Thursday, January 15, 2004

Warehouse Sales at the Expo

my arms and back are so so tired from all the heavy manual work setting up the wares for sales. my legs are tired from all the walking and standing around over long periods of time. my butt aches from all the long periods of time sitting on the cold hard expo ground. the term cashier was in fact a farce as basically i didnt do much cashiering, i did do some, but most of the time is doing odd works and trying out different ways to skive off work while apparently doing work.

the only thing good that came out of this stint was the friends id made. the girls ive befriends on tues and wed, rose, felicia, andrea, jaime, colleen, it was fun hanging out with them thinking of ways to do work when we werent doing anything at all. confused? an example, packing and folding clothes allowed us to have an excuse to sit of the floor, so we took a box of clothes, tagged them, folded them, sorted them in designs and colours, packed them neatly into the box, all at extremely slow speeds, then emptied the box, and packed them all over again. another example, when we were supposed to put up signages, we took the different signs and walked all around the expo hall looking as though we were finding suitable positions to put them up when we were in fact just blindly walking around and chatting. okay, i aint that lazy! it was just that most of the stuff we were supposed to do had been done and there was nothing to do but we cant blatantly just sit around and do nothing so we had to think of these ways to occupy ourselves!

finally, today i got to touch the cash till and serve customers. n i hell screwed them all up man! i broke down on the first customer i served. i was like so damn slow, made a whole lot of mistakes, and had to trouble my poor in-charge siew geok to help me clear up the mess while i had to endure pissed look of that dear customer. i fumbled on my first customer paying by nets too. id just blanked out on how to operate that stupid machine and had to call in siew geok again. luckily this customer was very easy going and he n his friend actually could joke with me being a pathetic greenhorn. well, to redeem myself, my cashiering skills actually improved along with the number of customers id served. yay!

n i did make more friends today. there is fellow cashier sherry whom i slacked around with today after id got ridden of my cashiering duties, my dear packer ser yang from ntu who had to work for his hostel hall, some other slacking merchandise clearer thian boon and his friend who took sherry and i on a slacking expedition around the expo hall, a poor san who had to sort out ladies wear all by himself until sherry, colleen and i went over to skive by apparently helping him, and many more other fellow slacking souls. another redemption was that john little really employed too many temp staff this time.

working at this expo sales really introduced many different kinds of people to me and it let me see how unreasonable some singaporeans can be. there was this old malay woman who wanted to buy a whole lot of crockery and insisted to the cashier that it is cheaper than we thought so when we knew matter of factly that we were correct. that woman insisted on seeing our in-charge, and when told over and over again the correct price, she decided to leave that big box of breakable items with us and continued shopping while thinking if she still wanted those goods. she came back to that same counter again with another box of similar crockery and said she didnt want the previous box when basically both are of the same items with the same price. really damn kanasai one!!!

the most head shaking people are those women who pick up bags and bags of clothes over to a corner then slowly pick and decide which ones do they really want, then just dump the rest of the clothes around. some women are even more impressive. since this john little sale is not equipped with fitting rooms, those women would pick up bags of clothes over to one side and try them on over their clothes, under their clothes, and when picking out clothes for children, they treated the whole expo area as one big fitting room. those poor kids. by the mid day, most kids were visibly bored stiff. one little boy around 2 years was so fed up with his mother that he kept walking away from her to sherry, colleen and me picking up hangers for us. like duh?! but because we were as bored as him, we humoured him. like even more duh?!

if only there were like some shuai ges around, maybe work will be more fun. but basically the guys there are like so so pathetic, not to mention short, like double the patheticness. haiz...