What a week!

Hmm.

This week starts off my 3-months stint as an Industrail Design Intern at Design Exchange. So far things have been pretty... intense. Due to my somewhat lack of proficiency in Adobe Illustrator (aka AI), they kind people over at DX have given me a couple of AI exercises, and upon the completion of those tasks... it had allowed me to become somewhat professional in the area of AI.

I used to have such a phobia regarding that computer programme... so much so that I almost entirely shunned its usage unless absolutely necessary. I would rely entirely on Photoshop or even rhino to do line-work (before exporting the linework to AI).

But work today at the YMCA was pretty rough: only me and Linda were working and as expected... I did the lion's share of the work. Let me put it this way: compared to my usual working speed, today I was literally performing at a mind-numbing 300%. While I was clearing paltes, Linda would be counting cash. While I top up the cutlery she would push a trolley around trying to make herself seem busy. WTF.

Even my boss who arrived on the scene after the breakfast was over, sort of sympathised with me so much so that he allowed me to go home 2 hours earlier than scheduled. Kinda due to the fact that I was extremely worn out by the time 2pm rolled along.


Yesterday, I encountered yet again another instance of customer ignorance.

Since the Y cafe provides orange juice and ice water on a ever-present basis in the form of two huge liquid dispensers (the type where the liquid is constantly pumped up a tube and splashed over the sides of the transparent container), many of our breakfast customers would just push the tab and receive an instant dosage of orange juice or ice water.

Apart from the obvious visual provided due to the orange juice's well.. orange colour and ice water's clear transparency, there are two smalle acrylic stands which indicate the nature of the liquids within the water dispensers.

So imagine my disbelief when one customer pulled out a cup, hesitated at the ice water dispenser and asked me:

"excuse me, what is this?"


I could almost picture myself saying:

"uhh, it's white wine sir, we're pretty liberal with our liquor here in this country"

or

"hmm, this is our brand new local drink. we call it zui " (fyi, 'zui' is water in hokkien)

or

"I have absolutely no idea sir. Maybe you could try it and give us some feedback so that we can tell whether or not it is actually safe for commercial consumption?"

I mean... it's a clear liquid, it says "drinking ice water" on the tag on top of the dispenser, and without it you'd just be a shrivelled piece of bak kwa. Sheesh.


Cheers,

Crawldaddy