At around 8.15 pm just as the time allocated was about to end, we discovered a middle-aged man in a neon-green t-shirt loafing around the closed section of stalls just outside of the Central Market, he seems to be casually chit-chatting with some fellow loafers who are about his age and some even younger. We decided to approach this man in order to fulfill our assigned interviewee for the guided observation trip (which is a loafer indeed) organized by Dr. Linda. We approached him courteously without too much alarm because we did not want him to take us the wrong way. So we introduced ourselves as University of Malaya students who was given an assignment to ask a few simple questions about his background, his point of views in life and surroundings and how he copes living every day. He was a bit hesitant at first but we managed to persuade him by convincing him that it is more of a regular chit-chatting type of interview instead of those formal ones. Upon accepting our request and started conversing we found out that he is a rather hilarious person, occasionally slipping some jokes in every question we ask. He is pretty easygoing and seemed to be the kind of person with lots of experience in life. We started by asking his name and he made us guess by hinting that his name coincides with the first Prime Minister of Malaysia. He also made us guess his age, which we almost got right by saying that he’s probably in his late 30’s or early 40’s.
Our interviewee is Mr. Abdul Rahman, a 41-year old retiree in the automobile mechanics service for Proton (a Malaysian automobile company) currently not doing much of a work due to a bone fracture accident on his right leg when he was travelling to Australia as part of his past job requirements in 2005. This was solely the reason why he retired from the field as he was advised to stop engaging in heavy workloads for recovery. Since then he found comfort in helping out in his wife’s business selling souvenirs in the Central Market itself. That is why he is often found loafing around the Central Market especially when there is not much to do in the shop, he will just sit outside and by the looks of it he had made a few acquaintances with the people around there, those who also loaf around when there is not much to do in their own shops and stalls. He claimed that he used to loiter around Central Market even during his younger days. It was his favorite place. He has a family of 4 including him and his Selangorian wife, blessed with two children aged 11 and 9 respectively. Mr. Rahman came to Kuala Lumpur at a very young age, leaving his hometown, Pahang, in the year 1989 to pursue his interest in being a car mechanic by joining a 6 months training programme organized by GIATMARA (a Malaysian vocational school) specialized in automobile servicing. He managed to get a job in the Proton company in 1995 and had been a loyal worker for them for about 20 years before the accident which caused him to abruptly quit. He claimed that he travelled a lot during his years with Proton because he was specifically assigned as one of the automobile maintenance mechanic for the Proton Motorsports rally team. He even showed us the official Proton logo on the neon-green t-shirt he was wearing, a proof that he was once part of the rally team. He seemed content with the experiences he had while working for the team ever so slightly having the look of pride in his eyes as he reminisced and talked to us about the places he had travelled to, the rally match he had seen and how he works diligently to ensure an exceptional condition of the sports car in order to perform well in the circuit. His enthusiasm in explaining every detail was very captivating. We feel like we could listen to him forever. He talks while giving us a clear picture of how every story felt and looked like, for example when he talks about his accident, he rolled his long pants up to his knee level just to show us the post-surgery scar on his right leg, running from the distal end of the patella to the lateral end of the mid-leg. It looked pretty diminished which is not really surprising as it has been 10 years already. All in all, Mr. Rahman was a good storyteller and we enjoyed talking to him. Mr. Rahman even made some significant comment about the very recent implementation of the 6% GST, saying that it can be both beneficial and detrimental. It is beneficial in a sense that it can improve the economics of the trades industry leading to a more competent economic growth overall. As for the detrimental effect, it has to be none other than the citizens’ negative perception towards the government as most people are against the idea of goods and services increasing in price considering how Malaysians’ annual incomes is not as exuberant as the well-developed countries who have long implemented the system. It has caused the people to associate the government with being greedy and corrupted, causing the people to lose their trust in the governments’ reign. It was an insight that made us think through for a while. By this time we knew that Mr. Rahman is not just any loafer, he is more of a well-off man seeking leisure by sitting around doing nothing, just to get forget about life for a while. All of us are definitely in need of a time like that once in a while. Before parting ways, we asked him about his plans for the future. He deliberately told us of his plans on helping expanding his wife’s business and his recent involvement in a Malaysian-based telecommunication project that is neither official nor vastly announced but he claimed that there were a lot of potential in it. He told us some details of the plan of commencement that we did not really manage to get but by the looks of it, this is a very ambitious project and we just hope for the best for him and his higher-ups. When we were about to bid farewell we decided to give him a token of appreciation in the form of some local delicacies that we can find easily around the food stalls nearby. He was a very cooperative man so we thought it’d be generous enough to just present him with something. We definitely learned something significant from the brief yet interesting conversation with Mr. Rahman. In a nutshell, the overall experience was priceless and mind-opening.