Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

If you ever bother to check out the lifestyle section on the NS Portal, you would notice that in addition to the short articles on the website, there would be a short poll on the bottom left hand side of every page on that section.

When you click on any option on that poll, you’ll see the results of that poll on the page. Believe or not, that number represents the number of bored CSOs ever. A few seconds later, the poll disappears and a new one appears in its place.

You click again on the new poll, and the same numbers greet you. Shocked, you watch in disbelief as the poll is replaced again by yet a new question, which gets sillier and sillier as you go through them. You are asked a variety of questions, from your preference of durains, to the location of NCS (the company that is supporting the NS Portal). Again, you are dumbfounded by the number of respondents to the mundane questions.

You see, working on weekends is usually boring, as the rest of Singapore is either away from the country, sleeping or playing, or simply busy not calling the hotline. This results in the few of us who happen to be on duty during the weekends to have a minute or two between calls to allow us to take a breather. When the gap between calls get longer, the number of bored CSOs increase, and thereby contributing to the traffic for the lifestyle page. (Though sometimes I wonder if that is the only traffic the lifestyle page ever gets.)

Contrast this with long call queues during weekdays, and the contrast is starking. People simply enjoy calling in during their working hours.

I worked till 10pm tonight, it is extra hours for extra money, so I might as well go for it. But I had a shock of my life when I left the compound to see my card away from it’s holder. In fact, i didn’t even know where it went, having got the shock only when I boarded the bus. I alighted at the next stop, and ran back to the previous bus stop, and searched frantically for the card. There was a large grass divider between the two roads that I had crossed to the bus stop, and I searched the grass, much like how we used to search for spent round cartridges after live firing.

When the AWOL card didn’t return after half an hour, I decided to call for help from Boss, whom immediately advised me to treat the card as lost, and to make a police report. All the while I was on the phone with her, a stranger tapped me on the shoulder. He asked me if I had dropped something, and pointed in the direction of the company guard house.

You cannot understand the feeling of hope that suddenly gets revived when a stranger comes out of nowhere and says that he knows that somebody had dropped something. It gets even better when the stranger tells you that the dropped item is a security pass.

My heart leapt into joy when I saw the missing security pass on the guardhouse table. I showed the guard on duty my empty pass holder, and he returned it to me after checking my details. The weight suddenly lifted, and immediately my heart was allowed to jump from pure gratitude that the card didn’t decide to abandon me.

I went back to search for the stranger who kindly tipped me off on the card, and thanked him very profusely for saving me $50 and tons of angst.

When I got home, I checked the card holder, and realised that the retainer had cracked, and was loose. That allowed the card to slip out easily when on the move. I was simply lucky that the card dropped in the company premises, so the security guard found my card. I couldn’t have imagined what might have happened if somebody with devious intentions found the card. Could they sneak in to steal all the precious unlimited supply of Milo?

Filed under: General