A New Found Respect for Manual Labour ....

In Singapore, we have this strange phenomenon of typecasting people by
the work that they do.

Road sweepers, Rubbish collectors, delivery men, couriers ... all these
jobs command very little respect in our society.

It's no wonder that nobody wants to do this kind of work! The Ministry
of Manpower is trying its darndest to reinvent this kind of jobs but
if Singaporeans in general, continue to look down on these types
of work, it won't help, no matter what you name them.

I am not a delivery man per se, but sometimes I make deliveries myself
to save on costs. So I bring along my trustee trolley and do my
delivery runs with my colleague.

One such day was yesterday, when I had to deliver some diaries to a
client of mine. It was in the heart of the city, so parking was not
easy to find. I managed to get a lot along the road and proceeded to
unload the goods onto the trolley. Making my way to my client's office,
I decided to do some site recce before trying to bring all the cartons
in, mind you there were 25 of them.

I asked one of the staff downstairs for the person in charge and was
directed upstairs. When I went up, I asked the bloke if there was a
lift I could use as it would be a daunting task to lug each carton,
weighing 20 kg, one by one up the staircase. To my dismay, he said that
there wasn't one and I just sighed and proceeded to bring each carton
up the stairs, one by one. I was with one of my colleagues and
therefore thought that it would not be so bad.

Being branded as delivery men by then, I noticed
that we suddenly became 'transparent' the staff in the office. They
literally look past you as if you don't exist. I am not being paranoid
as when I'm in my client's office as a Business Development
Manager, I realize that the treatment is very different, hence I could
feel the vast difference in the treatment in this instance.

Anyway, after lugging 18 cartons up the stairs, one of the girls, who
obviously had not noticed us 18 times earlier, asked my colleague in
Mandarin, " Next time you should bring a trolley, then you can use the
lift behind."

I was dumbfounded and asked out loud just to clarify, "You mean there
IS a lift?", and glanced at the bloke that said that there wasn't
initially. He sheepishly grinned and said that there was one, but they
never really use it!

I then looked at the girl and told her that we DID have a trolley and
that she should have told us earlier. She said, "I did not know how
many cartons you had, mah!" With her accompanying Ah Lian grin.

I took the balance 7 cartons and brought them up using the lift and up
to that point, because of the look on my face, I think they felt a
little bad.

They felt bad for several reasons, I reckoned. They felt bad because
they could not care enough for one minute to make another human being's
life easier by pointing him to the lift in the first place. The felt
bad because they believed that we were just delivery men, the lowest of
the low in society ... so who cares if they have to walk up the stairs
25 times! Only when they saw the sweat and the toil that we had to go
through, did they realize .. hey, they're human too!!!

So I have a new found respect for manual labour because I know how hard
it is to do their jobs, having worn their shoes for a moment. I admire
them because they still can do their jobs with dignity and pride even
though the rest of the world doesn't acknowledge them. I admire them
because they simply have to put up with a discriminating society like
ours.