Closing Memories

Dear Diary,

I am pretty drowsy now but I thought I can just quickly type a blog entry. This evening will go down as one of the more memorable ones. It was a pretty lazy day and I was looking forward to meeting up with 3 other colleagues for a buffet dinner! I met a particular new pharmacist for the first time when she came to relieve me of my duty at 5.30pm. I stayed on and chatted with her till 5.50pm. I was a little shocked to learn that not only did she ever do business development in a huge pharmaceutical company and a local hospital, she has an EMBA degree from Philadelphia! I was totally surprised! She is an epitome of corporate success and yet after more than a decade of scaling the ladder, she returned back to the humble community pharmacy work. Why? She is tired of travelling around the world for her work and she wants to bring up her child well. That’s it? Maybe life is really as what Ecclesiastes describes… Vanity! Everyone is chasing the wind if our objectives are of this world. Sigh… That conversation with her kinda jolted me up. It almost felt as if God is reminding me that as I step into the “real” corporate world, I should always remember my eternal destiny and not be lured into a relentless pursuit of the temporal achievements!

So at last, I met up with three other colleagues and we ate at Yuki Yaki restaurant at Marina Square. It was a nice place and we had a great time grilling food and eating from a steamboat! =) It has been such a long time since I met up with a close group of colleagues to chat and laugh, haha… unfortunately, it was already the farewell dinner for me. I know in my heart that it is going to be hard to get colleagues like them ever again. Sometimes, I can’t help feeling that everything is like a snap of a finger. Now you see and before you know it, it is almost over. It looked crazy as we laughed and took photos… the guys did most of the grilling and cooking though, haha… It was a three-hour dinner and we took time to help ourselves to free-flow of drinks, raw food to cook and barbeque, and ready-made sushi and fruits! ;-) By 10.15pm, we made our way home as all of us slept past 3am last night for one reason or the other.

It was the company’s Dinner and Dance (D&D) last night and apparently it ended past 2am! I did not attend it as I helped to work at one of the airport branch. In doing so, I broke a personal record by working non-stop for 14.5 hours in a day! Geezz… Those 14.5 hours were surprisingly fast! Maybe the staffs were very friendly and so were the promoters. Haha… there was this 21-year-old female promoter who came up to me and chatted with me. I was surprised by her friendliness and eventually when I asked for her name, she told me to decipher it from the word “aimless”. What a way to introduce oneself but I correctly pointed out her name from that jumble. Can you do that in less than 5 seconds as I did? Hee… She carried herself very differently from the usual 21-year-old students from the university… it is hard to describe but it can be refreshing to interact with her “genre” of people at times, haha… Then to make the entire day super-memorable, a Caucasian customer vomited profusely just in front of my dispensary counter. Once in a life-time experience. I had to get the staff to help me clean up the floor, the shelves and some of the products. We had to disinfect the air and some of the promoters were super exaggerating with their masked faces and their knitted eyebrows. I told them later that they wore the face masks the wrong way.

I left the pharmacy at 1am last night and had to rush for the complementary taxi service. Despite some miscommunications, I managed to sit in a Mercedes cab. It was a nice ride home and guess what… It was the first time I ever sat in a Mercedes cab (E200) in my life! Haha… and I need not pay a cent! ;-) Got home in a jiffy. I really think I have experienced just about almost everything in my job… ;-) Okay, anyway… got to sleep now, it’s been a long day! Goodnight! =) Thanks Yik Chuen, Wai Keng and Joy Chong for that dinner treat. Will remember it for a very very long time.

God Bless,

Andrew