Samuel Yeoh

For some reason, despite my lust for wealth, I’ve never been good at bargaining and negotiating prices. To put it mildly, I get squemish at the mention of price. It usually takes a tremendous amount of resolve, and a suicidal belief that I’m not going to get the job, before I can hold firm the price I want.

That, is rather detrimental. After all, price negotiation is always a matter of give and take, push and pull, the fluid tussle between two parties to reach an agreement. My firm, take it or leave it approach means bitter wrangling between the client and me, both refusing to stand down from our respective offer prices. Add to that my lack of persuasion skills, it means I miss out on more deals than one.

I’ve always been fascinated by how people bargain. Watching my mom and dad perform their stunts at the markets, at the shops, it’s always an experience. Some of the gambits my dad takes can be especially dramatic, like making a huge din and walking out of the store, despite knowing full well he’s not leaving without the purchase.

Despite the showmanship, I believe it’s a war of words, the battle of minds, and essentially boils down to how quickly one can produce coherent, logical excuses that justify your position. Of course, a little streak of daredevilism helps.

The tough part for me is knowing when to push, when to hold, and when to yield. I have innately poor judgement when it comes to these kinda things. Blindly holding my ground and refusing to yield to a good reasoning usually spells death, and end of a negotiation. Aggresive pushing of prices also quickly turn off a client. Yielding, while often the easiest solution, kinda shortchanges myself, and I often feel regret later. The catch then, is finding the perfect balance between pushing, holding, and yielding.

I’ve always come out of a good verbal repartee feeling pleasantly satisfied, regardless of the deal. When I’m buying things, I always appreciate a salesman who can convince me of his price. For me, mastering the skillset of negotiation is lifelong goal I hope to someday acquire.

At the moment, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that my little gambit with NGC Asia pays off. After all, it’s a matter of principle. Much as I want my photos to be on postcards around the Asia Pacific region, with NGC or STB’s logo on it, it’s also a matter of maintaining my already greatly discounted self-worth, and not letting a company maintain its budget at the expense of me.

To be honest, I don’t even know why I’m holding the fort. I just know it isn’t right to let NGC get away with anything lower than what I asked for. Call it mull-headed stubbornness, I’m probably gonna lose the job. Let’s just hope my NGC counterpart has sufficiently good negotiation skills to compensate for my lack of it, and persuade her boss to take up my offer.

Ok, here’s my 4th attempt at a cheesecake. The first was the coffee, the second was a lemon-lime, which I did not take pictures of, the third was another coffee I made in M’sia with chocolate crust, and now, a strawberry.

This one is kinda different in that it has an additional jelly layer, compared to the rest. I also added real strawberries to try to make it look more appealing. This time though, there were a couple of disasters, although I think most of them weren’t really felt by my eager guinea pigs at the office.

For one, this time around, I added gelatin to make it firmer, but being lazy, mixed everything in one bowl. Bad bad bad. The batter ended up being quite uneven, with a lot of small lumps. It’s not really noticeable with the jelly layer on top though. Next, I didn’t know strawberries are good for like 2 days before they start to soften and all that. I kept mine for 5 days, so it’s really sour. Maybe half the office will take MC tomorrow, and thank me for it, hahaha.

The worse crime however, was to freeze everything, including the jelly. My jelly became ice lumps. When they melted, they made everything gooey and wet, so the cheesecake looked kinda messy and unappetizing after being cut. The cheese, however, remained fairly firm this time.

Here are the pix! Sadly, I took them in a rush before I left for work, and I forgot to take pix of how it looks when sliced. The three layers do look quite nice, although people generally said the jelly was too soft. Should have used agar-agar instead.