The Associate would like to say this to all and sundry, in between his hiding in his attap house and partaking of food cooked in palm oil:

It's been a long time since I posted. And some of you reading this are kept reasonably informed on the current anguished status of my existence, which has taken on fever pitch of late.

While you can get all the gross details off Gabriel - he was the only person online when I needed someone to talk to, unfortunately, and thusly I furnished(bombarded) him with a great deal of goss.

To sum up:

a) Am working now in a bank.
b) I deal with people's money despite having no training(absolutely no training - i was posted to a branch to start selling unit trusts, opening accounts, processing loans, accepting credit card applications on the first day), poor handwriting, outdated computer systems(P-166 with 32MB of RAM - which isn't so bad. but the software linking to the bank's network is KLUDGY as hell. running a credit check on someone has never been so difficult), clients who think they're God, and a typical cheena firm. I mean cheena - every morning we have to undergo a Cultural Revolution style self-denunciation briefing where we outline the mistakes we made the previous day.(eg. the tellers describe the number of casting/entry errors they made, i outline how i mistakenly issued a passbook for a wrong account, etc etc...)

Let me highlight this - when we open accounts for customers, we have to fill in these forms. and then stick these forms into printers that will print some reference data on a blank space. Now, the printers are aligned for the latest form layout.. but our branch has been instructed to finish using all of the OLD forms first(a few hundred). and so, the computer printed stuff gets printed onto this space occupied by text and lines, and we have to squint like fuck to make out what it says for reference.

Although it's not an entirely painful experience - it can be reasonably interesting at times. Yesterday I met a client, who, let me euphemistically put it, was in the high-impact, high interest informal-debt collection/provision business. I feel safe to describe this encounter here, unless he happens to surf the net and have this page bookmarked, in which case the constituents of my body will soon be in several garbage bags. He wanted to meet us to refinance a house that used to be in a joint account but was now transferred solely to him. (hmmm)

A man came to pick us up at a gas station(probably to make sure we weren't the narcs.) As we entered the office, some thug locked the door behind us. His office is so disturbingly like what you imagine a loanshark's office to be from the movies that I almost thought that he copied it off some hong kong movie. It was in a barely occupied shoplot, with no signboard, at the top of an unmarked stairwell; and the office's decor had all the cliches: the gray, smoke-hazed miasma, the fishtank, the "chinese organisation" banner, the guan yu altar, the smoking henchmen lazing around, dumbbells scatted on the floor, the fat ta ge at the desk with a video screen attached to a closed-circuit camera aimed at the stairwell, and a huge slash scar bissecting his arm.

Quite a nice chap though, I must confess. As my senior pointed out: in our line of work, "the customer is always right" - in HIS line of work, "the customer is always wrong." Guess who has a happier working culture.