The toughest half year

The  year of the rat has been a series of deadly storms that rocked our pastry ship. Circuit breaker 1 on 26 Feb forced social distancing in restaurants halfing our revenue. Circuit Breaker 2 meant that we can offer only takeaways reducing whatever meager takings there were. Circuit Breaker 3 totally reduced customers coming to our shop. The only wind to our sail in the tough climate was diligence. We produced many delicious pastry and bread that garnered new followers. We had new customers that we've not seen before for our sourdough, cinnamon buns, baguette, ciabatta bread, boule bread, flat bread. 

When we exited from Circuit Breaker 3, our landlord visited us with an ultimatum. We had to pay the Pig a higher rent or move out. This scum bag milked us for years. The Sleaze-of-Humanity has systematically increased our rent every two years when there was no reason other than unadulterated greed. We were already paying the highest rent in the neighborhood. This bully thought that in such dire state, we will cowl to his tyranny.

It took a lot of patience, perseverance, teamwork and with some luck we discovered a place that's perfect for us. It's a bit small, half the rent and cozy. 

When we moved to our new place, it's as if the clouds opened up and the sun came into our lives. The move was taxed us to limits of human endurance. But we needed to pull out stuff deeper within ourselves to do even more. We had to set up shop in a week. We've known tired, exhaustion but now we know a new level of bone weariness.

In our new place, we had to contend with relentless safe distancing ambassadors. This fucktards kept popping up every hole like in the whack the mole game. We're not even open and these aggressive creeps are crawling all over our place. We also faced a zoo of government alphabet soup to get our licenses: ACRA, URA, SFA, NEA, SPF.  Each one of this leeches want money. We update our address in ACRA, spend money to buy our info. Go to URA, pay money apply for F&B use. Buy the approval info. Pay money to apply F&B license to SFA which wants the documents we purchased from URA and ACRA. Very clever, want to do business in Singapore, first buy from brother sisters. We've been doing this for 15 years and navigating the Singapore red tape is still daunting. 

After half of year of feeling like Captain Janeway on the Discovery, outgunned by alien tech, we finally broke through the wormhole into the heart of the CBD.