After 1 month of weekends into my Mystery Shopper part time job, time for me to blog/rant about it so that I can share it with you all.

Mystery shopper may sound like a nice, interesting and perhaps a unique job. I would have to agree on that at the beginning and totally disagree on that after just 1 day of being a mystery shopper as it is becoming a chore instead.

As I am busy on weekdays, I am only available to do the mystery shopper job on the weekends. Somewhere inside me makes me regret that decision, I should say I am only available for Saturday so that I can have a good rest of Sunday to prepare for Monday.

We started on the first weekend of June, it was rather a new experience and interesting job for the first few shops we visited and we are quite enthusiasm about it. After visiting almost 10 stores for that day, we got really sick and tired of it. It was really tiring walking the whole day and perspiring all over your body as Singapore is fucking hot during this period.

On the average, our working hours range from 11am to 11pm depending on the time they allocate to us. And yes there is a time limit. So for example they give you 5 stores to visit during a time frame from 1pm to 3pm, you MUST visit it ONLY within this time period. You NEED to also purchase something within the store so as to obtain the receipt as an evidence that you have to BEEN to that store at this particular time and day.

So if your planner does not know Singapore well enough (you will be amazed at road names that you didn’t know existed), he or she for example will plan you 1pm to 3pm at Boon Lay, 3pm to 5pm at Bukit Panjang and perhaps 5pm to 7pm at Jurong at then 7pm to 9pm at Choa Chu Kang. Notice the merry go round?

Worst still if your planner does not know that we have to wait for bus and mrt, he or she will plan you from 2pm to 5pm to visit 4 stores, 1 store at Chinatown, 1 store at Bugis and 2 stores at the opposite end of Orchard Road. This scenario pisses me off more than anything else.

Here comes the worst part, we are underpaid, to be precise SGD$8.00 per shop we visited and we can’t claim transport unless the time assigned to us is after 11pm. Only if we wrote in the form that we have car, then there will assign us this time slot. The amount we can claim is SGD$0.30 per kilometer traveled.

We are also “given” a maximum of SGD$1.50 to spend in each store, the receipt will act as evidence of the amount we spend as well. But if we bought something less than SGD$1.50, then we can only claim up to the the price of the item we bought and not SGD$1.50.

We need to observe a lot of thing like the cleanliness of the store, the service as well as the items displayed in the store. Normally we get assigned a total of 12 stores each day which is about 6 stores per person and we have to write it down immediately after we leave the store if not we definitely cannot remember as our memory tend to overlap one store with another.

When we have reached home, we have to type what we have scribbled on a piece of paper into Microsoft Word and THIS IS THE PART I HATE MOST! The questionnaire has a rating scare as well as an additional comments field for EACH question and it is COMPULSORY for us to fill in the additional comment field and we CANNOT repeat the same comment twice. The should just renamed the additional comments to compulsory comments instead.

All this work for only SGD$8.00 per shop, but before we applied, we are told that we cannot earn much from being a mystery shopper. So in another words, we shoot our own foot.

But anyway, since we are not earning much, I have been driving around to complete my chore rather than taking bus or MRT. So minus off SGD$2.00 for parking and SGD$2.00 for petrol for each store, we are only earning SGD$4.00 per shop.

My heart feel for Li Xiang as from Monday to Friday she got a full time job and weekends she do not even have enough rest, so normally immediately after we ended our mystery shopper job, she will KO immediately and worst still if it is a Sunday, she will KO and have to wake up at 7.30am on the next day for her full time job.

So think twice before becoming a mystery shopper.

BBC News has interviewed Bill Gates as he prepares to end his full-time work at Microsoft.

“Most of our competitors were very poorly run,” he tells Fiona Bruce, for The Money Programme.

“They did not understand how to bring in people with business experience and people with engineering experience and put them together. They did not understand how to go around the world.”

Sir Alan Sugar, one of Britain’s computer pioneers with his Amstrad range, testifies to Microsoft’s global mobility even as a comparatively small company in the 1980s.

Amstrad, in Brentwood, Essex, was visited by a Microsoft salesman – or “mid-Atlantic smoothie” as Sir Alan describes him – who came to sell Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system.

Check out the interview on BBC News.

My mom just bought a new refrigerator for the house. It is a Samsung RT58EAMT Refrigerator and it cost about SGD$915. The gross capacity of the fridge is 580 litres which is much bigger than my previous Sanyo SR-37ZB refrigerator. There is no one refrigerator big enough for my mom to put all her baking stuffs and hence my house always have 2 refrigerators ever since my mom picked up baking.

This new refrigerator is kinda cool, it will display the temperature of both the freezer and the refrigerator on the door. Now if only it has WIFI capability and we can monitor it directly from our browser, not just the temperature but also the groceries within the refrigerator.

Better still, since refrigerator are never turned off and it is very cool inside (Freezer: -19°C, Refrigerator: 2°C), it maybe a good thing to have a built in web server within it.

Old Sanyo SR-37ZB Refrigerator

New Samsung RT58EAMT Refrigerator

Temperature Indicator

I would like to thank WOM World for sending me my very own first poster which contains my nickname “gamerz”. They have sent it all the way from UK by DHL.

This shall be my very first poster that I am going to frame and hang it in my room.

My Very Own Poster (Click on the image to enlarge it)

THANK YOU to the whole team behind WOM World.

*UPDATE* I bought a poster frame (Width: 50cm x Height:70cm) from Ikea for SGD$19 frame it up and hanged it in my room just above my television.

Poster Framed And Hanged

I was invited to Nokia Connection 2008 which is an annual event. It is normally held just before Communicasia. This year it was held on the 16th and 17th June 2008. The first day was held at the Singapore Recreation Club while the second day was held at Mandarin Oriental. This year Nokia Connection saw the launch of two new products, the Nokia E66 and the Nokia E71 and the introduction of Share on Ovi.

My Lanyard

Read More (1,282 More Words, 15 More Images, 1 More Video)