The Philippine Blogging Summit is just a day away. When I registered last month, I said that I would wear a Chicken Mafia T-shirt to the event. Even though such a shirt didn't exist at the time, I was pretty confident. I mean, I had one full month to get one simple shirt printed. Piece of cake, right?

But of course, I procrastinated. Last Monday, I finally remembered to look around Megamall for a shop that can make me a nice Chicken Mafia shirt. To my horror, most of the few shops that I found needed a week to finish the printing. One week for one shirt? Why? Do they ship their shirts to Indonesia and have them hand-painted by underpaid children? Come on!

Fortunately, I found this little stall in the basement. They say that they can have it done in one hour. One hour? Great!

Earlier this evening, I went back there with a CD containing the shirt design that I created 20 minutes before I left the house. The guy behind the counter quickly dampened my mood by informing me that their computer's CD drive is broken and that I needed to have my design on a diskette. My head almost exploded. A diskette? You actually mean a floppy disk? Jesus, I haven't seen one of those in years!

I convinced the guy to lend me a blank diskette, and off I went to the nearest Internet cafe. Just copy the file from the CD and I'm done, right? Not so fast. This being my lucky day, the computer that I was assigned to also had a busted CD drive. What the hell? Is God punishing me for my religion bashing last week?

After wasting more time, I finally got the file transferred and took the diskette back to the stall. It was pretty much smooth sailing after that, which is good, because I was this close to losing my temper. I went for dinner with a friend, came back in an hour, grabbed the T-shirt, and went home. This is what the finished product looks like.

Yes... for some reason, they couldn't make the print any bigger. Maybe they have a miniature printer or something... don't know, didn't ask. Here's a closeup.

Yeah, I know. The design is lame. That's my fault. I should have spent more time on it.

I can't believe that I just paid 500 pesos for this lousy T-shirt. I guess that's my penalty for waiting until the last minute to get things done. Oh well, at least I have a Chicken Mafia T-shirt now.

Hmm, it still has that strong new shirt smell on it. It's too late to wash it now, so I apologize in advance to my seatmates at the blogging summit.

Of course, I still have one full day to have it washed and dried, but I'm worried that the paint on the shirt would dissolve the moment it comes into contact with water, and I don't think I want to risk it. After all, it's a pretty expensive shirt.