Karaoke Jockey!

First day of work at MusicPoint Safra, and I'm knackered. The place's different from what I'm used to, just a stage and a resting area, then the customers just waited for their turn to go upstage to sing. The difference is that they're not charged for drinks and food, they can even bring their own. What they had to pay was just a 'cover-charge' for a 'dedication sheet' to write and submit their songs on. Oh, you could buy multiple dedication sheets if you wanted to sing more than 1 song per round as well.

Sounds like a horrible concept, but business was pretty brisk. The place was booked in the morning by some community club, and there were nearly 40 sheets sold in the afternoon. That's like almost $400 in takings already, without even considering the night crowd.

I really wonder why these people pay $6 to sing 1 song, then wait almost 2 hours for their next turn. Probably has something to do with the crowd I guess, made up of mostly uncles and aunties around their 40s. The youngest person I saw today was probably the daughter or daughter-in-law of one of the aunties, and even she looked like she was on the wrong side of 30.

So anways, day got off to a really bad start when I realized, to my horror, that the place was indeed still using the old system of vcds and lds. Coupled with the system of the place, this meant that there was no time for breaks.

There was hardly time for me to stop moving my hands. The day was something like, get the dedications, sequence them accordingly, find the disc, play the disc, change the disc. There's a total of 4 machines, 2 for vcds and 2 for lds. The ideal scenario is one whereby you can sequence the 4 in order, so you can afford a little slack time in between, but it hardly ever happens. In fact, it's pretty much the opposite whereby you get all vcds or all lds.

Which brings me to the stupid ld machine. One of it was faulty. As in if u pushed the 'open' button too hard, it goes right in and renders the machine un-usable. When this happens, its a fucking catastrophe when there're like 7-8 ld dedications lined up in a row. Because you can't stack dedications, so its a mad rush to get the next song up fast. And it's bloody irritating, cause, firstly, due of it's size, you can't really like lay out the next disc on the table to save time, and secondly, it takes bloody long to keep the lds. And in between, you've still gotta try to dig the stupid button out (which ain't a easy task).

And don't get me started on the volume request, wrong mtv complains, wrong numbers, wrong songs, lack of info, and last minute change of dedications. One auntie even asked if she could just tell me the name of the song and let me do the rest. 'Hello, there're like fucking 3000 over disks behind me. Do I look psychic?'

Besides that, its a pretty brainless job. Which guess makes the $6 dollars I'm earning an hour's probably alright. Monotonous, but probably better than distributing flyers or waiter-ing I guess, which pays about the same.

Oh yah, and thanks Jen! For coming down. And for amusing me with your rubbish.

'不可以, 不可以. 我不可以现在走. 还六块钱来听 uncle 唱歌, 我今晚会睡不着的. Minimum 要唱 at least 一首我才走的下.'

It not really funny, but dunno why I was so amused. Heh, sorry you got lost in Safra as well! The bloody place's like in the basement and there's no reception at all la, so it's not like I didn't wanna guide you also la.

So that's Safra down. Jazz's next, hope it's more fun working there! Probably will be I guess, or I hope at least.

Stay tuned!