would you let a colleague or, im my case, an employee, drive your car without you being in said car?

today we were about to set off for lunch when my boss stepped out of his hyundai getz at the last possible minute and asked "can you drive?"

turns out he had things that warranted a lunch hour spent in the office so he told me to drive my colleague over to lavender market for lunch.

wow.

i wouldn't hold that much level of trust in anyone, not even for, say, family members or my boyfriend. it's my car, for god's sake. plus, i wasn't familiar with the jalan besar area, add that to not having driven for quite a long while, i think that makes for quite a big risk, no?

anyways,

work is just awful. please spare me your comments about how "this industry is like that one" and let me rant, ok? i am still a newbie, i think my complaints are justified. :)

the AE is a big lump of shit ok!

when i first saw him i was pretty pleased, he is a handsome man. working with pleasant-looking people are always, well, pleasant. but now that we are very much behind schedule, he is, in my boss's words, "shitting through his penis". weird choice of phrase, i know, don't ask.

he and his team just can't seem to make up their minds!

"i need this FA in five minutes, can you do it?"

three seconds later,

"oh nevermind, the other zone is more urgent. this FA you just give me tomorrow."

fifteen minutes later,

"hey the FA you give me in ten minutes ok? i need it by today."

and just today, i was doing a series of FA (final artwork) which were to be collected today. a while after completion, the dreaded AE comes down with new measurements for the FA i just did, rendering my time spent completely wasted! wtf!

it's like we're not humans, you know. bloody idiots.

last weekend, perrine mentioned how abominable men smell when the wake up in the morning.

(don't bother visiting perr's site, she hasn't updated since, like, last christmas.)

i couldn't fathom how people of the opposite sex could smell as bad as she'd claimed but you know the phrase, "be careful what you wish for"?

this morning i was behind a seemingly harmless, or odourless, male specimen when a sudden gust of wind blew in our direction.

holy mother of christ.

the malodor was so lucidly unbearable, it made me weak in my knees - for the wrong reasons! morning breath doesn't even come half as close, trust me. i may never recover.

my current work has indeed decreased the vast amount of free time i used to enjoy during the school term. errands now have to be carefully planned and arranged back to back to make full use of every single minute. it's so tiring.

on one of them errands i went back to school to print the posters i'd done up for a work safety poster design contest and to pick up mounting boards, etc, everything i needed for the contest.

so i thought i had everything i needed.

a week after printing i decided to get my butt off the couch and start mounting those posters on the boards, assemble everything needed for submission. it was going fine, actually, til dad came over curiously and started to study my posters.

i looked up, gave dad a smile and said, "that's your helmet i photographed! it used to be white and i made it orange."

dad hmmm-ed, 30 seconds later, he asked "helmet like that spell one meh?"

i froze in that blink-blink-blink pose you always see in cartoons; suddenly, the word "helmet" didn't seem quite right.

(it is spelt corrently in this post, but was actually "helmut" on my posters)

"shit"

how could i have let this stupid mistake slip out?!? me, the one who can boast of reports not having a single grammatical or spelling error (except for ICM, lol), but spells helmet wrongly and not notice it despite staring at the posters for two days?!?!

i am losing my mind! i am so tired i cannot even notice glaring blunders i used to be able to spot with impressive alacrity (hah)!

i need a vacation (hint).

anyways,

another one of my silly thoughts about my leaving for perth (again), i shall only tell you guys about the embarrassing ones. i mean, what's the fun in saying "i was thinking about how many sets of clean underwear i have to bring..."?

first it was the hairdryer incident, then on monday night i told my mum, "do you think they have Desperate Housewives in perth?"

hello esteemed readers,

i am a mini fan. it is undeniably the sexiest car around; not chunky like the tucson or just plain ugly like the latio sport (sorry to owners of these cars).

when i am finally able to afford wheels of my own i am not going for a mini. yes very ironic. i figure the mini should stay the way the name's made itself out to be - mini, like a toy model. why fork out over $100K for something so small my dad would have trouble fitting himself into? my dad is of average build, judging by the sizes dads usually come in, by the way.

with that kind of money i could get half a Jeep Grand Cherokee, "drive all the way up the KL", and "bully other people on the road", well, so says Glenda Chong anyways.

i am on the mini mailing list. check out their new cooper s in automatic transmission. kinda makes you want to get one right here! right now!

go play their deft fingers game too, it's fun.

yahoo has jumped on the 1gb bandwagon! this makes it all so tempting to switch to yahoo permanently because ironically, my yahoo account doesn't seem to get any spam despite it being designated that purpose (oops). my gmail account gets about 5 spam per day, yahoo gets that amount in a week. me thinks someone has conveniently plucked my gmail account for some dubious sign-ups. if only i could find out who that is.

anyhow,

back in march i went for an interview with a production house near tiong bahru, they were advertising for an intern to help them through with a Singapore Idol drama they were filming. the interview went on pretty great; i was their first interviewee, she told me she liked our videos and went on to discuss their production schedule and what my duties (video editing, amongst others) and allowance (420) would be.

sounds like i've already gotten the job, right?

that what i thought then too. but the interview was concluded with her saying she would give me a call by the end of that week.

so i waited for a week. there weren't any call, just the disappointment that comes with not getting what you've been wanting.

this evening i was walking to the train station after work when i discovered i had missed three phone calls during a meeting earlier in the day. they were not numbers i had in my address book. acting on a hunch and making a move that was unlike me, i dialed the latest number.

it turned out to be the interviewee from the abovementioned production house.

she told me production was going to start soon and that it was time to provide me details on starting work.

my mind went "huh?"

i remember my interviewee clearly, what i don't remember was her offering me the job.

so i reluctantly explained my circumstances, that i had found another job because i didn't think she'd called back.

when i explained things to my mum over dinner, well, complained, to be more specific. mum said i should have called back two weeks later to enquire about the job and to thank the interviewer for her time, yada yada. it never hit me that that was what i should have done. all those lessons on professional preparation and job interviews from the super stringent king rajan, and i forget them even before i graduate. how nice. i'm definitely paying for it now.

(this is going to sound like i have a fetish, but no ok, it's just an observation)

i have been shaking hands with more people recently, than i've had in recent years, which was the customary handshake coupled with happy-new-year chants and that was it, my quota of handshakes reached.

this year, however, my first day of internship threw a series of handshakes my way when my director introduced me to all his nine employees (i was the tenth), and then at my current workplace, there were more hands too, albeit only five or six.

not a whole lot of hands there, but enough to distinctly discern the differences between the office girl handshake, the man-like handshake.

i had never noticed this before; my lecturers, older cousins, aunts and uncles and other lucky strangers don't deviate much from each other when it comes to giving a firm grasp and a few pumps - which is in short, a good handshake, if i do say so myself.

but some office girls just offer you these three limp fingertips, tease your offered hand and shrinks their fingers back, i wouldn't have noticed anything had i not seen those three fingers with my own eyes. what kind of a greeting is that?!?

i love the man-like handshake. it is extremely comforting having a warm palm unfilchingly envelope mine confidently. go around shaking hands (if you can call it a handshake) with office girls and you'll see how nice the man-like one is. "turns your ahhhs!! into ohhhhs..."

have you felt the heatwave upon us lately?

where i had once looked upon lunch as the magic hour to let my hair down after a morning of being cooped up in the office doing work (ok, you caught me, surfing the Intenet), the abovementioned hour is now thought of as naptime for fear of actually perspiring if i step foot outside.

to make matters worse, the nearest lunch place in my new office is circa five minutes via a moderate walk, keeping to shadows and shelter, that is. five minutes in the godforsaken heat?!? oh jesus, no!!!

i am hence left with the solution of packing my lunch in the morning before i leave for work.

but that means i have to wake up earlier. what a dilemna!

you wouldn't be surprised if i were to proclaim shopping as one of my favourite activities, as long as it isn't at Borders, ok.

i love shopping alone. there isn't anyone to make you go into shops you don't or hardly ever step into, and you don't have worries about staying out too late or whether your company minds you running your own errands as well.

last week i was at the heeren while waiting for time to pass, i stepped into two small shops (heeren got big shops meh?). service was good and attentive, monday afternoon dictates that people have to go to work so the mall was pretty empty.

i tried clothes at two of them small shops. both salesgirls asked me, while i was still in the changing room, "is the size ok?", "is the size ok?"

i don't know about you but this pretty much irritates me. it makes them seem like those pesky, sticky, and eerily-polite girls you see in far east. i don't want to have to answer them, but it seems pretty rude to ignore their concerns after they were so nice to me and all that (a good thing about shopping during non-peak hours).

i'm never quite comfortable in small shops. give me takashimaya anytime.