I’m so tired of take out food and fried food. I’m without a fridge for a month now and that fffffvcking local Panasonic service center is the worst I’ve encountered. It took them a month to say that there’s an internal leak and they had to bring my unit to Manila. I can’t move on to buy a new LG fridge because that ffffffvcking unit is just under 4 years old.

Some of my frozen goods from my last grocery shopping when I still had a freezer are in my mom’s house and I’m slowly eating them down. I took the last of the thin pork strips from my mom’s fridge yesterday and made a sort of bibimbap for my girls with what meager resources I have. I was able to make a good gojuchang sauce to go with it.

I will call Panasonic in Manila again to complain. Again.

Meanwhile, I’ve been slaving away in the past two days to be able to reach my story quota. I’m still three stories short. After two weeks of courting a local company for an interview, I got rejected. I half-expected that because the owner is very conservative and do not want investors or an IPO. 😔 Some companies’ staff are unprofessional, like they don’t respond to emails, not only here in the Philippines—this is Southeast Asia-wide. An SGX-listed company that I’ve called several times is annoying. If they don’t want to reply to a media query, then they could just say so, like this other SGX-listed firm that I chased in January.

I’m soooo done.

I was working until 10 pm, emailing people, calling India at 16:30, their local time.

I still have to call Singapore at 8 am tomorrow.

I’m so stressed. I’m doing my best to keep one reporter from being fired. I kept another one from going berserk because a company used our talking points for an interview with a competitor who had just the good luck to have their interview scheduled a day or two ahead of us. I had to quickly think of new angles and topics in a matter of minutes while our reporter was on his way to the interview.

Managing people is a lot of hard work. I’d rather chase stories.