Woman gives up lucrative job to save dad’s car workshop

Compiled by BENJAMIN LEE and C. ARUNO

IN a bid to save her father’s car repair workshop, a woman in Singapore gave up her job in finance to become a mechanic, Sin Chew Daily reported.

Cordellia Ann Tan Mei Yin, 27, made the switch after seeing her father’s declining business due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

She said his business went too bad until their access to water, electricity and WiFi had been cut off.

“Since my expertise is in helping startups, I asked myself why not go back and help out to revive the business,” she said.

To acquire the skills of a mechanic, the National University of Singapore graduate went back to school and took courses at Ngee Ann Polytechnic. Tan had also started giving online tutorials on car maintenance to reach out to more customers.

The shop’s TikTok account has more than 7,000 followers and her videos were viewed more than 170,000 times.

As a woman in a male-dominated industry, Tan said that she had to deal with gender discrimination at times.

“There was once a customer who told me that I was stupid to quit a proper job just to sell tyres. He also said that I have destroyed my future,” she said.

Another foreign distributor declined to speak with Tan, saying he preferred to deal with a “male boss”.

But these negative experiences did not kill her determination.

“Most customers and other counterparts have been good and supportive.

“They admire the fact that a young woman was willing leave a Singapore job to fix her family’s financial issues,” she said.

> Hong Kong superstar Jackie Chan admitted that he was out of touch with the times as he could not understand why the younger generation are fascinated with their phones., Oriental Daily reported.

When asked if he uses any messaging apps, Chan, 69, replied boldly that they were a waste of time.

“I don’t even have WeChat. I would rather spend time interacting with people, watching good movies, listening to music, learning national language, reading poems, attending meetings to find good scripts and practising martial arts,” he said.

The above articles are compiled from the vernacular newspapers (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil dailies). As such, stories are grouped according to the respective language/medium. Where a paragraph begins with a >, it denotes a separate news item.