3 jobs

There are three jobs that i had always wanted to try my hands on: a waiter, a pizza delivery boy, and a bus driver.

They are my plan Bs for whatever current endeavours i embark on. If all else fails, these are the jobs interviews i'll go for to tide me out. Can't make it as a scientist? Not even a multi-millionaire artist? Heed the calling, join the ranks of waiters/pizza delivery boys/bus drivers! That's the way to go!

The waiter

My wanting to become a waiter stems from some innate desire to serve people. While some people feel the need to take control, to inspire the crowd, to take the lead in revolutionizing the people, i feel the need to feel lowly and serve, to take orders from above and to please the master. i have no idea how i developed such a desire over my lifetime, maybe it has to do with my zodiac sign, which in the modern context, goes to obedience school and its sole purpose in life is to fetch the master's shoes and look forward to the pat on the head that will simply makes its day.

Also, all those school years listening to pep talks on how we are all indebted to the society and therefore obligated to serve and contribute back certainly has indoctrinated me to derive satisfaction through pleasing members of the society ie. everyone else. My tenacity in being a good listening ear, paying attention to all words sent in my direction is another skill i've picked up during my school days, by listening obediently to the teacher even when all others have faltered and succumbed to the sleep monster or the chatty disease. That basically summarizes my resume describing all the qualities i have to be a worthy waiter.

But the desire to be a waiter goes beyond educational brainwashing. School has imbued in me skills to be a fantastic bureaucrat, a conscientious librarian and a very efficient desktop data-churner, but i don't want to be any of that. The wonderful element in being a waiter is none other than glorious FOOD!

Being able to serve up a good dish is a sacred privilege. Short of being able to whip up a great meal, the next best thing is to be able to serve it up to the customer's table. The waiter is the quintessential link between the guest and the kitchen; he personifies the image of the restaurant, he is part of theambiancee, providing the human relationship between guest and restaurant that defines the standard of the establishment, and of course, he takes your orders.

So here comes the importance of image. We very seldom see the chef who cooked our meals, and i'd like to keep it that way. The unwritten role of the waiter is precisely to keep you away from seeing who exactly cooked up that lobster dish you picked. If you had known, there is half a chance you would lose all sense of appetite, while the other half can't help but be prejudiced towards the dish which it certainly does not deserve.

Now, if you are served by a gorgeous waiter, that will definitely add to the entire dining experience. If the waiter is hideous, well, he's just the waiter after all, the closest he got to the food was serving it to your table. No harm done.

The pizza delivery boy

Being a pizza delivery boy feeds the voyeuristic nature of me. Between the moments when the door opens and shuts in my face, i am let into a part of the owner's world. For that few minutes of my life, i am offered a glimpse into how people are leading their lives. So in exchange for the owner's desire for a piping hot pizza, the deal for me would be delivering pizzas in order to invade others' privacy within a short minute. Extrapolate that out to delivering 100 pizzas and i would have swopped at least 100 minutes of my time in exchange of 100 others!

And what would i get to see? A group of friends throwing a party, the family with the mother too busy playing mahjong to cook, the ideal kid's night-in filled with junk food and tv while the parents are out for dinner, the working couple too exhausted to cook or eat out, the loner with no one else to share a meal with, the lab students stuck in lab running experiments (the saddest of them all!) . All in a day's work.

In some ways it does allow me to revisit the past, stirring up memories of the various pizza-eating occasions i have experienced over the years. But there are only so many memories to fawn over before you start living your life backwards, so i guess this is not going to be a long-term plan at all. But while i'm at it, i'll make it a point to deliver chilled soft drinks and not pizza-cooked warm cans and bottles.

The bus driver

The bus driver aka bus captain nowadays have a optimistic career prospect of rising through the ranks through a new scheme with enhanced salary structure and professional certification and training. Makes you wonder what kind of pay and training were they subjected to previously...

Anyways, that is not why being a bus driver appealed to me. Besides the innate need to serve the public, best achieved by maneuvering a public transport vehicle, it fulfills the busybody part of me that wants to know what other people are up to as well. Add onto it a routine journey to embark on everyday, well then, your mind is pretty much allowed to sink, rot and liquefy.

And then there is the most powerful seat on the roads. Here in the bus driver's seat, you pretty much control the lives of all your passengers (or potential passengers). Your bus will dictate whether they will make it for work in the morning, how long the girlfriend is being stood up for, how much of the trailers he will miss, whether everything's sold out by the time she gets there...

And you have a few tricks to pull these off. See a person running to catch your bus? Look the other way and pretend looking out for traffic and zoom off with the most serious and hardworking look on your face. Early morning crowd packing the bus? Close the bus doors like clamps to catch the juiciest piece of meat and seal the fates of all those behind to face the boss for being late or made to sing the national anthem out loud in the concourse for the prefect's entertainment.

That seat, i say, is indeed like no other. It warrants a certain immunity against all passengers, clearly barricaded from all the rest of us human beings by the plastic flap door. Under no circumstance shall this boundary be violated. Whatever that happens in the passenger section is their own doing and it is by the grace of the bus driver should he decide to step out and interefere with the affairs of his minions. That is why that bus driver felt no obligation to step in when one of his passenger got punched and bloodied by another. i just drive...