is so difficult to master that I gave up. But, what the heck, I managed to clear my room in the end.
So, Chinese New Year has come and passed, and life is basically back on track. I’ve neglected this blog for more than a year, but I’ve yet to feel saddened by it. Almost everyday I imagine what I’ll post here, but halfway through it I give up, too bored by my typical life to actually feel the need to jot them down for ghosts to read.
But recently I picked up The Diary of Anne Frank, and was inspired to post again. It’s a shock how well a fifteen-year-old can write! I doubt I could write as well as she could, but looking at her circumstances she was a girl who loved the study–a complete opposite from the lazy me. However my ambitions for writing were ignited again thanks to her diary, and I decided that writing on my blog again was the best way to practice.
Sometimes you can write better when the experience is something that belongs to you, and not someone in your head. I have great imagination–no matter what others say–but sometimes they lack the reality which I’ve seen so little of. Recently shit has happened to me, and I was made to open my eyes to the cruel and harsh society that this world was built upon. But that experience was something I had trouble going through, because this new world was so foreign to me, and yet I had been living in it my whole life.
While I’m not going to go into the details of the shit, I will run through, at least, the one lesson I earned from it: that humans are self-centered. If anyone happens to treat you nicely, the very first reason they do so is because it will benefit them somehow. In the midst of the shit I was sitting in my room, with my mother and my sister telling me to get over it and learn from it. Indeed, I was learning. “Know how to tell people apart,” my sister said. “Treat evil ones with evil, and treat kind ones with kindness.”
Easier said that done. I’m much too blinded by fantasies to be able to tell people apart.
Just yesterday, while at my part-time job, a customer came up to me asking to exchange a calculator that was damaged. Unfortunately for her we were out of stock, and hence I suggested going down to another outlet for an exchange instead. She answered me with modesty and cheerfulness, and I imagined her to be one of the more reasonable customers. I called the outlet, checked and double-checked that the calculator could be exchanged, and the customer left full of smiles. Before she did she passed me the cover to her calculator, and I noticed a faint writing there with her daughter’s name on it. I froze, knowing that goods with something written on them cannot be returned. I wondered if she knew, for that cover was not handed to me beforehand. She left in such a hurry and I was too surprised to say anything.
Today, I received a call from the outlet that I sent her to that she was making a scene there. I was shocked. “What happened?” I asked.
“We cannot make an exchange! The calculator has been bought for more than a month, and it has been written on! She’s making a din here, saying that someone here agreed to make an exchange. Who did you talk to yesterday?”
“A female staff… She said that it was okay.”
“Impossible! We don’t do exchanges like this! How could it be?”
I was so stunned that I couldn’t say a word. But thankfully the person on the other line was very reasonable despite her agitation. Having confirmed that their side did indeed agree to make an exchange she politely ended the call, saying that she’ll try to settle it.
“I’m sorry,” I said. And the call ended.
So yes, people are self-centered, no matter how ‘kind’ they are to you.
Perhaps the only one that wouldn’t take advantage of you is yourself. Friends can take advantage of each other, and so can your family. The whole world is able to betray you at any moment. So the important thing is not to betray yourself.
Another incident that occurred today has got me so puzzled and mad at the same time.
While working, the counter called for assistance. I went.
“This customer here would like to order some folders,” my colleague told me, directing me to an Indian lady. I can remember her vividly: an overly sharp nose, huge lips with bright red lipstick, a large dark face, and small eyes spread too far apart and seem disproportionate to the rest of her face. Like most Asians she had black hair, pretty dry, held up with a clip on the back of her head. And this I’m recounting with my horrible short-term memory: enough proof to show how much my experience with her had remained with me.
Because my colleague had said ‘order’, I imagined the whole dreary procedure of ordering goods for a customer: writing down their name and contact, confirming the item and quantity, writing them down on the reserve booklet, informing the manager/full-time staff, telling the customer to wait patiently for the call when the goods arrive, having to call the customer back when it does, confirming it with the booklet and setting it aside for it to be collected one day. It’s a pretty structured procedure, but there are so many ways for it to go wrong (and most of the time it does) that I’m pretty much tired of it.
But apparently the customer had another idea. I was made to lead her to where we placed our folders, and to show her the different folders that we had. At the beginning it was pretty okay, as I only had to point to her where the things were. But afterwards she got more bossy. “Show me the clip for the files (fasteners).” “Show me where you put your cabinets.”
“What kind of cabinets?”
“The metal kind.”
Our retail store is one that is mainly known for books and stationery. I know, as much as every one else, that a cabinet does not lie in the category of stationery–a type of furniture, perhaps? Thanks to that I was imagining the small key cabinet which we had in sparse quantities, but I knew that wasn’t it. Instead, having already known her lack of vocabulary (for the fasteners), I thought she might be talking about office trays in a metal box.
“Are you looking for the kind with drawers?”
“Ahh yes.”
“The kind with drawers?”
“Yes, yes.”
I brought her to the office trays.
“Nooooooo!! I was asking about cabinets! You know, the metal cabinets?”
You were seriously asking for real cabinets? “…The ones with a door?”
“You know, the cupboards?” She began shaping a rectangle in the air. “Cupboards?”
I was close to laughing. “Oh, we don’t sell those.”
“You don’t sell it!?”
Of course we don’t. But I couldn’t say it like that. “I’m afraid not, Ma’am.”
“Never mind. Show me your paper files.”
And I did.
“Hold this for me,” she said, and she placed her entire shopping in my hands. With her free hands she flipped through the little we had left for paper files, and began walking off to the counter.
“I’ll need to pay for this under my company’s name,” she told me suddenly.
“Oh, okay. Do you make a claim or something?” In my head I was imagining that she could head to her boss with the receipt and get her money back. That’s how I did it.
She stopped in her tracks, a few metres away from the cashiers. She stared at me for some moment, in thought. And then she said, “Can I pay by cheque?”
That was the most unexpected thing I had ever heard. “Sorry?”
“Cheque. Can I pay by cheque?”
To me, the thing ‘cheque’ is only used when there are too many digits in the amount payable, so many in fact that it needs to be written down on paper and transferred by suit-wearing-workers behind tables because it is impossible to have at hand. And this word is now being used in a question, directed at me, in a shop selling cheap office necessities to the most fundamental of incomes.
“Er… I don’t think so?”
“Can you help me check?”
I went to the counter, and asked in Chinese, “Can she pay by cheque?”
The two cashiers exchanged some words and returned to me the reply, “We don’t handle cheques.”
“I’m afraid we don’t take cheques.”
This I said to the Indian lady who stared at me–past me–in silence. Her goods were still in my hands, and she paid them no heed. Instead she stood there thinking, while I waited, knowing full well what’s going to come.
“Okay then, never mind.” And then she walked straight out of the shop, with me standing at the counter like an idiot with the things she picked out still in my hands. I had been made to crawl behind her like her shadow, to serve her one-to-one (a service which we don’t provide), and left abandoned at the counter with another job to do: to put back whatever little things she had taken. And she had made a few rounds around the shop–it ain’t going to be easy.
“She’s gone?” asked the cashier closest to me. I turned to her, with the stuff still in my hands. I made eye contact with some of the customers queuing before her counter as I told her, aloud, “That was one strange customer.” Not the strangest, thankfully, but still strange.
If I had been anymore agitated I would have shouted “That was one unreasonable customer!” and go on complaining to the cashier. But being the nice and cheerful person I was I chose a kinder word. Perhaps I shouldn’t have done that, since nothing would come out of being more tactful. But in my position that was the only complain I could really make.
So, moral of the story? I too am a self-centered bastard, for I complain a lot about others. But I just really hate being taken advantage of–and I will hate myself even more if I’m unaware that people are taking advantage of me, or am aware but does nothing about it. I’ve been much too weak-willed for the entirety of my life, and only recently have I learned how to harden.
I doubt the hardening process will stop, and I’m glad it won’t.
One Normal Life 