楠暉食品有限公司

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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 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, farmland, and other desolate areas with no sign of human life. Occasionally, there are single-story houses that look 40–50 years old. I say they are old because some are damaged and collapsed, revealing that no one lives inside. That is the environment around the area. It is also far from major roads; never mind the MRT—the vehicles passing by are mainly large freight trucks and tractor-trailers.

When you arrive, you see that the company’s main buildings are warehouses and factories made of sheet metal. The reason there are so many other company names, as I mentioned earlier, became clear when I arrived: the address listed on the job bank led to a warehouse, where I waited for a while without seeing anyone. Eventually, someone stacking goods told me 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 negative impression of confusion and a lack of organization.

The office area was a very traditional first-floor sheet-metal building, with the atmosphere of an office attached to a metalworking shop or freight business. They casually told me to wait in the meeting room on the right, then left without even turning on the lights. Someone else in charge eventually came to turn them on, but they did not turn on the air conditioner, so the room was extremely stuffy and hot. The person responsible for the interview was a middle-aged woman around 45–50 years old, slightly overweight, wearing glasses with large lenses. She had a somewhat smoky, husky voice. She told me to fill out a standard résumé form, tell her when I was finished, and then walked out.

It took me about 10 minutes to finish. After I notified her, she came in and started the interview. After I briefly described my previous work experience, she went through the job duties once in a slightly hoarse voice, as if reading from a script. After hearing it, I suspected that the company was stuck in the previous century.

Although the position was advertised as an accounting assistant, for 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 claimed that the company had more than 6,000 products and that actual “physical labor” was necessary to become familiar with them. Only in the afternoon would I handle shipment entry and administrative work. During those three months, the so-called combined administrative and accounting duties (which really meant spending half the time doing warehouse work) would supposedly later be separated into different positions. They claimed that the company’s specialization was very detailed and that everyone only needed to handle their own responsibilities. The contradiction is that, from the beginning, they wanted one person to do the work of three people—it really felt like they were preparing disposable chopsticks. And when she said, “Everyone who joins stays; the position is just being filled,” didn’t that basically mean the position had always been vacant?

As for salary and benefits, the offer was NT$24,000 plus NT$2,000 for perfect attendance (the statutory minimum monthly wage this year is NT$25,250—they are really good at this), as well as a meal allowance. She also said there was supposedly a monthly performance bonus, but no bonuses for the three major holidays. Everything else would follow the Labor Standards Act. Then came another contradiction: she said that during busy periods, there would be one day of overtime around the beginning or end of each month, emphasizing that overtime pay would be provided. But if the company’s division of labor was supposedly so detailed and everyone only needed to do their own job, why would it get so busy that overtime was necessary?

Anyway, after hearing everything, I quickly and perfunctorily ended the interview and left. I also noticed that the other person was eager to end it quickly XD, because when she spoke rapidly in her hoarse voice, her pronunciation became even funnier.