters were big headaches for manpower jobs, all the NSmen please take your IPPT on time.

1 year of administrative training as manpower officer had prepared me very well for outside world. I got to learn a lot of human resource management, as well as handling those irritating office politics, especially those super big Tai Ji and Arrows. Well, it was really a relief when my understudy, Wenkai, came to take over me. However, I still told my guys, to look for me for gathering or if they have any problems. Anyway, we were comrades in the army afterall.