So, for the past 4 days, i have been working for Meeting Matters International, together with Liyan Shanti and Sylvia. Wah it wasnt until yesterday night when i wasnt
1) busy getting home ASAP
2) busy showering quickly
3) busy getting hair to dry quickly
4) busy getting to sleep quickly
that i had the time to google the company that we've been slogging (sort of) for for the past days.

Btw HAHAHA i think the "Meet Matt" and then "Meet Cheng Hoon" is quite funny. If you get it. And the Ms Khoo Cheng Hoon in question, is none other than Liyan's mom! AND SHE IS DAMN COOL. Seriously. Cool and impressive in the way she handles her work (the Meet Matt site has this Testimonials page and it's full of praises for Ms Khoo HAHAHAHAHA! Ok though must consider that provenance is prob biased, but still!) She's kinda like a not-evil Hung-yi, and her current hairstyle is also quite similar to Hung-yi, only flatter HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Anyway so the event that we've been doing is this Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management IEEM 2008 conference and HAHAHA omg i just found the event photos! Here.

Ok first day, Registration counter was set up at the Mercury Room on the 5th level.

THIS IS MY JACKETS COUNTER! You can see 1/10 of me in extreme left. :D

Liyan Shanti Sylvia's Registration Counter! They laid out all the namecards in this formation.

HAHAHA Liyan good service eh!

The delegates are supposed to get their namecard thing, it was printed on a paper that had tear-along-the-perforated-lines, so they will have 1/6 of the paper for their namecard, Jacket Coupon, Dinner Coupon (if they bought), City Tours, etc. So when they pick out their name, they will get that piece of paper + a plastic namecard holder (the one which we were clipping the hard-to-clip clips on, on the first day) + the conference pack.

Then they come to my counter and get their jacket. I was told to let them tear the jacket coupon themselves, but they were not told to do that, and it was also faster for me to do it for them, so my duty was mainly
1) tear the coupon
2) give jacket
3) notice if they registered for Dinner, if yes direct to Singapore Flyer counter
4) if no, direct to buffet reception
5) refuse requests to change jacket sizes, because it is their stupid fault for registering wrongly and we have limited stock, and then take the scolding like how a Mr Chu from HKU lashed at Z and i in his HK-accented English, "THIS IS RIDICULOUS! NO I DID NOT REGISTER ANYTHING! WHY ARE YOU SO RIGID! THIS IS TOO BIG FOR ME! Blahblah" Haiii.

Actually got a little story here, where i learnt 1 lesson - How to tear the coupon fast. Haha actually this is also like, a Life's Little Lesson - if you do something badly, and someone shows you a better way, learn it.
So i had my first customer and i was trying to tear out the coupon from the middle, if you know, the perforation doesnt extend right to the side of the paper, so i was slowly tearing from the middle, and Patrick just took the paper from my hands and tore through the sides, and extracted the coupon in about 2 seconds. Whoa. And from the 2nd customer onwards i followed how he tore it.

Dinner ticket redemption for Singapore Flyer ticket + Payment Onsite counter. They were right beside my Jackets Counter.

Actually on the first day's Registration, there was a rather big mess at the Payment Onsite, because there are random people who haven finished payment prior to the event, and also random people who had random inquiries but because we didnt know anything, we directed all of them to the Payment Onsite counter anyway HAHAHAHAHA. This reminds me of one of the talks that Shanti and i went to crash on the 2nd day, where the speaker was presenting her paper on information sharing or something like that, and proposing that information should be shared to increase productivity and efficiency or something. BUT. Actually it isnt practical in the real world, right. How can you know the same thing as your boss? Then that makes your boss redundant, and you can prob overthrow him hurhur.

-this is the point where i took a break and saw Sylvia's entry and she said i would do a thorough review of the event. HAHAHAHAAHA ok i will try not to be influenced by this HMMM-

HAHAHAHA we nicknamed that dude sitting down in the background on the right "Eddie Murphy" HAHAHAHAHAAHHAAHHAHAHA.

The dude with a really nice shade of white shiny hair in the middle is one of our favourite delegates HAHAHAHAHA. Shanti thinks he's damn cute and blur and *shanti imitates* "He'll be like standing there with the 'Hm what am i doing here?' look on his face, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" He and his other friends took photos with us at the Singapore Flyer!

Singapore Flyer Day was probably the most fun and exciting part of the whole 4 days. :)

Picture of Sylvia taking the picture of the photographer! HAHAHA i got this pic from the official conference photos picasa.

HAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA this guy was nicknamed Gerrard. LOOK LIKE???

HAHAHAHAHA there was a Snake Charmer and Magician at the Megu to do filler items and also like, mingle in the crowd for fun. So we started taking photos with the snake, and the Snake Charmer sneaked up behind Sylvia and kissed the snake to Sylvia's cheek HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, i think she was totally freaked out.

HAHAHAHAHA Shanti looks like she's carrying the snake in this really loving manner.

Our group photo :D

Which evolved into a spontaneous whole-crew photo, and i took the snake. This one has Auntie Lily but no Patrick.

This one has Patrick but no Auntie Lily.

Ok this from the official photos. The person took the photo of us taking the photo using Sylvia's cam, that's why we're all not looking here hahaha.

Ok from left bottom -
1) Lousy Magician, we saw through like 4 out of 5 of his tricks!?!
2) Z! Her real name is Nur Z-something, which i cant remember SORRY!! :( but everyone calls her Z :D And she's a really nice and friendly person. I worked with her at the Jackets Counter on the first day, and when the PRC/Taiwanese delegates swarmed over, i had to handle all the Mandarin inquiries, then she said to me apologetically, "I feel so helpless!" Hahaha!
3) Nina! I also dunno her full name, but she's also very nice and handles the admin/computer stuff.
4) Sylvia!, behind Nina.
5) Shanti!

From left, top
1) Patrick Cha! He's a Korean dude wow HAHAHAHA. Dang i forgot to ask for his full Korean name. He handles most equipment setup and also inquiries about EVERYTHING. But the funniest thing is his Korean-accented English. It sounds cute but sometimes incomprehensible, and his sentence structures are all skewed.
2) Ms Khoo! Liyan's very cool mother, and also our employer this time. :)
3) Snake Charmer dude.
4) Me.
5) Liyan!
6) Dalong. Seems to be of similar rank as Patrick, but he does more talking.
7) Qing Quan, affectionately nicknamed QQ. He's a final year Uni student who has somehow er adopted this conference as a case study for his project and is just attached to Meet Matt and helps out randomly.
8) Auntie Lily! HAHAHAHA she's damn cute. Like an Auntie that i never had. She's Ms Khoo's old friend, and is called upon for temping (HAHA camping) for short term part-time during conferences. She's rather motherly, and exchanges confused looks with us when we are confused and seeking advice from her.
9) Ms Pritha. (half of her, that is.) She's actually the wife of one of the NUS professors/conference attendee who knows Ms Khoo and thus got her employed. Initially i thought she was a local, until the last day when i found out that she came to Singapore from Calcutta, India, with her husband 3 years ago. She's 27 this year, and got her Masters degress in Economics 3 years ago. Whoa man. Actually throughout the conference, she was about as confused and blur as the foreign delegates, and she kinda bungled her duty to lead the delegates on the first bus on the Singapore Flyer tour. :S Ai but everything well went in the end lah.

Random pic of the dinner banquet.

Outside of the function room.

Random delegates requested photos with us! HAHAHAHAHAHA like we were the python too or something. Maybe they can go back and show their friends "Eh look! We took a photo with SINGAPOREANS! This is how they look like, see!" This is the only one in Sylvia's camera though, but we exchanged emails with other people who took photos with us. :)

Then we went outside to eat our dinner, and halfway Dalong suddenly came to us and said he had extra Flyer tickets for us to take again and we rushed through our main course and ran all the way to the Flight Entrance, only to find he gave us used tickets, and out of the 4 given to us, only 1 was valid, and didnt manage to smoke through for 4 of us to get on, so we just wasted that 1 ticket. Actually on hindsight, that 1 ticket was wasted as revenge. Damn Dalong man, apparently some of the NUS student helpers managed to bluff the system with old tickets and so Dalong gave us too. Zzz so we went back to the banquet and cheered ourselves with the desserts.

The advantages of having big thighs when you have no tables.

Anyway when we were walking around the banquet, a man stopped me randomly and asked when he can change his jacket size?!?!?! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA WAHLAU EH. Haii so promised to find excess stock and exchange for him the next day, and he even took note of my name from my namecard. And the next day he really came at 8am to change his jacket.

Overall, it was really a good experience and really meaningful, though i dont know if i did a good job especially as Singapore's ambassador. On the way back from Flyer, this Chinese PRC guy came and spoke to Shanti and i to get directions on how to get to Sentosa, and in my broken Mandarin and his broken English (actually i dunno why he keeps replying in English), we had a conversation about China and Singapore, and Olympics and whether his Honours papers were written in Chinese or English. Anyway it was in Chinese HAHAHAHA but he didnt quite get my question about how he managed to write the paper submitted for this conference, since all papers were in English and filled with all the Engineering technical jargon.

Then yesterday as we were finishing lunch, someone else (also Chinese PRC) stopped me to ask for directions to go Little India. And i realized i dont know most of the Chinese names of MRT stations, zzz. And then they asked what they can do in Little India and if it's fun, and i was stuck too. HAIII. I gave some lame reply about food and sightseeing. In retrospect, i should have written down the MRT stations coz i think they probably didnt really quite understand what i was saying. I wonder if they got there in the end. :S

Alright then, that marks the end of my 2nd stint of paid work! Though honestly the stuff we did were not unlike school events, which we did for free and took all the responsibility and blame. Yay ok i'm now eagerly awaiting my paycheck. But now i'm quite xin tong to spend money after having slogged for it. Dilemma dilemma!

But the experience was truly priceless. Well done us! :D