The Long and Short about My Love for Money

I take back every single moronic pronouncement that I made previously on this blog about me not loving money, and money NOT being the oxygen of my happiness. Because it is.

Money can make me put up with:

(1) Being a sales promoter.

"Hello, would you like try our kueh lapis? We are having a $10 off promotion, only for today, last day."

Try repeating that a hundred times in a few hours, and then getting rejected about 60% of the time.

(2) Travelling an hour just to get to work.

They didn't get back to me initially, because they thought that I lived too far from the workplace. But, I practically insisted, that it was no huge deal at all travelling from the west to the east side of singapore every bloody morning.

(3) Running for the bus like an idiot every morning.

It's true. The further you live from your intended destination, the earlier you tend to reach. Remember how back in school, when the earliest to reach the school was the same person living furthest away from the school, and how the latecomers all lived nearby?

Well, I'm proud to say that I've ALWAYS been on time (i.e 5 to 10 minutes late only) since I started work about a week ago. No mean feat, I'll have you know. Everyone who knows me knows that I walk at the pace of an old granny carrying ten bags, and absolutely abhor running for the bus because I dread the pityingly looks on the faces of everyone who happens to be standing at the bus stop, when I've just ran 10,000 km after the bus and missed it by a whizz of a second.

(4) My stupid bloody moronic idiotic ungentlemanly Indonesian boss.

Firstly, it is just NOT RIGHT, to have two girls (one young, the other pregnant) to lug two heavy luggages all the way from the car to the office, and YOU (a young, perfectly normal man) to carry a light packet of tissue paper boxes or even NOTHING, trailing behind the both of them.

Secondly, thanks to ME, I managed to help you make a total of $400+ sales in just over a few hours, and I'm not even talking about the commission, but it's bloody RUDE and INSULTING when I answer a phone call, and just happen to forget the stupid price of the prune kueh lapis because of my cluttered, overloaded mind, to say that I have been working under you for four days, and shouldn't I have memorised the price by hard now? Oh, yes, I should have. How could I have forgotten that a prune kueh lapis costs $45 for 1.2kg? Sorry. My bloody mistake.

(5) Being a food packer, sticker paster, admin staff, phone-call answering machine, rubbish collector, and I'm not even mentioning about sweating like a mad idiot in the food factory, with the moronic aircon breaking down like an old man with arthritis, leaving your entire body drenched in sweat.

Well, that's about it.

The Long and Short about Never Giving Up Hope

"Every if you tell me that the person is dead,
I will still believe that I can bring him back to life."
~smartyypants

If there's one thing about me, it's that I embrace a glimmer of hope in even the most dire circumstances. Even when everyone around me is telling me that whatever I do would be rendered useless, I will still go ahead and do it anyway. I will still have hope anyway. I have to. By not deserting hope, it's the only way I can continue believing.

So, anyway, my sister had been 'suffering' an emotional backlash at her new school. Turns out, that MGS girls are really stuck-up, arrogant bitches, who stick to their own clique and exclude everyone else out. (psst, everyone else had the same complaint)

So, my sister decided to enlist all the help she could to get back to her old school. In the midst of everything, there was a lot of differing opinions. Emotional well-being or academic achievements?

Despite everyone's well-meaning advice asking her to stay on, the emotional tug-of-war in my sister's heart could not be ignored.

Finally, on Tuesday, we received news that someone had transferred out of the school, because she couldn't fit into the social environment.

There were a flurry of calls, altercations, and most importantly, a beacon of hope.

A personal trip down to the general office was being drenched in a flood of negative opinions. From "no more incoming applicants on the waiting list allowed" to "even if you speak to the principal, the result will be the same" to "chances are very, very slim, almost none (i.e you can forget about ever coming back this year)."

I remember HER very well. The person that delivered the news. She was a stern, slightly plump middle-aged lady.

We were informed that the chances of my sister getting back into the school were VERY, VERY SLIM, and the vacancy had been filled already, thank you very much.

When we finally left the school, the feeling was like a final nail in the coffin. The flame of hope had been snuffed out right before my sister's eyes. We saw no more hope, and yet we continued hoping...

Undeterred, that night, I decided to write an appeal letter addressed personally to the principal. The letter was heart-breakingly honest, the emotions very raw. When I was done, at the bottom of my letter, I signed off as my mother's name.

When I went down to the school the next day to personally hand in the letter to the principal, the reaction from the staff were less than friendly.

"Didn't we make it VERY clear to you already yesterday?"

"Yes, but I would like to speak to the principal personally please." Inside, I felt like a little kid suppressing guilty feelings for pestering her mum for sweets when it was dinnertime.

"(Annoyed) She's in a meeting right now."

"Okay, then please pass this letter over to her on my behalf, thanks." When the brown envelope left my reluctant hands, there was a sinking feeling in my heart.

Th principal promptly got back to my mum the very next day, and very clearly told my mum that she would give my sister first-hand priority if anyone decided to withdraw from the school.

"Chances are very slim, it's already the second week, it's highly unlikely that anyone would back out of the school now." Inside, the ringing discouragement from the school staff leeched onto my mind.

Everything we had done thus far in our attempt to get my sister back into her old school, was met with a stern NO. Now, this, THIS, if anything at all, was our best excuse for hoping.

A week later, a student was forced to uproot to another country, and withdrew from the school.

----------------------------------

Today, I was at the same location, and I was walking on the same path. But, there was one thing different. My sister is now officially a pupil of the school she loves so much.

And, when the stern, slightly plump middle-aged lady approached my sister with regards to her re-admission to her school, my heart swelled with a kind of triumphant elation.

So did my sister's.