新祥紀食品有限公司

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I originally applied for the night-shift order input position. The interview was at a very remote factory in Shilin District, but the actual workplace was on Dihua Street.

The job involved taking customers’ orders by phone at night and then entering the orders. In the morning, the factory staff would sort, pack, and ship the products.

Entering the orders was what made me furious, because each product had a different code. There were nearly a thousand products, and we were expected to memorize the codes ourselves. There was no training manual or complete product-code reference at all! Attention!! The product codes consisted not only of numbers but also of letters.

If you entered orders too slowly or learned too slowly, you would also be nagged at!

In addition, since it was a family business, people spoke extremely loudly and completely disregarded the fact that you were on the phone with customers.

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First of all, I did not actively apply to this company; they contacted me through a job bank, so I did not have particularly high expectations to begin with. Perhaps this is what they mean by “no expectations, no disappointment.”

This company supplies food products, and it uses different company names on different job banks. Nan Hui Food Co., Ltd. and Xin Xiang Ji Food Co., Ltd., for example, are actually the same company. Now for the important part: the company is located in a remote area of Shilin. It is so remote that you suddenly realize Taipei actually has fields. The surrounding area consists entirely of sheet-metal factories, fields, and other desolate places with no sign of people. Occasionally, there are single-story houses that look 40–50 years old. I say they are old because some are damaged and collapsed, allowing you to see that no one lives inside. That is the surrounding environment. Since it is far from major roads, there is no MRT, and the vehicles coming and going are mainly large freight tractor-trailers.

When you arrive, you see that the company’s main buildings are warehouses and factories made of sheet metal. As for the many other company names I mentioned earlier, when I arrived, the address provided on the job bank led to a warehouse where I waited for a while without seeing anyone. Eventually, someone stacking goods told me that the actual location was directly across the street. The sign across the street displayed one of the company names I mentioned earlier. The whole thing gave a very disorganized, poorly managed, and制度-less impression, which was a major negative.

The office area was a very traditional first-floor sheet-metal building—the kind of atmosphere you would expect in the office of a metalworking manufacturer or freight company. They casually told me to wait in the meeting room on the right, then walked out without even turning on the lights. Someone else responsible for the area came in later to turn them on. They did not turn on the air conditioning, so the room was extremely hot and stuffy. The interviewer was a middle-aged woman around 45–50 years old, slightly overweight, wearing glasses with large lenses. She had a somewhat smoker’s-and-drinker’s voice, told me to fill out a standard résumé form, and then left.

It took about 10 minutes to finish. I informed her, and she came in to begin the interview. After I briefly described my previous work experience, she went through the job duties once in a slightly hoarse voice, as though reading from a script. After hearing it, I wondered whether they were stuck in the last century.

Although the position was listed as accounting assistant, during the first three months after starting, I would have to spend every morning packing and sorting goods in the sheet-metal warehouse I mentioned earlier. She said the company had more than 6,000 products, so “physical labor” was necessary to become familiar with them. Only in the afternoon would I handle shipment entries and administrative tasks. During those three months, the so-called combined administrative and accounting duties (in reality, half the job was warehouse management) would supposedly be carried out together; only afterward would the duties be separated. She claimed that the company’s specialization was highly detailed and that each person only needed to handle their own responsibilities. The contradiction is that, from the beginning, they wanted one person to do the work of three—basically treating the position like a disposable pair of chopsticks. And when she said, “Everyone who joins stays; the position is to fill the vacancy,” didn’t that simply mean they are always short-staffed?

As for salary and benefits, the offer was NT$24,000 plus NT$2,000 for perfect attendance (the statutory basic monthly wage this year is NT$25,250—they really know how to work the numbers), plus meal expenses. She also said there was supposedly a monthly performance bonus, but no bonuses for the three major holidays; everything else followed the Labor Standards Act. Then came another contradiction: she said that during busy periods, around the beginning and end of each month, there would be one day of overtime, emphasizing that overtime pay would be provided. But if the company’s division of labor was so detailed and everyone only needed to handle their own duties, how could things become so busy that overtime was necessary?

Anyway, after hearing everything, I quickly and perfunctorily ended the interview and left. I also noticed that she was eager to finish as soon as possible XD, because when she spoke quickly in her hoarse voice, her pronunciation became even funnier.