Oh gee Anonymous can't deal with a little bit of Aparna Angst!? Daahhhlings, you've been RELIGIOUSLY reading my blog for months and you still haven't figured out that i have the tiniest little tendency toward melodrama? I am terribly terribly disappointed.

On the bright side, work's gotten much better. In fact, it's highly amusing working with loads of Indians. This morning there was a puja at the office. The head priest came over from the temple, and the fact that he recognised me and said hello is evidence that I am a Good Girl who actually goes to the temple every once in a while. a couple of the big bosses are walking around in dhotis, and they've put Holy Lemons at all the doorways, anointed with kumkum (the Holy Red Powder people put on their foreheads). I never knew lemons were Holy. and when i got in to work, everybody'd left their shoes outside the door and there was prasad (Holy Food) on my desk. so my breakfast was Coffee and Kesari (sweet orange thing, one of the few indian sweets i like/love). the irony is, less than a week ago the office was awash in champagne (they literally pop the Moet&Chandon and let it splash everywhere and the place reeks of alcohol for hours) -- first to celebrate a good quarter, and then on friday for the boss's birthday. and this week it's Holy Things.

Work has really been feeding me a lot -- a huge Secret Recipe chocolate cake for the boss's birthday and yesterday i had three pieces of kaju burfi, brought back from Delhi by one of my colleagues. sinful. every week one of them disappears off to india and brings back indian sweets and stories of the latest episode of SaReGaMaPa which hasn't aired yet in Singapore.

so let me do a recollection of the last... 4 weeks? this is going to be long, tedious and boring. i'm terribly sorry, but I'm finally in a blogging mood, primarily because it's tuesday morning, everyone's in a lovely mood, i'm high on caffe mocha valencia - a new starbucks concoction which is a heady mix of chocolate and orange - and i'm writing a post on Notepad which i will proceed to email to myself and then put on my blog when i get home (yes i'm that Sad.) but to paraphrase The Great Lianne, "We Blog For Ourselves."

okay. yesterday, i had dinner with claud at Marche. was good catching up with her. the MUD stuff still flies right over my head, though the whole 'atmosphere in text' thing is rather fascinating in a dreadful way. walked around HMV, which sells chick lit very cheap! but i Resisted. and then borders, where i resisted a book of Bangalore stories. i read the first few pages and it was really nice to read all the Bangalore language and the stuff about Ulsoor and Brigade Road. it's funny how much Bangalore feels like a second home, even though i wasn't born there and i've never lived there. i guess it's the one place in india that i've really been around properly, that i know something about and know people who aren't related to me by blood or marriage. so yeah, that book seemed like good stuff but i cannot afford to dish out 30 bucks for a book the day after i spent $150+ at Bugis, so i'm going to either get my mom to buy me the book or sit down in Borders and read the book through one day.

oh, before dinner i walked by Toni&Guy and decided to have a hair consultation. he didn't really tell me anything i didn't already know, but it was nice that for once someone appreciated the lack of time and energy for blowdrying, instead of admonishing me to blowdry more often. i think it was Vaish who told me she paid for her hair consultation though, i wonder what that was, because my consultation was free. so that was my Daily Research on Hair/Skin/Cosmetics products. unfortunately the Borders Beauty section is nothing to rave about, because i'm looking for a couple of books. will go check out Kino sometime. i'm obsessed!

Sunday: Bugis with Shirin. it's an amazing, amazing place. that's where i spent 150 bucks. will go back there one day to check out the rest that we didn't have time for. then my parents picked me up and we went to the IMM building because my brother asked for a chair that looks like a hand, and when my brother asks for something, he gets it immediately =/ hopefully my room will be refurnished soon; the bookshelf is leaning dangerously to one side and the drawers in the chest of drawers are sagging. Ikea furniture is cute enough and very cheap but they make their money by selling you horrendously un-durable furniture that has to be replaced every 2 years. i have my heart set on a gorgeous, tall chest of drawers from Picket&Rail but my mom insists that i have to clear out the rubbish in my room before i will deserve new furniture. she thinks all my copies of Vogue are rubbish because they're old. she should see the bookshelves in carrie bradshaw's living room. hmph. one does not throw away copies of Vogue. after all, if i'm going to overthrow anna wintour one day, i'd better be fully aware of the legacy that i'm inheriting (both the good and bad parts of the legacy.)

Friday evening after work i met Nasty for our Movie Marathon. she brought me an onion-filled wrap from Toast, which was pretty good except for the fact that they overdid the onions. so i spent some rather undignified moments at Cine, pulling onions out of the wrap with my bare hands. and then we watched Match Point, which was mostly good for the London shots and the eye candy. jonathan rhys meyer is hot as ever, although he has a really really weird catwalky walk. Nasty says he was hotter in Vanity Fair so i should really get round to catching that film. and the tom guy is HOT. tall and skinny and hothothot. and his sister, chloe - very endearing. i have a thing for the name chloe (i wonder why) and she reminds me of kirsten dunst but she's wayyyyy cuter than kirsten dunst. taller and doesn't slouch and doesn't have saggy boobs. scarlett johansson is nice and curvy (euphemism?) but my god, the scenes where she's screaming her head off are So Painful. the movie has a rather nice, redeeming ending though.

and then Walk the Line. which is AMAZING. joaquin phoenix is slightly mad and very creepy in Gladiator but he's very very hot. he epitomises TallDarkHandsome. (Tadah, yikes! oh dear the memories.) and reese witherspoon - that girl has some Pipes. the music was altogether very fantastic, reese has the most gorgeous, clear skin, and just. WOW.

we bailed on The Constant Gardener because we had to get to Kelly's place and we're nice compassionate people who felt bad about making her wait up for us (and i probably wouldn't have lasted through three movies.) especially after she'd only had two hours of sleep the previous day due to chasing a mosquito around her room. am i embarrassing you, kelly? so we walked around, got me some food, bought ice-cream at Haagen Dazs (which is open at 1am!) and walked back to her place. at this interlude i have to talk about three things. my cute new shoes that gave me blisters, my sudden aversion to chocolate and the corner between shaw and pacific plaza.

1. on thursday i went to the Tangs sale and got a pair of very cute heels, but unfortunately cute is not equal to comfortable. or rather, not equal to Made for Walking A Lot. so, yes, blisters galore. one which has even turned scarily red. but i walked from cine to shaw to haagen dazs to shaw to balmoral to forum to cine to cab-home in them so i guess the blisters are not unexpected.

2. couple of weeks ago i ordered a slice of moist chocolate cake at Secret Recipe. i used to love this cake, but i could barely finish half of the slice. then on Friday i ordered some chocolate fudge cake at cafe cartel. it was terrible and i wasted three quarters of it. that evening they brought a different Secret Recipe cake for the boss's birthday. this i could tolerate, but i ate a small slice and had no desire for more. then in the evening at lido i bought a Subway brownie which i used to like very much -- Nasty even has a picture of me with brownie in one hand and choc chip cookie in other, when we were watching Pride and Prejudice in December. but i took two bites of the brownie and couldn't stand it. couldn't stand the smell or the taste. it smelt like... plastic or something. so that went in the bin.

3. the corner between pacific plaza and shaw. beautiful at midnight. the orange streetlights and The Most Amazing Breeze. we stood there like a couple of fools (or narcoleptics) just enjoying the breeze. twice. once when we walked all the way to take the overhead to Far East, then a second time when we took the underpass from Tangs back to Shaw. it was a bit silly, because Kelly's place is on the same side as Tangs but we decided to walk on the other side, pass by RGS and then cross over.

the walk was great, besides the fact that my feet were killing me and both nasty and i had dehydration-induced headaches, and then we arrived at kelly's beautiful beautiful beautiful pool. it is the most gorgeous place to have a 1am chat. sat there for ages, with the icecream and dry ice in a glass of water to add some nice non-smelly smokey atmosphere. went up to shower and came back down to talk some more, whereupon i fell asleep on a deckchair around 430. it was terribly uncomfortable but i was going on a total of maybe 15 hours sleep from the previous three days, so i was pretty well able to fall asleep. kelly and nasty stayed awake the whole night -- crazy people -- even when we went back up at 6am and i fell deeply asleep on the bed. when they woke me at 7ish i developed a theory about sleep being one part unconsciousness and one part lying-down-ness. it sounded like genius at the moment i said it, but like most things i tend to say while surfacing through layers of sleep, it was very stupid. some would argue that the things i say when i have fully surfaced and am wide awake are no less stupid. i just don't get enough sleep.

then we trooped to forum, me again in my painfully cute shoes, and had breakfast at coffee bean. i was horrendously hungry after the chocolate disasters of the previous day, so i had two breakfasts. scrambled eggs on toast, and a bagel with cream cheese. the coffee bean is a very good place to people-watch. little-people-watch. so many cute kids! kelly disappeared after a while to go home and sleep, so nasty and i sat around for two hours stoning before going to check out toys'r'us. such a crazy place. kids have so many toy options nowadays. i long for the long, innocent days of playdoh and pollypockets and barbies. whose hair i never chopped off. nowadays they have polly pockets for boys, fake playdoh and fake barbies of all sorts -- Jessicas, Hollywood somethings, etc etc etc.

oh. and. sea monkeys. these really weird colourful five-limbed slugs that grow from eggs that you drop in water. they have sea monkey watches, pendants, even Executive Suites.

and then we walked back to cine to collect our money back for the Constant Gardener tickets which they managed to resell for us. but the person wasn't there so we just cabbed back. and my mother forced the whole family to sit down and watch some tamil film after lunch, because it's a sequel to one of the rare tamil films that my mom liked. but it was hugely boring so i retreated to my room, watched the latest episode of the OC and fell asleep for the next five hours.

thursday. work. sale at tangs, breaking my no-shopping for a week vow. i make that vow every week and faithfully break it every week. bought three bags and the Cute Shoes Which Gave Me Blisters. unfortunately the beauty hall doesn't seem to be having any particularly large sale now, or else i'd have been glad to stock up on all the products i've been coveting.

incidentally, my colleague just told me that she has a client called Toshit. His parents must've hated him. And my colleague used to have a friend called Shitin. When Shitin had kids, he refused to name them until they were six years old. When they were six they chose their own names. My colleague has a tendency to exaggerate a little, but she tells amusing stories. When she saw that I was reading A Short History of Tractors In Ukrainian she immediately had a story to tell about a billionaire cousin of hers, who married a blonde bombshell Ukrainian divorcee with a tall blonde son. The Wife and The Step-son were to visit this colleague of mine, but weeks before the impending visit, they received a message informing them that the visit would no longer be happening as the Billionaire and the Ukrainian were separating. Very dramatic.

At this point I must tell you about my budding relationship with another Punjabi guy. First, over the phone he gushes over the fact that I spelt out his email address in countries -- you know, London Australia Malaysia England for LAME. He says "wow, you really know your countries!" and then, he emails me to tell me he received my email, and he calls me Aps. at this point I was just being friendly, because it always helps to be friendly with customers. so i replied that "you know what, my friends call me Aps." and then the rest of my stuff about his account -- I wasn't wasting my time on non-work-related emails to weird customers. but then he replies going "so your friends call you Aps too, huh. isn't that beautiful? now i can be part of your gang." incidentally, like The Other Punjabi, this guy also uses a weird form of ungrammatical net-English, lots of "..."s and "m" instead of "am" and all sorts of laziness like that. also, being a temp, i'm using a communal email address, so when he sends all these rubbish mails it's sort of embarrassing because everyone can see it. but i didn't want to use the email address of the girl whose computer i'm currently using. so i continue emailing him from the communal thingy.

(ok i'm home now and writing the rest of this thingy. Useless Information? but then most of this post probably is.)

i didn't reply to that email, but he persisted. he continues asking the most inane questions. when he registered for his online account he emails me "Just wanted to know confirm that will they be keepin this info confidential,as its my personal info..U understand what m sayin." so i reply that of course all information submitted to the bank will be kept confidential (except, of course, these emails which i'm putting up for public consumption.)

at one point, i instructed him to complete an online registration and then wait for some forms in the mail, and he said "Well if u say thats alright,if u want me to wait I will actually ma'am..Anythin else u want me to do..Haha...Just kiddin..Anyways howz yr day so far..."

His english is pretty bad over email, though it's decent over the phone. Anyway the whole exchange was in the communal email and everyone he sent a new email (which was every five minutes) my colleagues would go "hey look Aps, it's (name of customer)!" it was quite funny, but it was available not only to the rest of the sales team i'm in but also to the bosses, and the customer clearly thought it was my personal email and therefore was in no hurry to stop sending dozens of emails. so i told him to send it to the address that comes only to me.

and then he started quizzing me on whether he could contact me after work hours at that address. when i told him that the email address was only accessible from work, he attempted to get my private email address. i told him that company regulations didn't allow me to give him personal details, whereupon he said he understood and was sorry about troubling me. i made some joke about how it was no trouble as long as he was opening an account with the bank, and then he sent a stupid email that annoyed me HUGELY saying "What do u mean...So we r in contact just because m openin an account...Thats it right.."

he was probably trying to be funny himself, although he pretty much hit the truth right on the head. so i replied that i was kidding, because unfortunately, he's a customer and if i have to lead him on in order to get him to open his damn account i guess that's what i have to do. although i have to say -- today i discovered that the full time people there have monetary incentives to open more accounts, whereas i'm just getting a rather measly flat salary.

so anyway, the saga today ends with him saying "I understand that u were kiddin and u r fine if I ask or talk to u..But how can I speak or chat when u r not at office..I mean we have similar work timings..So we r pretty busy that time.."

by that time i was exhausted from spending the whole day answering his emails as well as making a few dozen phone calls, so the reply will have to wait till tomorrow. meanwhile i shall think of something sufficiently scathing and masked in sugar to tell him. i shall block his email address once he's done opening his stupid account.

I have another customer who spent half an hour on the phone with me two weeks ago, trying to get information about the job market in Singapore, complaining about how much life in Australia sucks. He tried to get my personal phone number because he was supposed to submit his documents during the Chinese New Year time when I wouldn't be at work, and "in case of any problem" he wanted to be able to contact me, especially because he'd be travelling after Tuesday, and I was only getting back to work on Wednesday. I politely declined to give him my phone number, and guess what, when I get back to work on Wednesday I find that he hasn't submitted his documents. He wasn't the only one to ask about jobs in Singapore -- another one this week emailed me asking if i could help him regarding the job market in Singapore. i replied asking what help he wanted, and he said he'll compose another email soon detailing his situation. i dread these email correspondences, although we all get a good laugh out of them.

apparently it's quite the norm to be pursued like this by customers. another colleague of mine received an email love letter in hindi. aapke aawaaz sun kar mera mann dhadaktha hai... "my heart beats when i hear your voice." cue cheesy violin music. several other puke-worthy things in that email. including a line that happens to be the title of a terrible hindi movie -- "mujhse dosti karoge?" which means "will you be my friend?" meant in a completely non-platonic way.

so. fairly interesting day today. and this is a frightfully long post, so the recount of the remaining 3 weeks or so shall have to wait until i muster energy again.