The morning of day three saw me in bed with a nauseous stomach, a leftover from the previous night. I thought I was going to puke if I even got off the bed but I managed to win the battle and went to work.
Wow, “went to work”. Technically it’s not work because it’s just an internship but wow, work.
Esther was our OC at Newsdesk for the day and she gave us our first, official assignment since we stepped into Menara Star. All four of us were to follow a senior journalist, Yvonne Lim to 1Utama to interview (or rather, “ambush”, as how Yvonne had put it) several teenagers about what they were doing during the holidays. Before that, though, each of us called up a few friends of ours to interview them about their interesting holiday activities and at such a short notice, I could only randomly pick several friends and Anum, who was spending her holidays preparing for F1 Nationals, and Joey, who would be filming a short movie under her school’s Filmmaking Society in December were the unlucky (or lucky, up to you) ones.
We set off for 1Utama at around lunchtime. We headed for the cinema and bowling centre because those were the teenage hotspots and started our “ambushing” quest. To be honest, I felt like a sitting duck as soon as Yvonne said, “You can go try interview random people now” because…well, what if they ran away? What if they just stared at me and I wouldn’t know what to say at all? I didn’t even know what to say! God help me if I started stuttering and made a fool of myself. But as the others started off on their individual quests, I had no choice but to do the same. My first victim was a guy from SMJK Katholik and well, okay, at least my questions were clear and I got answers so not bad huh! My next victims were six 12-year-olds from SJK (C) Yuk Chai who came here as a sort of post-exams-cum-holiday class gathering at the bowling alley. One of the kids, a girl, was particularly enthusiastic and actually fought to be interviewed, exclaiming that, “We’re going to be in the newspaper! We’re going to be in The Star!” Amused by this, I was.
There is one thing about being a journalist (despite being an interned one) that boosts your confidence with each round of interview. One minute I was shaking in my flats, wondering what was going to happen to me if I went up to a random teenager to ask him or her about their activities during the holiday, and then the other I was getting addicted to marching up on random strangers to ask them questions. Done with every interviewee, I hunted for more (that sounded quite wrong but the metaphor is relevant). However, soon, we got the number of people we wanted and it was time to leave.
At Menara Star, we spent the remaining hour typing up short reports on our interviewees’ responses and left for home after we were done. We also managed to help Esther to decorate the mini Christmas tree at Level 5 before leaving.
My parents left KL at around 1 PM so that night, homesickness made a sudden appearance and I was left with nothing to do but sleep.
michelle teoh 