I brilliantly remembered the password to the online audio streams for the Principles of Marketing lectures (friend is having the examination tomorrow) I took a semester ago but brilliantly forgot what time I arrived at work on Monday, whether it was at 11am or 2pm.

I’ve worked more hours in this week alone than the amount of hours I spent in one month going to lectures last semester. Heh, taking a break now, no levelling up to do cause Maple Story’s servers are going through an upgrade and they’ve had a hiccup and it’s taking longer than anticipated.

I’m currently a level 38 Hunter, and I just found out that on the Japanese Maple Story servers, the highest ranking player is a level 140 something Warrior. I was like wide eyed when I heard that from my friend. Heh, so the game doesn’t end when you reach level 99, I just don’t know what monsters there are left for you to level up on at that high stage of the game. I could make a career out of this game, considering the number of hours you need to pump in just to reach that kind of uberness. It’s mad I tell you.

Life is a mass of colours now, you don’t know what shade of the millions of colours you’ll end up as next.

Heh, not like there’s anything special about today. In fact, it’s as typical as it gets.

Woke up to the ring of a phone or an alarm clock, was too dazed to remember. That was around 730am, that much I recall. Housemate’s last day of exams, so someone had to wake him up I guess. Today was one of the days I actually woke up feeling less tired than usual. Selling fish is physically tiring, and I’m not suprised why my boss said his pants are getting loser by the day, and this shop has only been running for 3 months. (he’s much shorter than me yet he used to weigh the same as I do, well almost anyway, so that says a lot.)

Arrived at work in the usual manner. Busied self with some stuff then went to greet my colleagues. Boss wasn’t around and he blurted out something along the lines of, ‘Mak, you die lar, yesterday when you took the fish heads, you forgot to close the fridge door properly. You wait later lar, boss is gonna screw you (transcribed but along those lines)’ And I went like, ‘Is it…’ but in my mind it was like ‘OH MY GOD’. For the better part of the hour, I was like going ‘Shit, shit, shit’ in my mind. I wasn’t really focusing properly, and everytime I saw my boss, I was all jittery. However, he acted like nothing happened. Well, why I was so worried about it was because he forgot to switch the refrigeration for the front display back on after cleaning it out, and was slapped with a bill from security for having to come down to check on it sometime in the middle of the night or something to turn it back on.

Heh, while all the drama played out in my head, a lady and a little girl came to the store to ask whether we did custom orders for our sushi. So I said we did, and the lady asked the girl what she wanted in her sushi. So the little girl (carried in the arms of the lady) said to me she wanted salmon, carrots and cucumber in her sushi, without the mayonnaise and the sesame seeds. So I went in and got the order for her custom made by our store’s chef. Well, I brought the order back out and packed it all up nicely and just before the lady and the little girl left, the lady told me,’My daughter says that you are a very helpful guy’. Heh, and my heart just melted as I waved goodbye to the little girl (maybe 5 or 6 years old?). I’m like, awww, so sweet. lol: that really made my day, from dreading getting lectured by my boss to feeling a little less burdened about it after that comment.

Well, much later after that, my boss asked me if I still wanted to take back any fish heads. Heh, I said no, and apologised immediately for my mistake. At least I owned up to it. I guess I didn’t cause too much damage from leaving the door slightly ajar, so he wasn’t too mad about it. So the day went about in its usual manner and I tried extra hard today to get things done better and quicker, at least to make up for the mistake I made.

Customers came around 5pm as usual, during the time when we have to clean up. Heh, they just do, so it’s shuffling in and out of the refridgerator to get their orders out. So it was like 620pm before we finally got to leave, instead of the usual 6pm. This time, I made absolutely sure that everything that was supposed to be turned on was, and things that were supposed to be closed were.

It was a longish day, and had a nap at my friend’s place nearby. Was supposed to cook dinner for them since they were having exams, but with the excess of sushi I usually bring home, plus the fact that nobody was hungry, we all decided to skip dinner. Another reason why I wasn’t really hungry is that, one of the perqs of working at the fish shop, you get a constant flow of food. Someone usually brings food in and today there was fish n chips, burgers and roti canai.

Weird enough, by the time I reached home around 11pm and took a shower, I was starving again. Went over to Jerome’s place, and had half a bowl of trifle (huge bowl), one zhong (the meat and rice dumpling wrapped in leaves) and a cup of coffee. Chit chatted a bit. At least the topics are outside fish and Maple Story. Heh, kind of nostalgic, these days it’s just working and gaming, really miss doing other things. Wonder how my boss works from 7am – 6pm daily 7 days a week, but then again, he’s just as tired at the end of each day, usually downing 5 – 6 cups of coffee to keep awake and get things done. I guess we work for our livelihoods, as my boss said that if he were to take a break, he’d never want to get up so early in the morning to run the business again.

Heh, an hour spent chatting online and writing this post as opposed to levelling up in that obsessive game. Think I’ll just go sleep.

At work, all my colleagues come from various places. My boss was from Hong Kong, but has already settled down in Melbourne. All his other employees are mainly part time students. They are all Chinese, from Malaysia (KL and Sarawak), Singapore and China. Heh, it’s really a jumble of languages when communicating with them. It’s either I speak English, Mandarin or Cantonese at times. My Sarawak colleagues converse in Hakka and Hokkien (I think it is Teochew or Fuchow actually, but they all sound the same to me, heh).

While I did lament about not being proficient in any one single language before, I guess it’s a privilege to be able to communicate with everyone in whatever language (or dialect in this sense) as you fancy.