After more than 1.5 years out of daily job circle, last Wednesday I officially started my day by sitting inside my new office, Carat Indonesia. Not inside a cubicle, fortunately, but in a comfortable room, around 2×2 m2 with a comfortable chair, a huge desk and a wireframe trash bin that look exactly like a default Mac OS X Tiger’s trash bin (Yeah, I know it’s weird to make a reference about a trash bin – but I just couldn’t help it.). There are still some leftover stuff from the previous resident of this room, I had no idea what should I do with those stuff. Some items are still missing, I keep a reminder to ask for a whiteboard (As a person with responsibility for digital stuff, I had a strange need to write things, with hand and pen, everywhere – so a whiteboard is a necessity). I unofficially called my room, the ‘-Chamber-‘.
That’s the physical. For the psychological, it was fine. Got introduced with almost everybody but couldn’t really socialize as I was sitting by myself inside my ‘chamber’ most of the time during the first day. So yeah, no socializing more than say ‘hi’ to a couple of people. The second and third day were not much different except the socialize thing started to escalate a bit. The fact that I am the first and only ‘digital specific’ person in the company didn’t really made this ‘socialize’ thing matter too much. Of course, socializing is part of the office life but in this case didn’t socialize much somehow helped me to concentrate more on my work.
The Tasks
About the job itself. Basically my current responsibilities are covering three tasks. Only three? Well, let me said those three were like the exam essay question with 1.a, 1.b, 1.c and so on parts. So, what are they?
- My first task is to re-established the presence of Carat Indonesia on the web since the domain carat.co.id was expired months ago. It will be very awkward to announce that we had a new digital division and not having a website, right?
- Second task is to build a presentation about the digital situation in Indonesia, a tough one. Tough because not only there were not enough information or data about it, for most of the time, Indonesia’s cases were unique and totally different than any cases around the world. It was difficult to get more information about digital users more than just 8.9% of the population (around 20 million) for internet users and 27.2% of the population (around 65 million people) for mobile users. Of course, there are many commercially available information out there – but buying them straight away was like buying a cat in a sack, I did not know if their data or methods were correct or even reliable, so if anybody out there could provide me with this kind of information with high reliability level – commercial or non-commercial, please let me know, I would love to discuss this.
- Third task is to integrate digital media as a part of the media solution offered by Carat to its clients and prospects. This is actually the main reason why I am working here. It could be a small part or an entire part, depend on the problem we tried to solve. I am a believer of ‘integrated solution’ as I believe there were only a couple of rare situations when digital or traditional solution alone will be able to solve any problem in this era of augmented society.
So there they are. Of course, when the first and the second task are done, I will concentrate more in the third tasks with all of its related issues.
Overall, everything looks great and challenging. So, wish me luck on this new place!