God's Slap

A friend just said that she’s making money for some million per day. That’s her rate and she won’t take any lower offers. That is for a job in an air conditioned room, complete meals, and sitting. Well, on the other side she’s gonna be tired since she had to speak all the time with full concentration.

Feel kinda envy.

I had this moonlighting job, preparing proceedings for five (two plus three) days workshops in English. It means that I had to listen to 17 cassettes and do a lot of translation since 80% of them were in Bahasa and even if it was in English, its either they are Japanese people a.k.a. awful accent or some people with nice intentions to use English yet they had poor vocabulary and grammar.

To finish all these, I barely sleep before midnight since the first day of Java Jazz. Frankly, I can say I never sleep before midnight, several sleep 1 or 2 hours after midnight, and mostly I sleep after the shubuh prayer in dawn. This is also because my main job is also requiring sleep in very late night.

Guess how much money that I got for all this troubles? Only around 15% higher then her. Not to mention an additional numb ears and tired eyes for sitting too long in front of the laptop.

Its kind of the same feeling I got when I was in college. The salary for being computer assistance in my lab plus giving twice a week private lessons in a month were sooo….. lower then what my friend got by being Sales Promotion Girl for just a day. However, since I don’t have the requirement for being SPG (nice-shaped-body, full smile), I just have to be happy with it.

But then something struck me by lightning.

A good friend of mine just got back from Aceh. She showed me this huge beautiful embroidery of Ayat Kursi, which was made in perfectly shaped gold threads with small nice little red accent details on every inch of it. It was made for at least ten days, by an old woman, in survival tent, with very minimum space and lightning. And guess how much does it cost for the teary eyes and back troubles that the lady suffer for those days? Only Rp. 200.000! That already includes expenses for the materials.

And what the hell should I whining more. God, you just slapped me so hard!