WHY HE QUIT
6pm: Nose surgery; 8pm: Back at work
SOME called him crazy, but he did not care. Even an annual basic salary of $100,000 was not enough to keep him in the job.[=> $770k leh?]
After seven months as an investment banker in London, Mr Chris Ho, 28, decided to call it quits.
'You earn all that money but have no time to enjoy it, because whatever free time you have, you just sleep,' said the London School of Economics graduate with a degree in Economics.
The unpredictable hours also took a toll on his social life.
'I couldn't even make dinner plans. If my boss asked me to do something at 6.45pm, I would have to do it and cancel on friends,' he said.
But the final straw was when he had to go for a surgical procedure in January at 6pm and had to be back at work two hours later.
While the operation was a simple one - the fusing of capillaries in the nose to stop his nose-bleeds - he had been on local anaesthetic and felt he should have been given some time to rest.
'It was a bit too much for me to take and I just started thinking about why I was in the job,' he said.
A month later, he tendered his resignation.
Mr Ho admitted the big pay packet was a key reason for taking the job in the first place.
Before landing it, Mr Ho spent 10 weeks interning with the bank. They paid him £5,500 ($16,590) for the stint - which works out to about $6,600 for a month's work.
'I earned more in the internship than my dad earned in two months when he started working,' said Mr Ho.
When he started with the bank, the sign on bonus was £4,000 and the salary was £35,000.
Now, as a teacher at a junior college, Mr Ho earns a third of what he was getting in London, but he does not regret his decision.
'I have more of a personal life and I gain more satisfaction from what I do,' he said.
Melissa Sim
No comments:
Post a Comment