The story of cover: a hotpot buffet restaurant called “LEGEND” in Burwood, I had a good meal there to celebrate my CCL test pass.

It has been a while since my last post, and even my last post of “Casual Talk” series was before I got the job. I miss the feeling to write something I think freely. Finally I have finished my professional year classwork part, so I gained my Saturday back to write something to record what happened recently. Yes, it has already happened a lot of things.

New Manager

Unfortunately, my former manager, Minh Cung decided to leave my team and the company. I did enjoy the time when we worked together, admiring his talent and skills. We lived quite close, so we can still meet each other quite often. Of course, I also got a new manager, which I haven’t worked with for long, but I can already tell the difference in team management, expecting we have a good collaboration.

I Pass My CCL Test

On 4th February, I took my CCL test after 2 months part-time preparation and I got the result on 17th February. The test is only about 20 minutes long but cost me 800 dollars. I felt so happy about it because I felt pessimistic right after I finished the test due to too many mistakes I made. It turned out that I don’t need to pay the incredibly high test fee again, so we have a hotpot buffet to celebrate! (I enjoy my team culture, as we are so close and connected even after work)

Promotion

Just yesterday, the new manager told me I was promoted. As I just finished my probation, I would regard it as a rapid promotion. I felt excited and challenged since I definitely will tackle more work while under the spotlight. Overall, it is exciting news, and good for my long-term career.

Introduce Randomness to My Life

I would say I have a good start of 2026 as you can see from above, as well as my condition as an IT international student, but I still feel unsatisfied. Today, I talked with AI in an honest and straightforward way, tending to find my life issues that I missed, trying to find out the key factor. AI told me that I am good at or prefer structural, predictable tasks, but reluctant to unstructured and random incidents. The ways I manage my finance, schedule, energy all kill the randomness happening from the beginning. As a result, my life becomes two dots and one line.

Right now, I have three concerns:

• Permanent residency in Australia
• Costs in study abroad
• Zero relationship

AI told me the first two are in progress through my familiar pattern, and will be solved eventually. The last one is something out of my scope, which is hard to quantify, measure and track. I need to involve more randomness into my life, allowing myself to do things I thought meaningless and observe. If a passive pattern hasn’t work for over 20 years, it sounds more like a directional mistake instead of figures.