Adventure Suntec

The shipment arrived yesterday morning from out of the blue.

When I saw the 20ft container parked outside of K.e.y.p.o.i.n.t, I wished it hadn't come.

It was high, smelly, dusty and the about 130 cartons in there, big, small, light and heavy were all over the place. The lazy buggers didn't even bother to stack them neatly. They didn't give a damn if the items were damaged or not. To them, their job is to deliver the goods and as long as they've achieved that, nothing else matters.

That's the mainland Chinese for you. Always full of surprises. Also, you order item A, they send you item B which kinda looks like item A when in fact, it is not. You never know what you're gonna get until they reach you. When you order from China, you can expect a small percentage of your shipment to be a surprise.

Unexpectedly, the people who sent the container didn't even bother to unload the goods for us. I don't know what the money we paid them is for.

They came, they parked, they left... with the container doors still padlocked. Dumbos forgot to unlock it. Thick padlock it was too. They were so eager to rrrun. So Max had to saw it off.

When that was over, it took us more than 20 trips to and fro the container and our new shop space to unload it... during lunch hour... with millions of people around. Of the 20 plus trips, I took on 3/4 of them. Back-breaking stuff.

After that, Max scrammed to S.u.n.t.e.c to oversee the NETS machine installation process while I stayed behind to oversee the goods were sorted with the help of two retirees and two of our K.e.y.p.o.i.n.t staff.

I was the youngest and presumably fittest so I took it upon myself to cut open all the cartons to view the contents, rearrange them into three categories: Barcoded, Not Barcoded and Wrongly Barcoded, free some of the cartons that came protected with wooden crates (highly fragile), dismantle the crates with a hammer and knock all the nails in so they wouldn't injure anyone (especially me), sweep and dispose all the rubbish.

For the Barcodeds, they can straight away be priced tagged and sold. The Not Barcodeds and Wrongly Barcodeds would have to be barcoded and re-barcoded (we have a machine for that) before they can be price tagged and sold.

Since we're talking about 130 cartons here, of course we didn't manage to complete everything in one day. The other guys left at seven. Max, Michael who's in charge of our The A.r.c.a.d.e outlet and I stayed till nine to process them as much as we could.

After that, Michael left while Max and I went to Suntec with our 5.25m signboard in an attempt to fix it up at the shop. We didn't. It was a pain in the rear end so we decided to go at it the following day.

Before we could go back, we had to clear up the mess which essentially consisted of the more than 5.25m wooden crate that the signboard came with filled with rubbish. When we transported it over, we tied the thing on top of Max's van like a surfboard from K.e.y.p.o.i.n.t but then it was still secure and intact.

Suntec is big and we didn't wanna carry the whole thing and walk to the rubbish dump and we were too lazy to go through all that tying up process all over again, so Max drove while I hung onto the side of the van for dear life while keeping the damn crate in position on top.

It was quite hilarious and embrassing. Thank God the road was quiet and the few buses that passed by were near empty at that time of the night.