I needed help, but help did not come. This thing called Feng Shui promised me money, love and a solution to all my problems, but I don’t know (nobody in my family knows!) how to call upon it for help. My mum, who was the only rich person I knew then (who had the ability to help me), still refused to bail me out. I thought that we had drawn closer because of Feng Shui, but she was resolute about my being independent. 🤬 My husband, who was working like a dog, was still seriously underpaid. 🤬 I was still stuck in that job, collecting money for the company. 🤬 They call my department ‘Credit Control’, but what I was really doing was calling people the whole day long, asking them to pay up! It was at that time that I started seeing a ‘disgusting’ side to people. I never knew people could be so shameless! Instead of feeling contrite about not paying up on their debt, they would yell at me for disturbing them with my phonecall. “Do you know that I can sue you for harassment?”, they threatened. And the postal system got slammed by these people for failing to deliver letters. Somehow, for this group of people, the mails reminding them to pay up never (ever!) reaches them. No matter that our Singapore postal system is top notch, there’s always a reason why they did not pay. Some even demanded to see evidence that we had registered every letter sent to them! “If you can’t prove that you sent me the letter, how can you say that I owe you money? You did not tell me that it is time to pay!”, they reasoned. I learnt to say “sorry” many times.

“Sorry, it was not our intention to disturb you.”

“Sorry, it is our fault that you did not pay.”

“Sorry, we will wait quietly for your payment to come in then. Please pay at your convenience (never mind that you are 2 months overdue!!!)”

You see, even though I accepted what was, but I was just a robot calling customers to pay up and getting yelled at and saying sorry. I felt numb after a day at work. But I did ‘behave’ in a manner that was required of me to keep my job. 😣 My husband, too, was not doing well. He was posted to ‘Audit’ department which, though his primary job function was to check the posting of accounts, it was really a people’s job. He had to go snoop and investigate people’s work, and we know most people go on the defensive when you try to ‘audit’ their work. For our shy and quiet personalities, our jobs were a huge mismatch! But it was still the financial crisis, what choice did we have? My husband, he is Superman. 🏋Instead of sinking into depression over his miserable job and his miserable wife, our misery only served to spur him upwards!

By then, we had worked (suffered) in our jobs for about 2 years, which makes us eligible to take out a very small bank loan. He never discussed it with me, but he took a study loan. Thinking back, if he had told me he was going to borrow money, I would have freaked out, thinking we would have been more in debt, and therefore had to be stuck in our jobs even more! The bank was only willing to grant him a credit limit of $2k (I’m only guessing the amount) at a time, so he would borrow to pay for 1 study term, then as stipulated in the loan agreement, he would pay off that loan, before taking another to pay for the next study term. And boy! My crazy Superman 🏋 husband gave up sleeping altogether, and he mugged over the books 📚📚📚 every evening after work. Even if we reached home at midnight after working overtime, he would study! 📚📚📚📚📚📚 I thought he was crazy to torture himself like this! By that time, we had been fighting our cold war for so long, we had become strangers. I guess I made him feel that he had ‘failed’ me, so whenever I had my temper tantrums, he only kept quiet. He never argued with me, and he never defended himself. He just let me rant and rave like a mad woman until I tire myself out!