Friday, September 15, 2006

Ramblings

I hate end of year. I seriously do. End of year means there's double the work of the whole year. There's diary & calendar to stock, greeting cards, this & that. But the one I hate the most is trying to find visual merchandiser. We always leave this until the last minute because we don't know how's the budget like, and scouting around for a good visual merchandiser can take the whole year. Heavens.

For Hari Raya decoration this year, nobody has proposed anything that fulfills the almost impossible expectations of Trump. Trump expects classy decorations at maybe a quarter of the normal cost. Cost here, cost there. Why we bother to spend at all is a puzzle to me. But then, come to think of it, this year's proposals don't even come up to my usually very relaxed standard. It's horrible. Why are people always proposing styrofoam thing-y? I hate styrofoam. It's so fake and we don't have space to keep it.

Talking about cost, I am exasperated at the way we are told that we do not contribute much to cost-saving measures. That is why, when we receive diary's / calendar's / greeting cards' quotations, we try to slash at wherever we could slash:

• Could we slash the expenditure for corporate diary this year by giving everybody diary refills i/o a brand new diary? (Get ready to be hated by everybody in the company except Trump)
• Could we limit the number of calendars to order by limiting the number of calendars each person can give away to their counterparts?
• Could we reduce the production cost of greeting cards by not having inlays and as I threw this idea to my boss, by exploring the idea of giving e-cards instead? (cross my fingers)

For example, if we give diary refills, we save about RM5K from last year's expenditure. If we limit number of calendars to 3/4 last year's quantity, we save probably around RM3K. So that's almost RM10K that we manage to save. So the bottom line is, please give me increment this year. Thank you.

P/S: Tu tak termasuk benda2 lain yang kena setelkan termasuk projek Trump, souvenir items, newsletter, etc. Adakalanya rasa nak gila. Like calling it a day and just exit. This is not what I'm looking for. I want something more in life. Something that I'm not going to get bored of doing, ever. But what is that thing?? What am I destined to be in this life? I'm still looking.