Day +149

I am fine today.

This afternoon, our Indonesian maid went home for holiday after working for us for about 3 years. She will come back to work on 11 January 2007. We have to pay for her return air ticket between KLIA and Bali, and we also promised to pay all her transportation fee over there. She said she needs to take another flight to reach her ‘kampung’ (rural village) over there. We do not object to her request, though there are cheaper means of transportation from Bali to her ‘kampung’. Of course she still enjoys full salary during the holiday.

The maid brought a lot of things back to Indonesia. The low cost flight service AirAsia weighted her hand luggage during check in and found out that it is overweight. She was forced to transfer some clothes to her check in luggage, and had to pay about RM100 overweight fee. According to my wife, AirAsia charged RM14 per kg of overweight luggage for flight between KLIA and Bali. What a lucrative income for them! The ticket price is about RM150, excluding miscellaneous charges. The overweight charge is equivalent to 66.7% of the ticket price. My brother, Richard, already warned me this new lucrative income generating measure by AirAsia a few days earlier. If you are a ‘powerful’ passenger who always carry heavy hand luggage, be aware about this, else it will definitely burn a hole in your wallet.

We are quite confident we can manage without the maid. My mother-in-law is now promoted to the ‘chief cook’. The girl who is sleeping with the maid since I was sick had been asked to sleep with my wife for the past few days. We also asked the two boys to involve in some house works such as sweeping floor, mopping floor, cleaning toilet and etc. A reward system is established to motivate them to do the work. For example, 5 points for sweeping floor, 3 points for cleaning a toilet and etc. I issue them reward coupon at the end of the day. They can redeem this coupon for ‘computer game time’ or purchase something they like.

See you next post :-)