Mood: Meh 
Vaping: Vozol 12000 Puffs Peach Ice
Drinking: Vanilla Coca Cola
Weather: 27°C, Raining!
Location: Mont Fleuri, Mahe, Seychelles
This is my first entry of the month! The last entry I wrote was about my having taken a whole week off while recovering from some kind of flu. I think it took me another 2-3 weeks to feel like I had completely recovered from the fatigue alone, the same thing happened when I was in Maldives this past April – after I had returned to Seychelles it took me another 2 weeks or so to rid myself of the fatigue of the sickness. What the heck is going on? I had no cough nor malaise during the sickness but for some reason there was some level of lethargy and fatigue when I started feeling better.
So what happened in the past few weeks? Well, our employee recommended a friend of hers to come work with us for the holiday season. We took her in on the 2nd of December. We had a brief talk with her that same morning that she was supposed to start. We had trouble trying to find the phone number of her previous employer and despite knowing that this was a red flag, we chose to give her a chance to prove us wrong. This lady was in her early 30s, with almost 5 years cashiering experience. We asked her why she left her previous employment and she told us that she felt she was loyal to her boss but her boss kept choosing to hire new employees over promoting her (i.e. increasing her salary). Over the next few days of watching her on the security camera, we noticed that she was quite passive, easily distracted and overall just very slow with things. On the 2nd week we decided to monitory her closely – she had forgotten to log in a sale, kept forgetting to hand over receipts to the customers (or simply choosing not to), she was having trouble with our POS system. Instead of letting her go then and there we decided to train her. I spent hours carefully completing a training booklet (no, I didn’t use ChatGPT) and then last week on Thursday I spent 2 hours trainer her to the best of my ability. Immediately after training, I continued to monitor her using the security camera. She again allowed a customer to leave without logging in the sale – after I had explicitly told her to always log the sales and give customers the receipt.
This lady was full of the wrong questions. For instance, I told her to process the payment first, and only after payment should the sale be registered, the customer given their receipt and THEN the final step is to give the customer their item. Her question: but what if the customer doesn’t want their receipt? I had to reply that most of the time, the customer doesn’t want their receipt because they are in a hurry and they already have the item on hand so they will just hand over the money and leave with the item because they don’t want to wait for their receipt. But an efficient way of ensuring that they accept the receipt is to issue it immediately after payment, followed by giving them their change, and then finally handing over the item(s) bagged/packaged. They will automatically accept their receipt if it is given to them before they receive their item. I had already explained this to her, and I had to repeat myself. Another question she asked was “but what if the customer then change their mind about wanting an item?” I reminded her that payment should be processed BEFORE giving them the item. After payment has been processed and their item has been given to them, the returns/replacement/refund policy takes effect. It’s only “wrong” questions because they were asked immediately after I had explained the reasons behind the steps of checking them out.
That same day, about 1 hour before the end of shift, I see the 2 employees sitting down with nothing to do and they are just gossiping. I sent the new recruit a message, telling her to take this time to test the barcode scanning of items, because I noticed she was consistently having trouble with scanning people out – it usually takes a minute or 2 but in her case it somehow always took more than 5 minutes. She replied saying “okay” and continued to chat. We decided to just let her go because of her unwillingness to improve, her inefficiencies despite all the years of experience, and the fact that we would need to quickly get someone else to replace her and still have the time to train the new person. That same day I texted an acquaintance of mine, asked her if her daughter is still available for the temp job and the young girl with no prior work experience started this morning. She was there early, constantly took initiative to engage with customers, looked around to improve her product knowledge and also already kept the store open all day by stepping up during the other employee’s lunch period. This young girl has already started doing cashiering and working the POS machine, logged in sales. Her mother would be nothing but proud of her if she could see what I was watching. My sister and I do expect a possibility of errors from the new girl, but we are clearly better off with her than without and we are clearly better of with her than with the one we had last week. She is an intelligent young lady and it’s very obvious that if you want something done right, you have to employ nothing below intelligence. There is just a certain seriousness and work ethic that intelligent people possess that not everyone has.
I already set up 2 ecommerce stores. The one I’ve spent so much time working on has no sales to date, it will definitely take some time because of the competition online. The other one I set up already has 2 sales (4 items) to date. I have not even started with marketing or SEO. For this month, the focus has been on the current retail store that I share with my sister – I am the person who handles the budget and the imports so I have to get everything here on time without breaking the bank. Almost everything should get here this week, and we’ll have a few things coming next week (we still earn quite a bit even after the Christmas rush). This month I ordered so many things, that I am confident I won’t have to import anything more until after March.
A few months ago I was at my mother’s place when she told me to order a few dresses for her. I asked her if I should order large size because last Christmas when we were in Maldives, I noticed she wasn’t wearing any of the medium-sized dresses I purchased for her. When I asked her why, she told me that they were all too tight. She was so offended, she started a bet with me that she would lose about 5 kgs before the 22nd of December. Initially, she said “let’s bet 500 rupees” she then very quickly decided that 500 rupees was not much at all so she upped it to 5000 rupees. I laughed and accepted her challenge. So this bet happened before she went to Singapore on October I think. Her starting weight was around 58-59 kgs. According to her, whenever she wakes up, she weighs herself and the scale says “55 kgs” but when she weighs herself in the evening after a day of eating in moderation, she is 56 kgs.
When she returned from Singapore, she was rambling on about how she spoke to my older sister about this bet and my older sister’s response was “how can I agree to such a bet from a pensioner who doesn’t even have money?” Look, the way I see it – a bet is a bet. There was no part of that bet that was my idea; there was no part of that bet where I included a challenge that was defined by me. My mother was the one who instigated every inch of that challenge, I simply agreed to it. When I had agreed to it a few months ago, I wanted her to win the bet. I wanted her to lose weight, I was more than willing to give her 5000 rupees if she was able to successfully reach her target weight. She had plenty of time to reach that goal but she slacked so how is that my fault all of a sudden? Now that she has 3 more kilograms to lose in 6 days, it’s time for her to start saving money because I do not discriminate when it comes to winning or losing a challenge. I would have gladly handed her 5000 rupees had I lost the bet that I didn’t even come up with. So anyone can think whatever they like of me, but that money better be in my bank account or that cash better be in my hands on the 22nd of December at 4pm.
In other news, my parents are officially divorced. I think it happened on the 10th of December but my mother only announced it the following day. According to my mother she wants to change her name either reverting back to her maiden name (using her mother’s surname) or she will change her surname to her late father’s surname. Her mother’s surname is of Chinese origin and her father’s surname is of French origin. I suppose she could also hyphenate if she wanted to. It’s so tedious though, there’s a whole process to change your name here, it also has to be published on the newspaper.