Photostating woes

I’ll ditch the angry, angsty relevations about me, my mum, my bro and I since I’m neither in that foul, pissed-off mood or that angry, IHATEYOU one now.

Yesterday after tuition, Shawn and I had our usual yamcha session at Syed Ariff – and I was supposed to belanja Shawn and I gave in, since we’re only drinking and not eating. Shawn ordered his limau kosong panas on the pretext of dieting (or something, I wouldn’t know) and me with my limau ais.

After ranting about the same ol’ mum-b****ed-while-I’m-driving and related the tale of another angry mum in the form of Wai Hong’s mother when we went to collect our Leo Gala badges (I’ll relate more soon), we finished our drinks and it’s time to pay up.

I checked my left trouser pocket, where I usually kept my handphone and wallet. Empty. And my right pocket where I always have my keys – empty. I sat there staring at Shawn for a while before it dawned on me that I had left my entire collection of things-to-bring-when-going-out nested comfortably on the shelf in my room.

I told Shawn I don’t have the wallet with me, while laughing (and thinking about the ‘washing plates’ stuff, which we always used to joke about and now might finally happen).

Shawn: Don’t lie lah.
Me: I really *laughs* didn’t *laughs* bring!! *laughs laughs laughs*

I stared at that stumped look on his face and laughed again. He looked at me in disbelief. Once I managed to convince him that I didn’t have my wallet with me, he went, “Oh shit. Now what?” Almost hysterical laughter from me.

While we sat there and looked around us for familar faces, both of us laughed a whole lot despite the silly situation we were in. Shawn wanted to use my handphone to phone his house to get some money over here, but the item in question was charging in my room.

I finally went upstairs to my tuition centre to borrow money from Kai Tzin, and I laughed yet again before even talking to him.

Oh god, it was soooo silly and stupid. Two idiots sipping their drinks without any money to pay for.

As for the Leo Gala badges, they turned out to be pretty nice and the badge guy even gave us a discount of RM20! He wasn’t the fat, beer-bellied Chinese-educated guy I imagined, but thin and short. Our meeting was at Coffee Bean, Subang Parade.

I worry for our upcoming Leo Gala tomorrow - being the last minute kings that we were (for almost anything, from deciding when to watch a movie to planning something like this), we were in for a huge rush in trying to finalise stuffs for tomorrow. Among them were booklets.

GL requested me to go with Jon initially, to photostat 180 copies of paper for the booklet, using our own colour paper mostly. Sasi went with me instead, and long story cut short, both of us went up and down FOUR FREAKING FLOORS worth of flight of steps, to and from from my class at the highest floor to the bookshop at ground floor.

Ms Bookshop-girl stubbornly proclaimed that we can only photostat one copy for 10sen each, even though we have a staggering 3 digit number and we’re even using our own paper to photostat on. “Boss kata tak bolehlah,” was her stupid response, each frigging time. Even when Geok Leng finally marched up with us like the head honcho, Ms Bookshop-girl refused to give us her boss’s number when GL demanded for it.

We looked for FatV instead, who gave us RM10 to solve the problem (GL refused to spend more than RM10 from our Leo Club’s fund for photostating).

We went to the bookshop. Hallelujah it was CLOSED!

>_>

We cursed profusely, and went to the office to photostat instead. Oh noes, another obstacle - they were photostating our exam papers.

The clerks directed us to the canteen to look for the bookshop-girl who was “keluar pergi minum”. Nope, she wasn’t there either.

After fedup with this wild goose chase, I told Sasi to sneak out through the backgate to photostat instead. He relented (seems like he never sneaked out like this before =P), and both of us went quietly and stealthily out through the hole in the back gate.

We finally managed to photostat for only RM8 at the camera shop behind Tien Tien Fatt (5 sen per copy, and 7 sen for every copy of white paper which we used from them) - and the Indonesian girl managed to count incorrectly for us.

Problem solved!, we thought.

We sneaked back in through the same hole and walked straight towards Block C, and whom did we encounter if not - Pn Rubiah herself! Queen of school, reign of conservativities!

She was two classes away from the bookshop at the window, staring out what we thought was towards our direction. We dashed for the toilet, took a breather, washed our faces, and walked out again. This time, she was looking at the opposite direction of us, on her left. We made a quick stroll to hide at the corridor, and when we walked out from it, we saw her walking out of the class and circled behind it.

We dashed quickly for the staircase – and we were all safe and sound. :)

About 5-6 of us skipped Chem while Jon was the only one from 5B who skipped his Physics to help us out. With our deft hands and amazing teamwork, we finished all 91 booklets, 6 pages each (there was one extra, for some reason) in under 1 hour (and FatV had refused to let us go out to photostat legitly, earlier, saying if we give her the items she can finish them in under 3-4 hours). I likened it to a factory, as each of us who were there was doing each different specific task – specialisation, I believe it’s called. :P

Finished watching the last episode of American Idol earlier – Kerrie Underwood won! (late telecast, so I knew earlier who was winning). I’ve never watched other American Idol episodes, but something compelled me to watch the result episode today.

Spectacular performance. And tomorrow..we will be having our Gala night, and our ‘band’, Flamboyant Melodies (I think the name is a little too flamboyant itself, but it’s Raessa’s and Fatin’s band’s name which we borrowed), will be performing tomorrow, and everyone expects it to be one of the best performances tomorrow since Fatin will be singing (not trying to heap praises on ourselves..but I’m directing it all to Fatin!).

I’ll be playing a small, mediocre role as a shaker/other assorted sounds and backing vocals, and I’ve been declared ‘unimportant’ and ‘useless’ in the band by none other than Wai Hong and GL. Heck, it’s an unimportant role but I’m glad to go up the stage and perform, and do my best no matter how insignificant my part is. I think that’s more important than… backing down, or be the devillish envious/jealous voice who do nothing but criticise and criticise unintelligently. Small roles may not be important, like in dramas or movies, but I think they’re essential to the shows.

Here’s an early hopeful toast to the Gala’s success, despite all the amazing last-minute preparations we can think of.