I’ve been working there for 3 days now, and I gotta say, people, life is real tough man. I pity the people who don’t have university degrees - RM1000 is standard pay for them, yet expenses for eating is already RM600. Plus people of that income probably have rent to pay, so there goes everything. The only thing they can hope to gain is salary raises through experience.

For me, it’s salary raises through selling enough things to hit the RM25,000 mark. Although I don’t think I’ll be doing that anytime soon, seeing as my language skills are rather limited. I mean, sure, I know English, Chinese, Malay, German, Japanese and Spanish, but in Chinese I only know Mandarin whilst everybody in KL speaks Cantonese, my Malay is not worth a dime, and German probably sucks balls. For Japanese I’ll probably say a few coherent words and go ‘moe rabu rabu’; Spanish may be marginally better, I never really used it since IB examinations.

And this work is rather tiring, so I’ll need to sleep 10 hours daily. As I’m typing this, I’m cutting into that time slice already, so yeah… I really don’t have much time to do anything except research a few products that crop up in the shop so that I sound like I actually know what I’m talking about, and cram an episode of Touch in there… and that’s about it.

So yeah, that’s the life of the cheap labour force in the Third World countries. (my parents say it’s cheap labour ‘wasting your life away’ or in a certain woman’s words, ‘watching paint dry’ or in a more direct sense, ‘watching people walk by your store’)

n.p. Herbie Hancock - Empty Pockets (Takin’ Off)