denniland.com

I went to EF at Delta Plaza Surabaya this morning to get my TOEFL test report. Shirley also asked me to get hers. Actually, she had been there on Monday but the report had not been prepared yet. The staff asked her to come back in one or two days.

I arrived there at about 9.30 AM. There were two receptionists at the guest room. A young woman and an older man. The woman was an IBC. She got a clear and white skin. Not that beautiful but pretty interesting. The man has a darker skin, a typical Indonesian. But I believe he ain’t a Javanese. His accent was rather different I can tell. The man was occupied so the woman got to serve me. Lucky me :p. Heck, not that lucky. I explained to her that I needed my test report. But she didn’t know anything about it. Gosh, I had to wait for the man who was likely in charge there.

Tick, tick, tick… Time was ticking away. The man had not ended his conversation with his guests yet. I started to feel impatient. I looked at the wall clock. Wow, there were three clocks. Each pointed a different time. Uh huh. I see, there were writings below each clock. The top clock showed the Surabaya’s time. The middle London’s and the last Boston’s. Do they really need to show the London’s and Boston’s time? Maybe they only want to look cool.

Oh finally the man finished his business. He moved to the table in front of me. Blech, I really hate to repeat my statements. But I did tell him that I needed to get my test report. He didn’t have it. He made a phone call to ask somebody about my test report. He told me then that the report had not been ready yet. He asked me to come back tomorrow. What the… I almost lost my temper. I said to him–in a raised tone–that it wasn’t the first time they asked me to come back again. Okay it wasn’t me. Shirley was the one who tried to get the report on Monday but what’s the difference? I insisted to get the report at that moment or else had them sent my report to the office today.

He seemed a bit confused. He made another phone call. He asked his mate about how was the report. Then he tried to create one. That’s better. I could wait. Gees, he was slow. Waiting impatiently makes everything seems slow.

Finally he finished the report. I asked him to make 4 copies of each. Mine and Shirley’s. Ha ha. I got him. The other staff told me the other day, that he could only make a copy of the report. I need to make a photocopy of it if I want more copies. But in that situation, I don’t think he had the guts to refuse my request. And he did make every single copy I need. I even asked a glassed envelope for each copy of the report. It made eight envelopes. I realize I’ve gone too far, but that time, I really wanted every second I wasted to be compensated. By the way, I am really disappointed about EF service. I mean it is a big company. They should know how to serve their customers well, shouldn’t they?

Today I had a TOEFL test with Shirley W. at EF Delta Plaza Surabaya at around 9 AM. I needed to take the test as a requirement for the ADS scholarship I am applying. But I was so sleepy I sent her a message that I would be late. Just before I left my house at 9.30 AM, my grannie told me that she had run out of money and inquired if my dad had sent her some. My mom did say to me that she had transfer the fund to my bank account but I needed to withdraw it from an ATM. So I went to the nearest ATM, got the money, and gave it to my grannie. Damn another delay. I arrived at EF at about 10.15 AM. I saw a girl seating in front of the building. I thought I had met her before but I couldn’t remember who she was. The heck, I was so in hurry I passed her. Shirley had begun the test the moment I entered the office. Fortunately I was allowed to catch up.

I entered the test room. A small room containing about ten Hewlett-Packards computers. I sat beside Shirley and the officer allowed me to begin my test. The first part was a writing test, but the officer told me to skip it and went throgh the second. It was a listening test. I put my headset on and started listening. Damn I was so screwed. I forgot that was an English test. I neither take it seriously nor listen carefully the first conversation. I didn’t understand even a sentence. I really needed a luck for that.

Okay forget it, let’s go to the second conversation. I listened very very carefully to the next questions and I could do them well enough. Although the discussions mostly took place in a classroom or a college, they varied and the topics were pretty entertaining: literary, physics, astronomy, math, the roman history, and the regular campus life. After about ten or more conversations, the second section was ended.

The third section was my favorite, the structure. I didn’t need to listen to any lengthy conversation nor read multi-paragraphs passages. I only read the sentences one by one and picked the right answer for each question. Gosh, I thought it was easy. But my last English class was well four years ago. Some uncommon structures forced me to think pretty hard and wasted my time. Screw me, the time ran out but I hadn’t finish all the third section’s questions yet.

I continued to the last section: Reading. It was boring since I had to read through some passages before I could answer any question. Anyway, it ain’t a big deal since I could finished the whole test in about an hour. I even finished much earlier than Shierly did although she started the test before me. I even got a slightly higher mark. My final mark was 223, higher than the minimum requirement for the scholarship (170). Thanks God. But Shirley seemed to be a bit upset with her score when he finally came out of the test room. Soon, the girl I saw earlier outside EF came in and asked Shirley’s result. I eventually remembered. She was Cimot (can’t remember her real name), a friend of Shirley. She accompanied Shirley there.

After the test, the three of us had our lunch at Mc. Donald’s. We chatted a bit while we were eating. Some times later, Cimot saw her boyfriend passing by and she went to him. After a while she returned to our table. After finishing our lunch, I headed back to the parking lot while Shirley and Cimot went to Cimot’s boyfriend’s mobile phone shop. I stopped by Flash Disc to rent some VCDs and DVDs. No interesting new titles were available. But I got A Cinderella Story and The Bourne Identity.

Hilary Duff is Cinderella

A Cinderella Story was another modern version of the classic Cinderella story. Hilary Duff once leaved only with her Dad. Her dad was her bestfriend and vice versa. Her dad ran a successful eating place. Things were good until her dad married a woman with two daughters. She got a new stepmother and two older sisters. Anyway she was happy for her daddy. Until a tragic earthquake killed her dad.

Then things changed drastically. Her stepmother took all her dad’s belongings and started to treat Hilary as a mere servant. She must now serve her stepmother as well as her two annoying stepsisters. I won’t tell the rest of the story since it is very easy to guess. It closely resemble the classic Cinderella only without the magical things. Simple plots, average actors’ performances, and great soundtracks performed by Hilary Duff herself. I only rent this movie because she is currently one of my favorite celebrities. She’s hot and she has a sweet angel voice. One of the soundtracks is familiar to me. It’s “Come Clean” performed by Hilary Duff.

The Bourne Identity

The story began with some sailors in a fishing ship. One day, they found a human body floating in the sea. They picked him up and he was still alive. Unfortunately, the man couldn’t remember who he was, what he was doing, where he was heading, and what was happening to him. He got amnesia. The only clue was a bullet burried under his skin that contained a Swiss bank account number. Soon after landing, he headed to Swiss. One night when he was sleeping at a park bench, two guards asked him to leave. He was upset and beat them up. He was surprised knowing that he had the martial art skill.

Upon arriving at the bank, the officer let him access his storage consisting a large amount of money, a gun, and many passports with his picture on it. He had the US passport with the name Jason Bourne along with other nations’ passports. French, Brazil, Italy, and UEA to name some of them. He got even more confused. He took all the money and the passports with him but he left the gun. And Jason Bourne’s journey to find his true identity was started. The movie was packed with some cool actions of CIA agents trying to eliminate Jason Bourne. Matt Damon performed well as Jason Bourne. I like the story as well as the actions. By the way, it had a sequel already on theaters, The Bourne Supremacy. Hopefully I can watch it soon.

We had two sessions of knowledge sharing today. The first was about discovering our personalities by Dinny. It took place in the library after the lunch. People tend to like this kind of sharing than the technical ones. So without doubt, most of us attended the session. I think there were more at least twenty people. Unfortunately the library room is so small we weren’t comfortable.

The session did well enough though. Dinny introduced the popular four kinds of temperaments (I’d rather call them personalities though): sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. For your information, we had been asked to do a 40-questions test earlier. The answers were summarized based on certain formula to discover our personality types. The result showed a well balanced groups. We were almost evenly divided into four groups of the personalities. Of course noone had the pure personality types. All were hybrids but a personality generally dominated the others.

I had the purest personality type by the way. From the 40 questions, 32 proved that I was extremely choleric. 5 showed my sanguine side while only 3 told that I was melancholic. From the session, I knew that the choleric is extrovert, short-tempered, a born-leader, a doer, and perfectionist. Yeah it’s pretty much like me, I couldn’t deny it. Dinny also suggested that the cholerics should find the phlegmatics as their soulmates. It sounds sensible but I prefer the melancholic. I love the intellectuals.

The next session was Anton’s guide to creating a game with Macromedia Flash and ActionScript. Our knowledge sharings will be evaluated at the end of the year. The best will get a prize. Okay the prize is not the main concern here but I felt it was not fair enough for Anton since he was the newest employee yet he got his turn before the formers. Personally I don’t think his performance satisfying today. He couldn’t explain well and clearly to us. Maybe he was nervous. Maybe he didn’t even know that most of us had no computing background. Too bad, maybe I should inform him before to avoid using highly technical terms. I decided to leave the session earlier since I couldn’t hold my tounge that always tried to take over his session. Hehehe truly I am a choleric.