Yeah… You Know..

People gotta do what they gotta do.

I was in my way back from a customer visit. The factory is located somewhere around Cibubur or Bekasi or lets just say near there, not sure myself.  Then a thought flashed.

For many of you who work in Jakarta offices may already know what it takes to support the lifestyle. What I mean here is lifestyle as a working middle ranked staff in a medium to big company.

In that kind of position, people may got paid a lot better than many of other Indonesian worker with the same age and education background in other areas and that maybe one of the reasons many of fresh graduates willing to throw themself in to the recruitment battlefield and gain the honors to call themself as employee of (put a name of a company).

Being relatively well paid, during the first years of working when you are single, it may reasonable for you and most likely that you will choose to rent a place and pay around 1 to 3 million rups a month and enjoy living in the center of the crowd. By doing this you can walk to (maybe) the hypest mall in the country.  Watch the latest released movie and tweet or blog it afterwards and later on having a meal in a very nice dining and talk about hottest gossips that not even talked in those infotainment.

The heavenly lifestyle that many of our fellow Indonesian may only dreams about or only watch it from their televisions.

But then you get married. Having a family and start to settle down. Buy a house.

Unless you come from a ultra rich family or own a very succesful business beside the job I mentioned before that brings you money way a lot that your salary or you are someone who landed yourself a job with a very big salary, buying a land house in the middle of Jakarta is an option far beyond the calculation of bank mortgage based on your salary. Or so most of the cases are.

Apartment then is an option, either buying or renting. But many people here still want to have a land house for their family. Bekasi, Bogor, Cibubur, Serpong and those satellite cities are created.

Many of us live in those areas.

Commuting then coming as a direct consequence. One or two hours from home to the office for a single trip is nothing. Nothing compared to the salary amount received every single month. For some it even takes 3 hours or more just for a daily single trip.

I’m lucky enough to live in an area with commuter line that can bring me to my office only for around 45 minutes. Yet I stil try to land myself a job within 5 to 30 minutes motorcycle driving distance away. I don’t know whether is it me being too lazy or I value other things more than others but for me, now, if I manage to get a job with a decent enough salary with less time spent for commuting I don’t think I’ll spend 2 to 3 hours commuting.

But then again, till now I’m still trying to come to train station early enough to get an empty seat to sleep along the way or just write a post. People gotta do what they got to do for their life. Don’t they? 🙂