EDIT: Thank you so much to all my subscribers ! When I came back after a long hiatus, I was surprised to find new subscribers despite my last update being literally last year. I can't thank you enough for the support. I will try to update more regularly as I refine my writing skills. Please do look forward to more new entries!

Dishes stacked carelessly under a the murky waters of a clogged sink, a pile of laundry that was a giant eye short of being called Sauron and a general unkemptness of the whole show. Read this description again and ask yourself again whether fate has allowed me to be so laissez-faire with the way the girls lived. Surprisingly, the luck of the gods kicked in and that little coin toss I did a couple of days ago turned the tides into my favour … but as I glossed over it, it was really just a short-term boon. Sure, I won’t be sweating buckets and I would be in bed till 10 AM on a Monday morning but the question was “Is it really worth sleeping in on Monday if I screw this job up?”. I was pretty much living on borrowed time and space, literally. I didn’t even own a single square inch of the dormitory I was cleaning up. And this was an outstretched hand offered to me by my uncle. If it wasn’t for him, I would have probably be bursting a vein or two at some Resorts World hotel in a very humid Malaysia. And I kinda need to do a good job of tending to my subordinates (I need a better description for the people under my care) or else I won’t be able to have materials for a good portfolio. And I kinda owe it to my subordinates for their hospitality. They could have been severely weirded out by me but until that Monday morning, I have not yet received a single gram of meanness from them.

Why can’t you ask the girls to help you out with the chores?, is what the reader would ask but it’s almost as if my life took a page out of Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events and TWICE had some brunch with the big cheese - Mr. Something Something Park. So, unfortunately, I was all alone in my crusade against wrinkled bed sheets and half-eaten toasts. It didn’t really take a toll on me since I was molded by the heavily competitive hospitality industry. The beds were quickly made and the dishes were sparkling clean soon afterwards. The only thing that was left was the enormous pile of laundry. To their credit, at least the clothes were all in one pile as opposed to being thrown around haphazardly. As I scooped the laundry onto my hands, the familiar ruckus of a door opening suddenly emanated from the corridor. My immediate thought was “the subordinates aren’t even supposed to be back yet”, causing me to spin around in order to come up mano e mano with a potential sasaeng that was all the craze in the news recently. However, the heavy load of clothing on my arm combined that with a relatively slippery floor caused me to fumble and tumble onto the cold feel of a marbled flooring. At that point, the laundry caught up with me and I was literally buried in a mound of fabric.

“Manager-nim!”, a perky voice came penetrating my tomb of costumes.

It was simply Jihyo.

“What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at that brunch?”, I queried her whilst she pulled my bruised bum up.

“I decided to head back first because Sana and Momo wanted to go get some sherbet.”, Jihyo replied. She looked behind me and gazed deeply into the scattered mess beneath us. Briefly laughing, she told me, “You could have chided us into cleaning up the house first before we left. This was far too much load for one person.”. Without a second of hesitation, she began picking up articles of clothing and I immediately followed suit, not wanting to leave all the work to my subordinates. However, as I started picking up one of the dresses, a ferocious pain raced down my arm and I was left clutching it in agony.

“Manager-nim, are you OK?”, she hurriedly raced to my side whilst I move my wrist around. At most, it was just a bad sprain caused by a bad landing earlier on but I was unable to finesse my way through the pain. It was that excruciating.

“Yeah, no. I’m fine. Just leave the mess here to me and go and get rest first.”, I reassured her. Like a Snorlax lying down on a pixelated road, Jihyo wouldn’t budged when I shooed her to her own room. She just resumed picking up after the other members, leaving me to look on in shame. My desperate pleas and attempt to continue with my housekeeping was met with stern warnings and assurance.

“I’ll be upset if you continue to force your ways, Manager.”, she half-angrily, half-jokingly uttered which was more than adequate reason for me to resign to my current position. I rested my head on the sofa as she shuffled around me, lifting stacks of clothing in the process. Jihyo returned from the laundry room, fairly exhausted from all the work. In our defense, I wasn’t joking about the description I gave earlier on about the pile of laundry.

Strands of her hair would stick to her milky forehead as she wiped the beads of sweat gently rolling down her cheeks with a graceful gesture. It wouldn’t be exaggeration at that moment of time if I described her as glowing underneath the kiss of the sun that seeped through the window panes. As attractive as she may be, she was just a subordinate, I assured myself.

She sat across me, sipping on some Pocari Sweat and re-affirming my position in the household in the process. “Manager-nim. You could always ask us for help if you need it. You’re one of us now and we won’t leave one of our own behind to do all the hard labour. I-it’s true that it’s only been a few days but … I can tell you’re a good person deep inside. Just that you’re probably still uneasy around us.”.

“It’s not that I’m uneasy around you all.”, I rebutted her point. “I’m still getting a hang of things. I mean it isn’t easy to decide what to bring over from my long run as a hotel manager. Hotels … girl groups. They’re essentially two different things. You can’t run a group as if it was a hotel and vice-versa.”

She giggled, “Not if you look at it that way. You would care for every component of a hotel as much as you would care for every single thing that happens to any one of us, no matter how small it may be.”. She glanced at the tip of my pinky finger, noticing the old scar that ran all the way down to the second digit. “Where did you get that scar from, Manager-nim?”, she asked with curious intent.

I replied, “Pinky got caught with the curtain hooks and I fell off my ladder. Not a pretty story to tell but in essence, the curtains were crooked and I had to fix them to my guests’ liking and I had a little accident.”

She ooh’d and ahh’d in fascination, though I was half-convinced she only squealed because she couldn’t really find an appropriate reaction to the tale. To be fair, my scar’s origin story does lack a wow factor. But that was beside the point as she later on tied my scar with her own brand of philosophy.

“Well, there we go. You do care about the everything down to the tiniest detail. I’m sure your eyes will work as they were back when you were running hotels. You just have to take note of the smallest characteristics and you’ll know how to proceed from there.”

I’m gonna be honest - that felt almost too ominous not to remember but she did carry a significant point. Though, she may have been a tad too late to teach me how to do things my way. As she made her way to her room to get some proper rest, she cautioned me for the last time, “It’s best if you take the rest of the day off and ice that wrist. I’ll tell the other girls to clean up when they come back. Goodness knows, if I don’t do it, Jeongyeon will.”

Too caring to the point that it’s suffocating … but I could definitely learn from her.

Just before she shut the door behind her, I chimed in with a final quip. “If you’re back here then how would Mina know to shout her name out during the roll call?”. She stopped dead in her tracks and quickly shot her head towards my direction. With a grin in her face, she yelled, “NaJeongMoSaJiMiDaChaeTzu! So you do know what to bring forward from hotelling!”. Her smile retained its integrity as the last glance of her disappeared behind the mahogany door.

“It’s all about the smallest characteristics.”, I told myself as I finally conceded defeat to fatigue and closed my eyes.