Bloomberg couldn’t have said it better than news agencies around the world; 2 weeks to repair 6 damaged submarine cables would mean that the better part of south-east Asia have somehow travelled back in time 10 years to pre-historic Internet.
While the official explanation for the time-frame was that most of the time would be spent locating the cables, hauling it to the surface, and then patching it up, I’m more inclined to believe that there are other factors that the officials have failed to mention.
#1: It is winter in the Northern Hemisphere
Whereas people were getting all nicely charred Down Under, we’re freezing out here in the upper half of the world. That includes Singapore, even though we are almost exactly one degree higher than the official bulge-line of our extremely emotional planet, average temperatures of 25 degrees celcius throughout the day makes air-conditioning units redundant, and blankets compulsory at night.
I even have to turn on the water heater to bathe at this time of the year in tropical Singapore; goodness knows how the waters are exactly doing over off Taiwan: divers are going to run the risk of hypothermia if they are not careful.
If I did not recall wrongly, one of the ships rushing to save the Internet originate from Singapore; if this is any indication, Singaporeans will have trouble operating in less than tropical environments, especially if my colleagues are any indicators to go by
#2: Finding a cable amongst the debris
Without casting doubts on the capabilities of the salvation crew, locating a piece of wire that is barely thicker than a marker pen (1.6cm in diameter) in a pond that spans Asia to the United States is no easy feat. Granted that they could have a GPS reading for the location of the cables, but that doesn’t make it any easier, as any experienced user of the GPS would tell you. Readings are accurate up till around 50 metres, and then it is the needle among the haystack.
Not to mention that the cable could have drifted while it floated down into the sea bottom during the laying, or simple displaced to some other weird kink, or simply buried by all the sediments that were thrown up during the earthquake. You would be amazed how much abuse they would let an innocent cable, with the critical task of handling half of the world’s largest continent’s data transfer would be armoured, tagged, and reinforced in some way, but I think we get the point.
#3: Follow-up tremors in the immediate area
In case you didn’t know, earthquakes don’t come alone. While its favourite buddy is the tsunami, this doesn’t stop its own siblings from escaping and running their own shows with their own friends after Big Brother had his fun. I won’t want people to be trapped on a ship when a tsunami strikes, it is going to be quite ugly.
I didn’t know that I could come up with so much plausible rubbish in 5 minutes: either I am a professional blogger, or I must be definitely so bored that I was able to come up with armchair theories about why a cable cut would take that long to be repaired. If you were looking for some facts on the cable cut, I hope you had as much fun reading this as much as I have enjoyed wasting your time
I can safely say that it has been verified. There was an earthquake of 6.7 or 7.1 on the Richter scale just approximately 20+ km off the coast of Heng Chun, Taiwan.
As we all know, Heng Chun is one very significant location for many male Singaporeans. I worry for the safety of those whom are currently on site.
Meanwhile, the tremors severely damaged many of the international submarine cables snaking through the Pacific Ocean, some of which carry quite a heft of South-east Asia’s communication links. Not only did it kick Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia back into Internet pre-historic data transfer rate days, it also placed a heavy load on the unaffected links to the rest of the world.
So, if you realise that your MSN messenger is lagging, or would like to know the reason why all your friends are offline, there you have it.
Time to get a life and do something other than World of Warcraft!
If you didn’t get this and are too young to get satire, you might want to get your teacher to help you out there. If you are a gas-guzzler, and don’t know what this means, I’ll help you book a visitation slot, with my compliments.
While Christmas is the overblown commercialised holiday of the year, it doesn’t make it a sufficient excuse to keep the world from coming together to enjoy each other’s company! Oh wait, it is cancelled?
Do you feel secure around the people in charge of your security?
I certainly was, especially back during my National Service, we totted weapons with ammunition to patrol the camp. It wasn’t the fact that people would even think of trespassing, but the thought that somebody is wide awake while you are sleeping makes it a lot more easier to go into dreamland.
Not many people have that chance though: in less socially stable countries, you can barely find a competent security system to rely upon. Heck, no matter what kind of system is set up, a maniac crazy enough (and dedicated enough) to wreck some damage will surely ruin everything and hurt somebody. Plus employees under such a system are probably have a danger exposure as high as what the military faces during operations.
So, what is an accepted benchmark for the safety of any given society? I’d say it depends on the attitude of security companies.
Highly Dangerous: Guards with shifty eyes, hands on their weapons most of the time. Ready to draw and fire.
Elevated Risk: Guards eyeing the surroundings with wariness, hands tensed, but not on their weapons. Ready to move and strike.
Normal Risk: Guards with a bored look in the eyes, hands on their work tables. Ready to hand the Visitor’s Book to visitors.
Low Risk: Guards with shifty eyes, hands on their (other) weapons most of the time. Ready to draw and fire. (No, this is not a mistake.)
You see, with Singapore under the Low Risk category, it has become unsafe for the average lady to go past the guard house alone.
Not only do the security guards have the mundane task of ensuring that everybody wear their building passes, they would have to patrol the building at regular interval, for the extremely unlikely and unidentifiable intruder. I suspect that some of them pass their time by blowing affectionate greetings to ladies who pass by the guard post.
Of course, we would dismiss this as a sign of friendliness, but when you go past the same security post for the better part of the year, and have not managed to have any of the security personnel speak to you (and the other 50% of the working population in the same building), it is unnerving when I see how some of them make verbal advances on the ladies.
And the problem is simply not confined to personnel in the security services. I have witnessed how a cleaner in our building attempt to get into the same lift as one of my lady colleague, even when he is pushing a cart-load of cleaning equipment, and obviously wouldn’t fit the two of them in the same lift comfortably. She gestured to me for help, and I stopped the guy in time for the lift door to close.
That is the price we pay for having a relatively safe society. Therefore, I propose that we set up an enterprise to manage and balance the crime rate in Singapore, by committing crimes at regular intervals, to keep all personnel on a high enough alert that nobody would have the time to pursue passionate interests.
Who knows? The next lady you blow a kiss to might turn out to be a skilled assassin, and that lift trip you take would be the adventure of your life. Can you even imagine the spin-off industry this would create?
I could have swore that the sun was in my bedroom yesterday evening. No, I wasn’t baked by the absolute heat — though I would have been well-cooked had there really be infra-red rays hanging around — for some weird reason, I couldn’t keep my eyes closed longer than 10 minutes at a time. It was as if the sun was shining right in my eyes (when the shy, innocent little globe was busy cooking whatever was on the other side of Earth from Australia).
In fact, it got to a maddening extent that I had half a mind to go for a long jog just to tire myself out. My only problem? I was thinking on all the cotton candy that accumulated in my head in the day.
So, mindful of the mindless knack for being unable to fall asleep despite being tired, I decided to just stare at the ceiling. You know, the type where you just lie on your bed and gaze at the ceiling, and pretend there are stars flashing? I probably really saw stars, but that didn’t tuck me into bed. When the clock ticked into 0400, I got pretty desperate. You would be when you have to work the next day, but still have not managed to get a single wink of sleep. I was thinking of risking it, and go to work once it happened, but with all the clouds floating around, I didn’t dare take the risk.
It couldn’t be helped. I had to take the next day off, so I sent a message to one of the Bosses (I have 3 of them).
Amazingly, she diagnosed me as having problems adjusting from sleeping in the day to sleeping in the night. This is surprising, because I could pig out from 11pm every day prior to this. But I was getting edgy when I saw the sun rise. After a few more messages, and a frantic call for help to all my friends, I managed to doze off at around 9am; strangely my usual sleep time after my night shift.
The accumulated stress kept me out cold until 3pm, but when I woke up, it felt like morning.
“This is bad,” I told myself. “At this rate, I’ll miss Friday too!”
After stuffing myself with water, and a very late lunch (which I couldn’t finish), I went for a jog around the neighbourhood. It was amazing what the rain did to the park connector. Sediments from the grass were scattered haphazardly around the park, while there were many nasty green-brownish puddles along the entire route.
It had to come after I had just washed and dried my running shoes.
In the end, an unidentified smear of mud still managed to cake itself to my shoes; like the over-used phrase: a clean linen always attract dirt, such a magnificent job of whitening the brown shoes surely would make any dirt worth its smear jealous.
They were pretty mean about it: the shoes did not look as bad as before it went under the brush, but it sure did look as if the owner was a filthy, typical male specimen (which I am, of course). But I sure hate how they squared the shoes off so fast.
Singapore has turned into a near perpetual toilet for the skies these 2 months, with the loo trips as frequent as every evening; each a heavy hitter in itself, so much so that no sane outdoor activity could happen from 3pm onwards.
Well, I could try dashing down to the supermarket for a few things during the lull, but it usually means a gamble that could see you laden with shopping items, no umbrella; or sprinting back home in the rain with your shopping and turning up at the lift lobby looking as if you had just come out of the shower. And that is for a 10 minute shopping trip at the local supermarket just across the road!
With such capricious weather, I can only look wistfully whenever Open Season time starts. No running in the rain, unless I am a hardcore person who doesn’t want to go to work the next day. Wait… I could try that if I didn’t want to go to work the next day, right?
Besides that point, the sky looks alluring with the pastel grey shades across the skyline. I always liked how the cool, stiff breeze always comes with these clouds (I think they are called cumulonimbus clouds), it is a welcome relief from the baking heat in the middle of the year.
I really feel for the NSFs whom are currently serving their National Service right now, surely some of them must be stewing in the muddy ponds that form from the rain. Imagine having to walk through the entire outfield exercise in wet clothings, and the prospect of a freezing night to pass without a change of clothes: my heart will be with you. I’ve been there, and done that. The jungle tropics can be cruelly cold at night in Decembers.
Now that is something anybody who hasn’t been through it would even know, don’t you agree?
