An Addiction to Gambling

By the first look at someone face you really couldn’t tell that one day a person would become a gambler.  May a fortune teller can predicts that. Here is a person named Zack who lead a normal life making a living as a busy businessman in the city. He is the owner of  a chain of retail provision shops. Like everyone one of us doing his business, contributing to the country’s economy and provides for his family every day. For the first part of his life he was quite a happy person, busy working and well-respected by his employees and a role model for everyone in the retail industry to emulate.

As times goes by his business expanded to many parts of the country. His retain business thrive and even survived through many economic upheaval in the region and many of his peers would like to learn from his success story. Zack was always very humble and knew that one will always need to adapt to the changing environment particularly there were so many competitors in the region. He had entrusted his business to his managers and even took the advice of jumping on the bandwagon of the internet through e-commerce. With the use of technology his business was able to move up the level chain and be able to stay ahead of his competitors.

The retail business is a very dynamic industry, from marketing to logistics, customers’ relationship and prompt delivery everything need to be in a tip top conditions. However, nobody is perfect and Zack has one weakness – that is, he likes to gamble and gambling was like his past time hobby. Sometimes in the weekend he would go to the casino to gamble and his gambling hobby became a habit. He didn’t know the reason why he like to gamble maybe he liked the thrill of winning or it was just to de-stress himself. With the city’s opening up of integrated resorts he would always visit the casino sometimes after work.

When he was inside the casino, he would spend long hours playing jackpot, roulette, card games like black jack or poker, rolling dice big or small and many table games. As one of the integrated resort sales tactics, Zack applied for the premium membership and had accumulated many points for him to come back and gamble over and over again. He was awarded with free hotel stay, free car parking lot and sometimes free buffet in the hotel whenever he gamble a lot and wins many points. All these reward system motivated him to gamble even more.

His gambling habits went from bad to worse. An old adage that one wouldn’t get rice just by gambling didn’t hold true in him. He was adamant about changing his gambling habits. The thrill that he had in winning overshadowed everything that he treasured in his life. Soon his relationship with his family members turned soured and his business takes a toll. With the arrival of the giant retailer, he began to make unsound judgement and listened to wrong advice. Some of his trusted managers even warned him or opposed about the dangerous strategy of having a price war with the giant head on. Some many of his managers left his company, some were sacked by him. The giant retailer leverage on its economy of scale coupled with making use of the disruptive technology on smart phone mobile apps, Zack retail business was too slow to catch this wave. Many customers started to order from the giant retailer using this new technology to order their stuffs with the touch of their fingers things that you order would deliver to your doorstep. And the giant retailer even had plan to deliver thing using drones in the future. Many of these changes that took place he was unable to see as he was too engrossed and blinded by gambling. He became a habitual gambler and addicted to it. He would let his managers run his business entirely like an auto-pilot.

Soon his business was unable to compete with the giant competitor. His company runs into heavy debt and unable to pay his vendors on time. With mounting debts, and debtors coming after him and his company for repayment he went into hiding in the casino to gamble away his time and money. When he ran out of money he would borrow it from the loan shark. Many debtors and loan shark runners came after him he got no choice but to retrenched all of his staffs and folded his business. From then on he became a bankrupt. Some of the angry loan sharks came to his house to draw graffiti signs like O$P$ on the walls, out of panicky Zack escape to hiding in the park.

Zack was at his wits end. He was very sad, down casted and disheartened. He had never tasted such a bitter failure in his life. He took stock of himself, when he thought back he felt that this was all his fault and could not blame anyone in his life. He repented what he did and prayed that he would do some changes in his life, he yearned to be given another chance to atone his mistakes.  

One day while walking towards a bus stop, he noticed an advertisement of a voluntary charity organization with a written message ‘Don’t Be Afraid of Ah Long (meaning loan shark) We’ll Help You”. Upon reading this, he felt so touch and straight away copied down the contact number. He called up to a Mr Tan and he was happy to meet him on an appointed date for some counselling. On that day Zack met with Mr Tan who listened to his financial problems compassionately. Being an experienced person who had handled many of these cases before, Mr Tan tried all his best to settle his debts with his debtors and the loan shark on condition that Zack must quit his gambling habit. The loan shark’s scare tactics had no way to threaten Mr Tan as he has dealt with them before. Zack agreed to repay them with an instalment plan similar to the rest of his debtors. When all was settled, Zack thanked Mr Tan for all his help and wanted to stay on his organization to volunteer and help others with the same situation like him. Zack quitted his gambling and found his job as a delivery driver with Mr Tan’s help.

To this day Zack’s debt was almost settled, he recalled at time when he was struck with failures  it was too tormenting and devastating for him to shoulder these heavy debts , he was too ashamed to go home , the worst thing that came haunting in his mind was to commit suicides. Luckily that suicidal thought did not materialize otherwise he wouldn’t be here guiding and counselling others now. He was grateful that he made the right choice of giving himself another chance and was very thankful to his benefactor Mr Tan.