Hazia’s Reflections

Yesterday, I had a really, really bad day at work.

The moment I step out of the lift on my office floor at 8.20am, I almost got a heart attack. A girl from our subsidiary asked who was manning our booth for the huge international trade event in town. What? I thought our subsidiary was particating on our behalf. They failed to inform us that we are given a separate booth altogether. I nearly slapped the girl. The event is on for 4 days, meaning I need manpower from Thursday to Sunday and I’ve only gotten 1 new staff. She was okay, a natural PR person but she can only handle 1 day.

After making several heart-stopping phone calls to other department heads, I have to resort to manning the booth myself on the first day, together with my smart aleck staff - driver turned librarian. One department head even offered to man the booth himself in the afternoon, since his staffs were damn busy. My reliable customer service staff called almost the whole company to ask for help. Her husband had to go for check up, so she couldn’t make it. She succeeded, after much persuasion. Thank god I don’t have to man it on Saturday.

It was a good eye opener as I noticed that there was really no point in the librarian doing it, despite him saying that it was his interest & he really want to do it. And he was so full of craps too. In the future, I reckon that he can despatch the stuff, set up the booth and then, leave. He could not attend to queries alone, might as well I have 2 executives alternating instead. What’s the point of having him there?

Man, that was actually my first time maning the booth, not bad, but the whole day incidence had given me a bad headache. To make things worse, it happened at at the time when I had tonnes of workload. My new staff and I caught the foreign delegation feeder bus back to the hotel next to our office at 3.30pm. The Arabs behind our seat talking loudly among themseves made my spinning head worst.