On the up: Shopping during office hours
On the down: Not getting to keep any of it

Part of my work involves a whole day at the shops - I get to shop for a living. Like wow say all the people stuck in a cubefarm crunching numbers all day. See, as a fashion writer, I get the much envied job of picking up clothes to be featured in our mag and sending them for photo shoots. Yah, true, it's fun for about 5 minutes... then, like any other job, reveals it more tiresome side. This is why it is not always fun to shop for work:

Preparation
... involves sending an infinite number of faxes to companies asking them to approve a product loan.

Some of them are fabulous and approve it straight away (like Tengku Shamel who is the most fabulous marketing person).

Others you have to ring and harrass them. In short, it's like, "Please please please approve my loan so I can borrow items from your store and feature it in our magazine and give you free publicity!" Lynn from NafNaf is the worst of the lot and deserve a slap and a demotion for not doing her job properly.

On the day
The day usually starts out totally fun - yay! A whole day of shopping ahead.

Then again... you're not shopping for yourself, so you get to see (and maybe borrow) heaps of cool stuff but none of it is for you. And you have to return it within a week.

There are restrictions as you're looking for specific items to fill specific themes. When you reach the last store and they don't have those cropped black silk trousers it is entirely worthy of a panic attack.

The sales assistants - especially the Chinese girls - do not understand the concept that they are supposed to help you. You have to put up with their horrible rudeness all day long.

When you're still walking around the shops by 7pm (having started at 10am) looking for print cotton dresses, you feel you cannot ever look at a shop or a cash till ever again... and thus, the whole shopping experience is ruined for you.

...........

Then again, I could still be processing press releases in an office and writing articles about college students.... infinitely worse. Count my blessings, immense gratitute. Ommmmm...