Day 10
My first job
The first time I earned money was for an article that I wrote for the Star, back in 2007. It wasn’t really a job, more of a side hobby which generated money. But I had fun. We even had a campus spread when I collated few members of my faculty to send in their writings.
Then there was the first official job I applied for in 2008. I was having coffee with my friends at Old Town White Coffee when we saw the advertisement on location, and I asked to apply. I couldn’t recall now what was the exact motivation for me to apply, but it must have been the romantic in me trying to live the life of a struggling writer where she works the night shifts and write during the day.
Naturally, I only lasted a week (My parents had let me do it “so I can experiment”, go figure).
Still, it was fun. I was the only girl among a crew of 10 or so, apart from one of our managers. My first day, I had to change to the Old Town White Coffee t-shirt in the only changing/storage room that we shared with everyone else (I came prepared from the second day onward). The boys I was working with were amazingly courteous and respectful. Some of them secondary school kids waiting for their SPM results, others have worked in the hospitality industry for years. Our shifts finished at midnight, and it will be almost 1am in the morning when we finished cleaning, and the boys always asked me to go home first so I won’t be the last one to leave.
And I loved being pushed over and beyond my own skin. Anyone who knows me would know that I hate interactions with people. My first few days at Old Town I often get remarked by customers at how shaky my hands were when I put out the drinks for them. But it was the systems that saved me. One of the younger boys who have been working there for a while showed me what I needed to do, the system in place and what steps I needed to follow — from remembering the table numbers to taking the customers orders and punching them into the system.
I figured if I go with the flow of the system, I can take over my fear and focus on getting things done.
I can’t remember now what exactly was the reason which made me quit after a week. But I remember saying that I had just received a scholarship to go abroad (I hadn’t, not yet at the time), and I packed all of my stuffs and made my journey home afterwards (one when I ran into the flat tyre incident). A few months after that I received my admission to UNSW and my scholarship was granted (the same months when I wrote the E-mail to Tunku Aziz).
Steve Jobs said “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” In the same way, I am grateful for what the small blip of the time I had spent working at Old Town White Coffee had taught me.
Whether we believe it or not, things do happen for a reason.
October 8, 2015
