Mucus.
We love the sticky concoction. Not only does its application range from the rear end of stamps and envelope flaps, its utility extends to lift buttons, door handles and cooking utensils. Kids and adults alike love it for its easy application to our favourite public property, and the camouflaged nature after appropriate exposure for a few hours.
In fact, it is so easy to use, we are not even conscious of it! Because of its widespread popularity, human mucus poises to be the most prevalent compound ever found in the human constructed world. With self-sustaining production capabilities within each and individual occupant of the human world, it is a dire dis-service we are doing to ignore the great capabilities of this substance as the shelter for more than a billion organisms which proudly call it home.
So why wait? Run out to the nearest lift, and spread this life-sustaining substance NOW! Living things will thank you for your benevolent contribution to their living space.
(Disclaimer: Whilst such philanthropic actions may benefit billions of living creatures, the inherent jealous nature of humans will cause them to disapprove your act with extreme stares of disapproval. Let not sour vinegar stop you from charity!)
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General
As far as I can remember, the PCs of my friends are ridden with a delightful range of unwanted applications, ranging from the persistent adwares that would magically re-install themselves after having been forcibly removed, to silent intelligence-oriented spywares that send in their bank log-in information to a gloating hacker in a remote location miles away.
I would help them remove some of the rampant infestation using the available tools from the Internet, but no tool is ever perfectly accurate in pin-pointing these nuisances, so discreet programmes that are adept at cloaking themselves from detection act as trojan horses, and race to re-download their fellow comrades as soon as the anti-spyware tools aren’t looking.
You would be surprised just how many users don’t want their anti-spyware tools to run continuously. Ironically, being the most visible programme, people tend to think that it occupies “space”, and would close it whenever possible. They remain blissfully unaware than many more applications keep on running, even without having a visible interface.
The unsolicitation market is vast, not just in cyberspace, but also on the streets. If geeks ever bothered to take the time off their intense obsession with their beloved rigs, they would marvel at how much the situation is mirrored on the street. The average street is littered with sales personnel, surveyors, cheats, beggars who specialised in attempting to relieve you of your wallet.
What happens on the street occurs online in the form of spam. Companies engage the services of a professional spammer to plaster a few million copies of in-your-face advertising into every conceivable mailbox that the automated mailer can generate. Nigerian Scheme scammers pose as royalty of Nigeria sitting onto a US$3 million stash belonging to a deceased relative, yet others hold animal lovers hostage by threatening to kill a rabbit unless the perpetrators are paid off handsomely.
While most people are street-smart enough to avoid being duped in the real world, they are not as savvy with the Internet. By treating every e-mail with the same trust as postal mail, businessmen out for a quick profit soon find themselves in for a fast loss.
Users who do not bother to keep a small persistent antivirus, firewall, and anti-spyware programme soon find themselves with parasitical programs that rob other legitimate programmes of running space without even noticing it.
If you won’t have sex without protection, don’t use the Internet without protection. Protection keeps you safe; use it.
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General
Perhaps the situation is far worse than I have thought. Not only do Singaporeans have the nasty hobby of rushing into an already packed train without waiting for passengers to alight, now they even refuse to give way to a medic who needs the lift to rush a patient to the hospital!
Even the newspapers are on to the coat tails of this alleged phenomenon (as if the nightmare will go away when they wake up the next morning). The Straits Times conducted an investigation into the manners of Singaporeans, and the reporters came away shocked that the majority of the people do not hold doors for people behind them, don’t like to express gratitude in return for gracious help rendered, and feel that it is their right to think of themselves first.
The report went on to conclude that only a pathetic 20% of Singaporeans bother to thank others for courteous actions. I wonder how many of the reporters themselves do thank other parties for holding lift doors? Perhaps they are just guilty as the rest of us.
It is a scary situation, that despite more than 30 years of money spent by courtesy campaigns initiated by the government, there hasn’t been a single improvement in human to human interactions — that by itself is a frightening piece of statistic. Surprisingly, the government hasn’t come up to issue a statement on the apalling results (which in itself is strange, because they are well known for issuing swift and harsh rebuttals to any claims by the foreign media).
We claim to have morals. Authors write angry letters when we see something we don’t like. Bored people complain about extra letters in public signage to newspaper forums, irate callers shout at poor CSOs for slight inconveniences while being unapologetic when they are in the wrong.
Just today, while I was alighting the bus, an auntie tapped her EZ-Link card to out-process her card when she had no intention of alighting. She took advantage of the large number of people out-processing their EZ-Link card to tap hers too, so that she will not be charged for the rest of her journey. Being the average Singaporean, I gave her the stare, but made no noise. I considered complaining to the bus captain, but when he caught me in the eye, I quickly walked away.
What did you expect? I am the same as the rest: we are all ugly Singaporeans, and proud to have our morals!
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General
It has been proven: offices are the breeding ground for an unusually high amount of bacteria and viruses — and our office didn’t need some expensive laboratory testing to discover this.
Instead, empty seats dot the rows in the office, the uniformity being disrupted in a random few seats by humans whom had either just gotten back from a terrible flu from someone, or were just starting to come down with that same flu.
And the effect is felt not only from the colder-than-usual air-conditioning (which I suspect was a contributing factor), but the fact that callers who made repeat calls are more likely to get picked up by the same agent. It gets embarressing when the customer actually remembers you and says, “We talked 2 hours ago, remember?” when all you can do is to ask for his identification number as if he called you for the very first time.
I know, it happened to me. There is this expectancy that customer service officers would remember them from the first call, where in reality so many other calls have gone by that the first customer would have been forgotten completely. Couple this with a flu-ridden mind, and you can see the potential disaster.
I know that somebody put in a request for an air-cleaner to be installed on site, but with the size of the room, any home-appliance-sized machine will struggle to even recycle the air to make a difference to the air quality. My teachers were smarter in this regard. They solved the problem back when I was still in school by turning off the air-conditioning and opened the windows.
A recent discovery was that computers are also hot-beds for virus and bacteria to breed in. Blame it on our own habitual obsession of eating at the desk. The minute food stains the keyboard and allows bacteria to grow rapidly, so much so that some people actually have declared a toilet bowl to be cleaner than the average keyboard! To think I actually dared to pick up snacks with my bare hands after typing on the it!
I really hope that they would do something about turning the air-conditioning on full blast during weekends; my last Sunday was extremely unbearable. For an asian having lived in the natural habitat of the tropics, the air-conditioning was artic to my hands, which could barely move in the cold. I seriously considered wearing gloves, but decided not to because it affects my typing. However, if things continue as they are, I might resort to getting those heater packs found in the army market. It isn’t common in Singapore to need a heater pack to work, but in this case, I consider it essential to even function in the cold.
In case you were wondering why I am ranting about the office environment, let’s just say that I fell sick. Being the good person that I was, I deprived myself of a day’s income by staying at home today. Anything for the health of my colleagues!
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General
I don’t know about the situation in your country, but living in the little red dot has kept me safe and secure from the wonders of terror driving.
How so? If you ever got behind the wheel on the roads in Singapore, you will first notice that the cars around you are all recent models, none come from a vintage earlier than 4 years old, and purr around stealthily, so much that you will gladly purchase a house next to a major road, and yet not grumble about the sound pollution — that is if you are not Singaporean. That is because you would have become used to the sight of ancient cars coughing their way past the housing estate, and would have loved to see all those nice new cars.
For one, I still complained about the whoosh sound those cars make whenever they go past, but seeing these new cars has become a matter of fact that the moment I crossed the border to our neighbour, Malaysia, I got the culture shock of my life. There, just a few kilometres away, was a land where no old cars could ever be found, yet I was standing amidst ancient engines that belched both noise and smelly black smoke, and I was only just beginning the trip!
I plonked down on my seat behind the bus driver, whom told me that we were lucky to hitch a bus that was only 2 weeks old. However, some vandals have already gotten to the new mechanic chairs, so there were one or two seats that couldn’t lean backwards like the normal coach chairs. You would shudder to think about the state of the chairs in a few month’s time.
Since it was early in the morning, there were not many vehicles on the road. 10 am is hardly the time where you would find cars romping rampant on the highways, but it was there I witnessed the first of many driving experiences in Malaysia.
The bus driver would keep to the left side of the road, and overtake on the right lane of the dual carriageway. It sounds like what a normal person would do except that he did it without any signal lights, nor did he leave clearance space in case the vehicle in front suddenly braked. So, my heart was literally in my mouth for half the journey, since there was so little distance between the previous bumper and the next, and there was this annoying habit of drivers not checking their blind spots before performing over-taking. Luckily, the bus driver noticed, and blasted the bus’s air-horn aggressively. Whenever he did that, the entire bus would jump from their seats, and then fumed silently at the interruption of their mid-morning nap.
Meanwhile, with my mouth still throbbing (my heart was still in my mouth), he cut neatly in front of a small white hatchback, and made it into the exit ramp just in time to overtake a goods truck that was travelling extremely slowly. At least he did the correct thing by slowing the bulky bus down earlier. I really hated brake jamming, it always jarrs me, and I won’t be able to feel comfortable in my seat if the driver did that the entire journey.
Anyway, I got tired of having my heart in my mouth for the next 3 hours, so I slept through the rest of the journey, air-horn blasts and sudden swerves and all. Danger can make one extremely sleepy.
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General
Two weeks of stagnation, and I didn’t miss writing my blog one single bit. That was how much fun I had in Malaysia. Initially, I did try to get access to a computer to do some writing, but when I saw the state of one of my Malaysian cousin’s computer, I was very much discouraged to even think about entering my password to check my email.
The last I checked with an anti-spyware program, her computer had 130 seperate spyware programs running simultaneously. To think she actually bore with the massive system slow-down, and continued using her computer even when Internet Explorer started to close on its own…
So, I am offering this as an excuse for mysteriously not blogging. Actually, I was always playing outside to even think about touching the computer, which is a highly unusual occurence, since all geeks suffer that obsessive compulsion to get in touch with technology even on holidays.
Mornings start late, which isn’t unlike Singapore if you are not working or studying, and the afternoon is spent either wandering in some mega mall, or the smaller stalls called “pasar malaam”. We didn’t go to any of the parks that my travel guide mentioned. You won’t too, if you actually went and saw the maze touted in the newspapers as an “attraction”.
Unlike Singaporeans, people actually have to travel quite a distance to reach a convenience store, and travelling to work places require either a car, or lots of time on the local public transport — sometimes both. The traffic gridlock the bus I took into Malaysia got trapped in was enough convincing that Singaporeans are timid drivers.
More to come, when I get over the inertia of going back on the job…
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General
I live in one of the numerous HDB buildings that are higher than the previous standard 12-storey flat-tops that was the hot favourite among city planners in its hey days.
In those older buildings, we had this lift in the block that always never failed to give me a claustrophobia each time I get in it. Not only is the standing space small, the lift buttons looked as if they would pop out if you even poked it gingerly. And the light: two fluroscent lamps that flickered whenever the lift moved really added to the atmosphere; imagine getting into this lift with an absolute stranger in the dead of the night — enough to give any sane person shivers.
To make matters worse, that lift only stops at 2 other floors besides the ground one, and it likes to jerk at least 2 times before coming to a halt at the landing. I’ve seen it at its worst once, when it didn’t mate with the landing door properly, and you had to take one step down from the lift onto the landing platform. Given HDB’s stringent lift inspection policy, that lift really gave me the creeps.
Right before I shifted house, I had the opportunity to visit one of my friends who live in a similarly mature building, with an equally aged lift. However, the lift was markedly spacious, and had nice blue walls, with buttons that were solid, though it still did the obligatory dual-jerk before opening on the landing, and was as slow as the lift at my old place.
In 2000, somebody in the higher levels of the decision making body decided to totally wipe out my housing estate, and replace it with sky-scrapers that would “define the landscape of Kallang forever”. All the residents were invited to the exhibition for their plans for the piece of land, for reasons known to me. It seemed counter-intuitive to show an affected person how you would tear down their house of 40 years (that was how old the building was), but that was how it went at that time.
Weeks later, some HDB runner came by the main gate and popped a thick piece of envelope with an eviction notice. Everybody had to clear out by 2004, whereby the building would then be demolished. Contained alongside the eviction letter was a series of prospectus for housing projects in the surrounding areas.
I was excited about shifting to a new house, since the cockroach problem was getting worse by the week. We had always suspected the trash hopper in the house, but it turned out to be the old pipes running through the flat. I got hit with the realisation literally when a cockroach came smack into my mouth while I was in the toilet one day. But moving house also held a realisation of sadness within me: leaving a building that has saw me change from toddler to teenager caused a tide of my memories to come back.
But I am digressing.
The first time I visited the new house on the 16th storey, I was surprised to see 3 brand new lifts, complete with LED displays, and wide enough to accomodate almost double the number of people as the old lift could. The lighting was cheery, and the ventilation fan whirrled busily — a wonderful change that made me extremely happy. Did I mention that the lift was speedy too, at 1 storey per second?
However, there were flaws in the lift system: the infra-red sensor on the door fail-safe mechanism seemed to like to mismatch, so that the computer would always read an obstruction at the door, and refused to close. I always suspected that the kids living on the lower levels had something to do with the mis-alignment, since I had also witnessed their projectiles raining down from their flats onto the ground floor, but I had no proof, so I left it alone after pestering the Essential Maintenance Unit for the umpteenth time. Also, the buttons tend to get stuck if somebody got lazy and pressed the sides of the button, instead of hitting dead centre. The lift ends up on that particular floor for a long time, until some irritated resident comes along to unstuck the button.
It gets creepy too, in the dead of the night, when the lift doors keep opening and closing.
You would too, if you had creepy kids living in the same block 
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General
Yesterday afternoon, I nearly snapped at the train station. Right when the train opens the door, the people trying to board the train would simply take the liberty to push their way into the train car, when alighting passengers have not yet gotten off the train.
As one sharp blogger put it, “logic dictates that the passengers from inside the car need to alight before more can enter it”. It is a social disaster when people think that this behaviour is not only acceptable, but a logical conclusion based upon their years in this education system.
It appears that those trying to force their way into the train are people who have a fear of standing on the train, and would strive their utmost to secure a resting place for their buttocks. The sad truth is that if they had to squeeze to get on the train in the first place, their chances of getting even breathing space on the packed can on wheels is next to impossible, let alone getting a seat. The sadder truth is that most people don’t even think that far.
Making matters worse, nobody thinks it fit to publicly denounce this inconsiderate behaviour. I make it a point to comment loudly to the passengers in the train, but being guilty of that offence themselves, they make no effort to concur, and I am made to feel like the heretic instead.
Peeved, I stand in silence fuming as the train continues its journey. A foreign tourist manages to get her camera out, and takes a picture of her companion.
A young punk with piercings on both his ear lobes and lips stood up from his seat immediately.
“$%&^! Who took picure (sic)?”
I glanced at the old lady holding on to 3 NTUC Fairprice (a local supermart) plastic bags full of groceries, and fumed silently.
If anyone has ever questioned the mandate given to the government, bear in mind that these people on the trains are the ones who gave that “mandate”.
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General
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