I have been up to my nose with work. I figured that I needed to get myself an assistant if I wanted my children to still greet me as “MaMa” and not “Auntie” when I got home.

But I couldn’t really afford a very expensive one, so we were interviewing really young people, fresh out from school.

One of them wanted to take it on as a temp job as he’s enlisting in NS in August. He asked me,”why did you switch to sales when you have an engineering degree?” I said, “why not?? It’s incredibly fun!”

“So what do you want to do next time?”

“I want to be a consultant.”

“Consultant? Why?”

“Because a consultant solves problems for big organisations. I feel good solving people’s problem.” He beamed.

Wow oh wow!

Doesn’t that sound kind of familiar??

I still remember, in my final year at the university, big and prestigious MNCs sent their HR teams and past graduates to conduct career talks, to woo the brightest and best of the cohort.

We were very impressed with the consulting companies. They were huge American MNCs, they only took in the ones with the top grades. They would give you a wardrobe allowance so that you could dress yourself up and not throw their faces (aka disgrace them) in front of the clients. Oh they forgot to mention that it came with a bond.

My senior joined the company a year ago and came back to do the career talk. “It is a fantastic career!!” And all the naive us believed him. What’s he to say??? He wasn’t supposed to smear dirt on the company who sent him back to promote it? Na ah! No career limiting move must be executed.

“We solved all the problems for the clients.” He forgot to mention that solving problems meant clearing the choked up toilet of all the shit. Well, figuratively.

“We are paid handsomely!” He glossed over the details such as the insane number of hours they had to put in that if you divide the pay by the number of hours, it didn’t make mathematical sense anymore.

And so all of us… Aspired to be…. Consultants…

After the interview, I told Mr Meepok, “waa! Another consultant wannabe! Reminds me so much of myself when I was just fresh out of school!! So idealistic!!! Maybe I should enlighten him that consultant = toilet cleaner (clear shit mah)??”

“Why you want to break a young person’s dreams?? You are old and jaded lar! So sad! No more innocence left!”

Innocence cannot eat wan lar. Only kana makaned by others! Sigh? Where has the fresh-out-of-school-starry-eyed me gone to??