You know, working is hard. It's especially frustrating when you work in the service industry that undeniably depends on people serving other people and generally depending on...well, people. People who are different and varied and moody and fallible.

I get frustrated all the time. There are some days when I feel like I'm speaking to stupid people and there are days when I feel like I'm just talking and listening to STUPID. No, not a stupid person or stupid people, just STUPID.

I've been driven to bouts of intense frustration and indignation and anger. But those, thankfully, have been few and far between.

Today, I've officially dealt with a STUPID and the best part? It wasn't a staff of mine. Oh no, it was someone, and in hindsight can be argued to be several someones, who drove me to stupidity-induced hysteria.

Syabas cut one of the staff hostels' water yesterday morning. On a public holiday. According to their systems, it should have been the day before, but no, eyewitness accounts put it at yesterday morning. I don't know if it's just a lazy technician who should have done it the day before and procrastinated, or someone incredibly sadistic, but they did. And so there weren't any people around to fix the blasted problem yesterday.

After calling in and finding out that the outstanding bill wasn't even RM45.00 and besides the fact that they haven't been delivering the bill to us monthly for over a year, we made payment through an automatic bank deposit machine and proved payment. They received. They said they would have it fixed by this morning and we settled in to wait.

And wait. And wait.

Apparently, early today became past 5.30pm. Past 5.30pm became by 8pm. 8pm came and left and now, well, I'm just pissed.

Because I've been calling their careline every hour and they haven't rectified it.

Then, I got a call from their technician. And this really pissed me off.

The man had the gall to call and say that his people went to the site to connect the water but found the meter to be missing. I pointed out that yes, the meter would be missing because Syabas technicians took it when they cut the bloody water. He said that since there's no meter and they don't have one, they can only connect the water tomorrow morning. I told him after repeating myself that he's a bleeding Syabas technician, and shouldn't he have a bloody meter, to better try his best to connect it by tonight otherwise I would make an official complaint in the bloody papers. Which, if this keeps up, I WILL.

Hello? Fucking Syabas has the gall to have as a tagline and on their prerecorded answering machine that they're there to help save water and save lives. Cutting water to more than six people for more than 48 hours seems like they might not get the last bit of their fucking tagline. The one about lives? And the inference, for the stupids out there, that water is an essential necessity for the continuation of lives? And the basic ethics of being humanitarian people who care about people and their lives????

At any rate, I called the careline and related my wonderful conversation with the technician and, somewhat mollifyingly, the careline dude was horrified at the utter stupidity of the technician as well. He said that as a meter technician, he should always have extra meters on hand. I agreed and told him that I was extremely frustrated. And I might have been slightly hysterical too. That might have played a part in his utter mortification and apologetic floor scrapping, but, honestly, until this is resolved, I'm going to continue being slightly hysterical and increasingly angry.