Work & Business

Email, meetings, customers

• My Job A1 I work in a small shop. The shop sells bread and cakes. I start at seven in the morning. I open the door and turn on the lights. Then I put the bread…
• The Office A1 Our office is on the fourth floor. There are ten desks and one big window. My desk is near the door. I have a computer, a lamp and a small plant. The…
• My Boss A1 My boss is a woman. Her name is Bu Ratna. She is forty years old. She is kind, but she is strict about time. "Be on time," she says every day.
• A Busy Day A1 Today is very busy. The phone rings all the time. Many emails come. A customer is angry because his order is late. I say, "I am sorry. I will check."
• Payday A1 Today is payday. I check my bank. The money is there! I smile. I work hard every month for this day. I give some money to my mother. She says thank…
• The Meeting A1 We have a meeting at ten. Everyone sits at the big table. Bu Ratna talks about the new plan. I listen and write notes. I do not understand everything.
• My First Customer A1 It is my first day at the shop. I am nervous. A woman comes in. She wants a red bag. I show her three bags. She likes the small one.
• Late for Work A1 I wake up late. My alarm does not ring. It is eight thirty! Work starts at eight. I run to the bus stop. The bus is slow. I arrive at nine.
• Lunch with Colleagues A1 At twelve we go to a warung near the office. Five of us. We sit at a long table. Ari orders noodles. Sari orders rice and chicken. I order soup.
• A Small Business A1 My aunt sells cakes from her house. She makes them in the morning. Her kitchen smells sweet. She sells them to the shops near her home.
• The Job Interview A2 Last week I had an interview for a job at a bank. I was so nervous that I couldn't eat breakfast. I wore my only white shirt and my brother's shoes,…
• My Colleague Talks Too Much A2 I sit next to Budi in the office. He is a nice person, but he talks all day. He talks about his weekend, his motorbike, his neighbour's cat and the…
• Asking for a Day Off A2 My sister's wedding was on a Friday, and I needed the day off. I'm new at the company, so I was afraid to ask. I thought my boss would say no, or…
• Selling Online A2 Six months ago I started selling my mother's chili sauce online. She's been making it for years, and everyone who tries it asks for more. I took some…
• The Difficult Customer A2 I work at a phone shop. Most customers are friendly, but last Tuesday a man came in shouting. His new phone had stopped working after two days. He…
• Working Night Shifts A2 For the last three months I've worked night shifts at a convenience store. I start at ten at night and finish at six in the morning. My family sleeps…
• The Team Lunch A2 Every month our company has a team lunch. The boss pays, and we go to a restaurant near the office. Last month it was a big Padang restaurant with…
• My First Salary Negotiation A2 When the company offered me the job, they told me the salary. It was lower than I expected. My friend said, "Ask for more." I said, "I can't, they'll…
• The Broken Printer A2 In our office there's one printer, and it breaks every week. Last Thursday it broke while I was printing a report for a meeting in ten minutes. I…
• A Second Job A2 During the day I work at a bookshop. In the evening, three times a week, I teach English to children at a small course near my house. The bookshop…
• Resigning Politely B1 🔒 Premium After four years at the same company, I decided to leave. The job wasn't bad, but I'd stopped learning, and a smaller company had offered me something more interesting. The…
• The Presentation That Went Wrong B1 🔒 Premium I'd prepared for two weeks. Twenty slides, a clear structure, a strong ending. The presentation was to the company's directors, and my manager had told me it could lead to a…
• Starting a Coffee Cart B1 🔒 Premium My coffee cart opened in March, on a corner near the office district, with a total investment of about eight million rupiah and a lot of fear. I'd worked in cafes for five years, I…
• When Your Friend Becomes Your Boss B1 🔒 Premium Ari and I started at the company on the same day, sat at neighbouring desks for three years, and complained about the same managers over the same lunches. We were friends in the…
• The Email I Shouldn't Have Sent B1 🔒 Premium It was late, I was tired, and a colleague from the marketing team had just sent a message blaming my department for a delay that was clearly their fault. I read it twice, felt my…
• The Warung That Went Digital B1 🔒 Premium My mother has run a warung on the same corner for twenty-two years. Rice, five or six dishes, fried tempeh, iced tea, plastic chairs. She knows every customer's name and most of…
• Learning to Delegate B1 🔒 Premium For the first year as a team leader I did everything myself. Not because I didn't trust my team — I told myself I trusted them — but because doing it myself was faster, and because…
• The Customer Is Not Always Right B1 🔒 Premium Every service job I've ever had came with the same phrase, printed on the wall or repeated in training: the customer is always right. For years I accepted it. Then I spent two…
• Remote Work, Two Years In B1 🔒 Premium When the office closed in 2020, everyone thought it was temporary. Two years later I still work from a desk in the corner of my bedroom, and the company has quietly stopped…
• Why I Fired My Best Client B1 🔒 Premium When you run a small design business, a big client is a kind of miracle — steady work, regular invoices, the freedom to say no to the small jobs. For eighteen months, a company…
• The Meeting That Could Have Been an Email B2 🔒 Premium There's a genre of meeting that everyone recognises and nobody admits to organising: the one that exists to have existed. Eight people in a room, or on a screen, for an hour, at…
• What My First Business Failure Taught Me B2 🔒 Premium The clothing shop lasted fourteen months. I'd like to say it failed for reasons beyond my control — the location, the economy, a competitor with deeper pockets — and each of those…
• The Salary Conversation Nobody Teaches You B2 🔒 Premium In eleven years of working I'd never once asked for a pay rise. I'd waited for them, accepted them when they came, and privately resented the years they didn't. The resentment was…
• Managing People Older Than Me B2 🔒 Premium I was thirty-one when I was promoted to lead a team whose average age was forty-six. Two of the eight had been at the company longer than I'd been alive. One, Pak Hendra, had…
• The Side Hustle Trap B2 🔒 Premium Every third article about work these days is about the side hustle — the second income, the passion project, the thing you do at night that might one day replace the thing you do…
• Hiring My First Employee B2 🔒 Premium For four years the catering business was me: me cooking, me delivering, me invoicing at midnight, me apologising when the three things collided. It was exhausting and it was also,…
• The Toxic Colleague B2 🔒 Premium Every workplace has one, and describing them is difficult because their damage is deniable. Nothing Hendri did was, on its own, a firing offence. He didn't shout. He didn't steal…
• Burnout Doesn't Announce Itself B2 🔒 Premium I thought burnout would feel like a crisis — a collapse, a breakdown, a moment you could point to afterwards and say, there. It didn't. It arrived so gradually that for months I…
• The Family Business Dilemma B2 🔒 Premium My father built the shop over thirty years, from a single stall to three branches and a small warehouse, and the assumption, never stated but never doubted, was that I'd take it…
• Automation and the Job I Used to Have B2 🔒 Premium For eight years I processed invoices. That's a simpler description than the job deserved — I checked, matched, chased, reconciled, and knew the supplier accounts of a mid-sized…
• The Myth of the Dream Job C1 🔒 Premium Somewhere in the last few decades, work acquired a new obligation: it was supposed to make us happy. Not merely to pay, or to be tolerable, or to leave enough of the day for the…
• On Being the Boss C1 🔒 Premium Nobody tells you that the promotion is a loss. You're congratulated, you're given a title and, if you're lucky, a raise, and the assumption on all sides is that you've moved up —…
• The Slow Death of the Nine-to-Five C1 🔒 Premium The nine-to-five is dying, and the obituary depends on who's writing it. For the optimists — the consultants, the founders, the people whose livelihoods involve selling flexibility…
• What a Small Shop Knows C1 🔒 Premium On the corner of the street where I grew up there's a shop that has sold, for as long as I can remember, an inventory that no algorithm would ever assemble: rice, batteries, chili…
• The Interview from the Other Side of the Table C1 🔒 Premium I've interviewed perhaps four hundred people over the past decade, and hired about sixty, and I want to say something that I think most candidates would find surprising: I'm nearly…
• Money and the Things We Don't Say C1 🔒 Premium In my family we talked about everything except money. Illness, death, marriage, the failures of neighbours — all fair game at the dinner table. But the question of what anyone…
• The Economics of Loyalty C1 🔒 Premium Loyalty is the virtue that companies praise most and reward least, and the gap between the praise and the reward is one of the quiet scandals of modern work. I've watched it from…
• What the Night Shift Sees C1 🔒 Premium There is a second city that runs beneath the first, and it clocks on when the first clocks off. I spent six years in it — nights at a logistics hub, sorting the parcels that would…
• The Startup and the Village C1 🔒 Premium I spent three years at a startup that was going to change the way people bought vegetables, and then I spent a month in my grandmother's village, where people have bought…
• Retirement, Seen from Halfway C1 🔒 Premium My father retired last year, and I've watched him since with the particular attention of someone who's begun to do the arithmetic on his own. He was a civil engineer for…