Jobseeker’s Diary

Sugar prices are down again. Thank God. Depending on where you shop, you could have been paying up to 1,500Rwf and 1,300Rwf for white and brown sugar respectively. By the way, is there a difference between white and brown, perhaps the same way nutritionists advise us to choose brown over white bread, something I rarely do? I envy one of my friends who is off sugar for health reasons and I was contemplating doing the same, but knowing my love for tea, I’m not sure I would have made it. Though the prices are not as low as they were pre the sugar hike, they’re still lower. What’s not down are the transport fares. Not that they’re too high or anything but they are steadily rising and where you have to take a motor, the price is even steeper. So if you find me walking, I will probably tell you it’s just a leisurely walk or that I’m exercising when in fact I’m only trying to cut back. I’ve also been wanting to buy CDs for a while and I passed by a computer shop on my way to work. Because the price was unbelievably low, I decided to buy at least 5 so I could finally save my pictures and music onto these because they’ve been taking up my computer space. Unfortunately, the CDs were fake with 0 bytes. I feel cheated and I have to return them and either get a refund or replacement and they better not stress me over that. And that’s not the only service I found lacking this week. Remember that Supermarket located close to home that I once wrote about? Well, I like many things about it but it also has some issues. There’s a wide range of snacks these days and of these, I usually go for meat pies though I think they should actually be called “bread pies” since they have more dough than meat. But the bigger tiff is with one of the attendants. Every time I buy a pie or two, I ask him to warm them. And if I don’t, he doesn’t. I remember one time I was distracted by a few products on the shelves so I went to check them out. By the time I returned to the counter, he had already packed my pies and I was glad I wouldn’t have to wait long. Then I get home, eager to savour my warm pies only to be greeted by a cold taste. Tired of asking him to do the same thing all the time, I’ve taken to just pointing to the microwave. How I hope he realizes the exasperation in my gestures sooner rather than later or else… The other thing I usually buy there is toilet paper. I’ve never had complaints with that until this week. I noticed that the tissue has different colours. At first I thought it was just a design until I realized that even the texture is different, with some parts soft and others a bit coarse. Now, I’ve always known that tissue is made from recycled paper but this just reinforced that and I was left thinking that someone somewhere got different bits of paper together to get the final product. Reminds me of another friend who doesn’t eat minced meat, sausages and related processed meats. The reason, he says, is because these products are made from the remnants of the other parts of the animal, usually cow or pig. Think tail, tongue, lips, ears etc. Just killed your appetite, didn’t I? To be continued…