Thursday, August 04, 2005

Why I like my job. Sometimes.

There are times when I quite appreciate my job and the things that I have to do, being my job scope.
It's fairly broad in terms of my duties, but most of it still remains in human to human contact. I.e.: communicating with morons.


I do like chatting with other people in the line. They can be very nice/ funny sometimes, but more often than not, I find myself half crying with frustration, banging my head on the phone and pleading with God to kill me instantly.

All my sadness and joy stem from one main source - my suppliers. Supps for short. So, there are great supps and there are shit supps. And we really have to live with both kinds, because you need to have experienced the shit supps to really gain an appreciation your great supps. Believe me when I say that the shit supps WAYYYY outnumber the great ones.
And I have had instances where I can't help but laugh at the sheer idiocy of some of these shit supps.

Shit supps are easily identifiable by a few indicators:-

  1. They only send their quotations by fax. And they never use email as a means of communication. So by the time you receive their quote, it's disfigured beyond imagination so imagination is all you pretty much have left.
  2. They never type out their quotations, preferring the authentic handwritten style favoured by old mom & pop companies. This style of quoting was made fashionable in the 1900s and has carried on this the 21st century despite the invention of the computer, which may still be viewed as a marvel not for daily use to enhance a business's operating speed and efficiency. They also insist upon enforcing their legacy of 'doctor's handwriting' of illegibility so that the receiver of the dreaded quote has no choice but to call them and be subjected to a barrage of chinese abuse, because according to them, "I write already!"
  3. They chop all their quotes and they chop 'em well. By 'well' I mean that they chop them horizontally so the barest hint of blue shows up. Of course, the fax machine makes another comeback and very nicely slurs the whole 0.00005 inches worth of chop mark into a speckled blot. So of course when you receive the smudge-y fax, you half-kill yourself straining your eyes to read who was the idiot who did the quote so you can call the mofo to scream obscenities at him.
  4. My eyes and my brain hurt. I don't want to think about these people anymore. See above and repeat should you need more reasons why my life sucks.

Note to self: I must not over-exaggerate. I must not over-exaggerate.

Why my eye health is poor dealing with these people:
See, sometimes, they don't have a whole heap of time to spend on typing out beautiful quotations (unlike moi, who is time poor but still types out beautiful quotations), and they scribble their chicken scratch on and send it off.
And the fax machine is a fine way to defect anything sent through it into visual obscurity (Another reason why I quite like to use it too).

Forex, If you can direct your eyes below at this excellent example of piss poor handwriting, perhaps you can understand why I refer to the term
'chicken scratch'.





If you look carefully at the dollar signs $$$, you can actually see how it slowly degenerates into an incomprehensible squiggle (there's no other word for it). And it happens all the time. I apologize if i've offended any poor buggers out there whose handwriting resembles the shit above, but really. There are dogs that can pee straighter and neater lines than some of the shit I get presented with.

Not everything is the fax machine's fault.

I know it's quite pathetic how I collect these little trivialités but hey, it's my penchant de spécialité, and (hanging my head in shame) I will stop with the french now. (bring out the french fries jokes! - Not.)


Yes, this is just a small taste of how lame I can really be when I want to.


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