narcolepsy

hello blog...

as you might have guessed by now, sleep deprivation is no longer an occasional event but a daily fixture... add that to occasional extended periods of lack of work, which forces me to read things that sound like "Financial Adviser's Act" and various publishings from MAS, and you get a potent tranquilizer that might work even better than sleeping pills... i have become a master of the art of advanced stoning... as the old cliche goes, practice makes perfect... i'm reporting to work tomorrow for more training...

today i had the privilege of having an evening to myself with absolutely nothing to do... sensing the need to go get something enriching to read, i made my way down to the national library after work... i quickly decided on "tuesdays with morrie" by mitch albom, a book i remember vividly from my days in army... a campmate brought it to the guard room while we were doing guard duty and i remember i was at chapter 2 when the DO(duty officer) came in to give us a turn out or something like that... anyway, i never had the chance to finish that book... i checked the e catalog in the library for the availability of the book, and found out that the library had 20 borrowable copies...

i headed straight for adult fiction, and i couldn't find any of the 20 copies there... so i approached the nearest librarian and asked her to help me with a title... i told her that the name of the author was mitch albom and she nonchalantly asked me to look under "alb", as if i didn't know or i looked as if i didn't know how to spell... so i told her that i checked the catalog for the availability of the book, looked under "alb" for adult fiction and couldn't find it... i must have really looked like a liar who was illiterate cause she actually walked me to the shelf where the books classified under "a something" was and told me it should be there... then she directed me to the same e catalog that i used and asked me to type the title in front of her on the search engine, as if i was lying to her... so i did exactly that, showed her the search results and explained to her again that i did the same thing previously and searched the shelf throughly to no avail... if there was one thing that she could do right, it was to consult a more experienced colleague...

she got the second part right, but the colleague was just as clueless as her... he asked me to type the search again in front of him, and without even bothering to check the shelves, told me he didn't know why the book isn't there, before asking me to consult the counter staff instead... so after wasting 20 minutes of my precious free time, i made my way to the counter, told them my title and to cut the story short, i finally got my book which was placed in the non fiction section... diao... those 2 idi**s i approached first didnt even know how to operate the e catalog and read the damn code... nevertheless i would still like to thank the staff at nlb for helping me with my book...

oh anyway i was about to leave when something caught my eye...



wow.. i didn't know... for those who don't know who rooney is, well... read more...

i was walking to the bus stop outside national library, across the road when something else caught my eye... must be the sleep deprivation playing tricks with my eyes...



for those who dont know who that person is, where the hell were you when the rest of singapore was watching fandi ahmad and malek awab and gang on tv or the national stadium? shame on you...

hello blog...

wow! 2 posts in 3 days! this doesn't happen a lot... you might want to get 4D tickets this week cause seeing this on my blog might be rarer than striking 4D... ok maybe
not... cause i finally have a decent phone with a 2 megapixel camera... which means i can finally unleash all my voyeuristic tendencies on the sunny island of singapore... ahahahah.... muahahaha....

it has been 3 and 1/2 months since i got my job... working in the CBD and people watching in raffles place during lunch has not only made me a part time voyeur but also some sort of a pseudo anthropologist...

lunch time at popular places like lau pa sat, china square, far east square and golden shoe complex presents one with a motley mix of characters with lots of intersting behaviour on display... office aunties and their middle aged colleagues engage in (office) political discourse over nasi lemak, punters dressed in their checkered short sleeve shirts and jeans shouting orders for bets on epl matches over the phone or discussing wayne rooney and frank lampard with their teenage ka kias while sipping their teh c, and temps joking and laughing at things which are too juvenile for others to pay attention to and dressed too seriously for their own good... obviously i belong to the latter... there are countless others, unrealistic for me to list on this blog... at least for this entry, anyway...

a closer look exposes habits that typify many quirks and idiosyncrasies that we can identify with as singaporeans... like how we are suckers for queues and the fact that we immediately assume that the stall with the longest queue has the best food instead of the slowest service, or how we go for stalls with the most newspaper cuttings and television posters and "certificates" from food shows like "makansutra" and "our makan places"... habits like these are fine cause they make us unique in our kiasu-ness but one thing that pisses me off is the very common practice of people choping seats with packets of tissue paper, while they wander off to get their own food... dont get me wrong.. im not against choping seats for friends or yourselves while your companions go off to get food for you 'cause it saves one the hassle of walking around like a moron with a tray of food, ready to trip and spill the contents onto somebody else's head... but seriously, i think these people should have the decency to have somebody in the group stationed at the table, so that at least somebody can politely tell others that "the seats are taken" and have a casual apology ready for others who have made the effort to walk through the crowd to check out the availability of the seats... i mean leaving one to walk all the way over to the mirage of an unoccupied table only to find packets of tissue paper on the seat is just... vulgar... urghh... to prove my point i have provided evidence, courtesy of the camera function in my phone (thank God for camera phones)...



see what i mean? irritating... so in an attempt to display my penchant for mockery and one-upmanship, i decided to try this...



okay maybe not... soon people around me started giving me strange looks and my lunch partners started shifting a few seats away for me... someone told me i'm a retard but its ok... thanks for reminding me about something i already know...

maybe they didn't understand what message i was trying to convey... maybe you don't too.. thanks for reading anyway... will be back with more...

p.s. on second thoughts, that was a little lame...

logic?

hello...

finally... time to actually switch on my computer and blog... i have been reading the news... lots of news about things happening elsewhere and around us... things that doesn't affect us, things that affect us, things that we wish affected us, and things that we wish happened earlier so it would have affected us...

maybe i should just get straight to the point...

i have been reading about the proposed pay hikes for civil servants, especially "highly paid" ministers and members of parliament who are supposed to serve with very respectable civic minded passion, as if having "passion" fills their stomachs and their wallets and their children's stomachs and wallets magically by dropping from the sky... i mean seriously... civil servants and ministers and members of parliament are humans too and working legally in the public sector entitles them to a paycheck they deserve, as much as the rest of us who cast our envious glances everywhere as if the grass is always greener on the other side...

for those of you who might not be reading the news or haven't been around, much of the debate has been on highly paid ministers and members of parliament getting substantial increases in their pay... people are unhappy that ministers and MPs, who are in the public sector serving the people for a "noble" cause shouldn't pay themselves more than a token amount for their work because they should take pride in being "privileged" enough to serve the good people who voted them into power...

in doing so, the detractors of the pay rise are trying to tell the ministers that they shouldn't get rewarded for their work, regardless of how well they have done in their jobs... if they do well, it is okay because that was what the people voted them for and if not they should be condemned and kicked out by the next election...

i hate to say this and sound like a social studies text book but we have really gone soft and taken the relative well being of our country for granted... seriously, i feel that we should give credit to them where it is due, and make sure we keep our standards and continue to have competent people serving the country... if we continue to tell ministers and MPs that they should not be getting what their counterparts in the private sector are getting, we are letting them that they are inferior to them, and therefore do not deserve the same pay... eventually, talented people who deserve to be serving as ministers and MPs will leave for greener pastures and fatter paychecks... less competent people will replace them and we will end up shortchanging ourselves, just because 4 million of us want to save a few million dollars every year so we could buy more 4D every week...

seriously... having a "heart" for the people and the appeal of getting "fulfillment" from the job can only take one thus far... eventually, the competent ones will start to realise that they are shortchanging themselves and leave, allowing somebody else less competent to take the job... the honest ones will continue to serve... the less honest ones will start looking for "supplements", and this opens a door to corruption and ultimately incompetence... one does not need to look further than our neighbour,the one whose flag bears an uncanny resemblance to ours and thinks that we are eating their land away by importing sand, to find an example... so why should we shortchange ourselves by driving away the current ones, whom i think are pretty competent, simply because the country is doing well, and replace them with people whom we know will not be the best that we are getting for the job? it would be pretty sad for us to allow money to be a limiting factor for competence and good governance, when we know very well that the country is doing well and we can all well afford it...

what disturbs me most is that many of us understand the concept behind paying high wages for quality work... those who watch football will know that if the top teams stop paying those extravagant wages to their top players, they will request for transfers and find employment with other clubs who are willing to pay them the wages that they think they deserve... telling civil servants that they should be working for the joy of the job is like telling those footballers that they should be playing for the love of the game and not for the wages... the top footballers in the s leage in singapore earn up to S$13,000 a month... michael ballack, the most highly paid footballer in the premiership, earns GBP130,000 a week.. which means GBP540,000 a month... that is more than 120 times the pay of a top s league footballer in singapore... one look and you can tell the difference in the standard of football between the two leagues...

well if you've made it this far then thanks for reading... i would really have wanted to discuss a lot more things but its 2am now and sleep beckons... i havent had a decent night of sleep because of work... i know its a little cliched but hope this entry has been constructive to you...