A locker tale

This week passed by in light speed. Really, without me knowing it, Friday is already here. Not that I am complaining but it’s really quick. It was also a week where I have been very discipline in going to the gym. And consider that I have not been a regular for the longest time; my whole body feels as though it’s falling apart due to all the weights.

Speaking of gym, I have been warned that my gym is notorious about having a high density of people who have lost a sense of direction. Ya’ know… those poles who like poles instead of holes. This friend of mine was telling me how he felt as though someone is always ready to pounce when you’re showering. Haha!!

One thing I wanna share with you all. You see, if you happen to take up a locker deep inside a particular row of lockers and when the gym is crowded, you practically have to squeeze through in order to reach your locker. The other day, I happened to take up such a locker. And just as when I was trying to get to my locker after my shower… this guy pulled down his pants (and underwear) and bent down… and he was freaking blocking my way!!!!

What’s worse is that I was just about to walk pass him! For a moment there, I almost landed myself in some very sticky situation. Suddenly, I came up with these 5 horrible things that could have happened to any guy in that situation…

Number 5…
As you walk passed him, one of your hand accidentally brushes his ass… OoooOOOOooo!!

Number 4…
He turns around to you and both of you have eye-contact… holy shit!

Number 3…
He smiles and begins to walk slowly to you…

Number 2…
He touches your ass!!! Shit!!

And the worst thing that can happen to you thereafter….

…
…
…
…
…
…
…
…
…
…
...

...

...
...

...

...
...

...
…

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...
…
…
…
…
…
…
You actually like it….


Happy weekend everyone…

Don’t ground ’em… just crash ’em

It was not until I received a mail from one of my former classmates that I actually begin to follow the development of the incident. I was left wordless when I read that mail, sent to our class of 95 yahoo mail-group. The mail talks about the recently crashed landed Nuri helicopter… the pilot was our former classmate, Kapten Nor Azlan Termuzi.

As some of you may know, the military helicopter went missing last Friday 10 minutes after taking off and the wreckage was found mid of yesterday. There were 6 on-board the helicopter, none survived. Me and my former classmates lost a friend today.

The reason why I did not pay much attention to the missing helicopter until I know Azlan was piloting it was because Nuri helicopter crashes bear much resemblance to haze in this counter… they happen rather frequent, so frequent that it warrants a “huh, crash again?” reaction. We are either fed up with it, or just couldn’t be bothered as it doesn’t concern us. To me, it was both.

How frequent are the crashes if you may asked...

Well, inclusive of Azlan and his crew, 67 people have died in 11 crashes (I counted them from statistics shown in today’s Star newspaper). The first crash happened 1 year after the Nuri was introduced to the Malaysian Air Force, with 3 crashes and 2 emergency landings in the last 4 years alone.

Is there something seriously wrong with these helicopters? Of course not!! As reported in today’s news … “The Nuris have been properly maintained and are in good condition”. Hence, despite all these crashes, the Nuris will not be grounded. There will be an investigation done on this latest crash and then they will decide whether the Nuris will be grounded.

Wait a minute… shouldn’t they be grounding these helicopters until they are proven safe and not flying them until they are proven dangerous. Oh yeah, I forgot, this is just our way of doing things. Besides, all those who are dead are not some big shot VIP but just our regular soldiers. Also, the Nuris are just 40 years old and since we still got more than 20 of them… yeah, don’t ground ‘em… just crash ‘em… crash ‘em all…

To Azlan, I will always remember you as that guy who ran in the 5,000 metres race during the 1994 sports day and emerged second. And when I saw how tired you were, I asked how they hell are you going to run in the 100m and 400m sprint… you smiled and said “Jangan takut”.

Azlan emerged as champion in the 100m and 400m sprint.

May you rest in peace my friend.

Those auto messages

My boss was on leave today. Usually, she will activate her ‘out of office’ message for her e-mail but I think she forgot to do that for today. How I know? … Cause I copied her in some of my mails and didn’t get the prompt.

Oh, for those who don’t know what an ‘out of office’ message is… it is a function in our office mail where we modern slaves can activate should be we go on leave. When there is an in-coming mail, an automated message will be sent to the sender telling the sender that the recipient is on leave and will not be around to reply.

A typical ‘out of office’ message will go something like…

“I will be on leave from xxx to yyy and will not be around to reply your mail. Should you require any urgent assistance, please contact the sucker at 12345678”

Sounds very boring right? Well, someone sent me a list and allow me to share with you some interesting ones…

I am currently out at a job interview and will reply to you if I fail to get the position. But if I did, I just want you to know that you suck. – do this only when you’re very confident of your new job.

You are receiving this automatic notification because I am out of the office. If I was in, chances are you wouldn’t receive anything at all. – I am sure many of you wanna put this one up, right?

Sorry to have missed you, but I am at the doctor’s having my brain removed so I can be promoted to our management team. – oooOOooo… how many agree this is important?

The e-mail server is unable to verify your server connection and is unable to deliver this message. Please restart your computer and try again. – this will probably reveal how many idiots are out there.

Thank you for your e-mail. If I don’t reply you, it means you have just asked a stupid question. – how many of you modern slaves in the consulting world wanna put this up?

And here is the most interesting one…

I will be away for the next 2 weeks for medical reasons. When I return, please refer to me as “Sharon” instead of “Steve”.

Do you have any version of your own?

And to sum it all up

Girls are generally money minded… rich guys are generally jerks… guys will generally go for younger hotter chicks… married men are generally horny… those topics have been hotly debated in AZAIG lately. For a while, I thought I have turned AZAIG into a forum or something. The initiating entry even breached the century comments count! Not that I am complaining. In fact, I am absolutely thrilled and long may it continue.

Anyway, I’ve said earlier that I like Helen’s comment best, but another comment came in later and I must say, blogger ‘me’ said it all in one simple phrase….

“… yes, women do it too… the statistic is just still not as many as the men”

She was referring to the how thrill and excitement of ‘something new’ will drive men into forgetting about his responsibility and plunging his head (the dick version) into some new “hole”. And she is right in admitting that women do it too, infidelity I mean, not plunging “head” into a certain “hole”. But of course, like she said, just that the statistics point more towards guys as being the perpetrators.

Being a member of the male species, I’ll admit that is true.

Similarly, the debate about all girls being money minded can be concluded in that manner. Some female readers have pointed out that men can be equally materialistic. I will not deny that but well, if I may borrow the phrase by ‘me’…

“… yes, men do it too… the statistic is just still not as many as the women”

Fair?

In life… we usually know what is wrong and what is right. Most of us are born with the instinct to do the right thing, ethical right things I mean. That is called knowledge, gained through our understanding about life. When being asked whether we will do the wrong thing, our knowledge will tell us to deny it… to say no. It’s our natural response.

With knowledge, we are then being put in situation whether we need to do the right or the wrong thing. This discerning knowledge allows us to know what to choose between wrong or right. This is called wisdom.

But… admitting that we have our weaknesses and limitations, that we are vulnerable to temptations, that we may land our ass in the dark side one day… admitting that wisdom may fail us despite having the right knowledge… that is called… maturity.

May you have a blue-less Monday.

Ponder and find the peculiar time

Have you heard of this over the radio lately?...

“Hey guys, where are going?”
“We’re going for a holiday.”
“That’s great. Where to?”
“Oh ya’ know… Phuket, Bali, Singapore, Thailand.”
“Hey… kam mon, this is we-shit mesia year 2007, we must all support we-shit mesia year!”
“Oh yeah man… let us all go to Ipoh, Penang instead”
“Yea yea… let us all we-shit mesia… let’s go to Subang!”

Something like that… heard of it? No disrespect to hitz-fm or the morning crew, Rudy and JJ but…

Now I know how our country is going to achieve the targeted 20 million visitors. Hey you… did you go to Ipoh lately? You just contributed to the number of tourist in this we-shit… I mean visit Malaysia year campaign. Oh… that nuffnang gathering in Penang which attracted quite a number of KL bloggers, you have all just contributed to visit Malaysia year 2007.

Ok ok … maybe I am being a bit too critical of it. But one thing I must ask is WHY… WHY… WHY each time a person is supposed to portray Malaysian in a radio advert, they will put on some broken manglish? WHY? Another typical example is the advert asking us to support our local football team. For goodness sake, it’s vi-sit Ma-lay-sia and not we-shit mesia.


I know some of you all are supporters of manglish, but really, is this how you want to be portrayed?

Oh well… it’s Friday after all, and we should all be happy. I am not actually, I have just finished my half year reporting to London and the tax filing is due so the modern slavery life is going to be worse than ever in the last 2 weeks.

And oh… just to tickle everyone’s thoughts a bit… time has always been a peculiar thing in this blog… can anyone tell why?

Updated: Oh, a very big word of thanks to AhPek from AhPek.com for featuring me in his blog. What an honour... !

Happy weekend!

P/S: Go vote now if you haven’t done so.

Very quickly

There is an infection to my right eye and it’s quite bad so this is going to be rather quick. 4 things I would like to share today.

First, remember this entry and this entry where people are dying from being a modern slave? Well, we are indeed dropping like flies. Check out the article below and pay attention to the last line. It’s just so true.
Secondly, Tunku Halim is organising a fun competition for his readers. For those who do not know, Tunku Halim is a reputable local author who has made a name for himself. He is currently organising a fun competition in relation to one of his book titled “44 Cemetery Road”. Details of the competition can be read here.

Thirdly, I have put up a new poll, go vote!! I am beginning to like this poll thingy. A total of 137 readers voted in the previous poll. A big word of thanks to you all.


So most of you like to think… hmmm… that’s really good. I must also applause many of you here whom I can call “thinking readers”. Your comments can sometimes be better than my blog entry itself. You know who you are... Kudos to you all and keep them coming!

Last but not least, anyone who would like to take up a role of an assistant instructor in a child learning centre teaching maths, drop me a comment leaving your mail. I will delete your comment after getting your mail if you do not wish to disclose it to the world. I will mail you the details. Oh… this job is in 1 Utama.

My eyes are hurting… need to rest. Goodnight everyone.

Debit affluence, credit conscience

Though I am in working in the accounting industry, I am not exactly a number person. But any accounting graduate; or even student will know the very basic of accounting. It’s called ‘double entry’. “Debit” usually means ‘inflow while “credit” usually means ‘outflow’.
One of the few things I still remember from my University days was this finance lecturer who said that the whole world functions like an account. What goes up, must come down, if there’s an input, there will be an output, when there’ a debit, there must be a credit. I find this notion very true, more apparent these days. Unless something falls from the sky, we cannot expect to gain something without losing something in return.

Looking at our society, we will all agree that we are progressing in almost all aspects as the years go by, generally speaking. People are getting more educated; we are more aware of our needs and… we have a much increased desire for luxury. As such, the motivation to succeed has been heighten tremendously. The competition to make it big and to be somebody, has reached a level no one has ever imagined before.

If the whole society is a company, we seem to be increasing our ‘revenue’; average income per capita for KL (the capital of Malaysia) folks have never been higher. We are certainly moving ahead with our way of life, just look at the amount of shopping malls and if you’re observant enough… look at the way we spend, it’s truly incredible. Also, the purchase of motor vehicle, once considered a luxury, has reached such a level where owning 1 car is already a necessity. Our society is indeed ‘debiting’ plenty of affluence.

But amidst our desire to increase our wealth… to debit our affluence, have we ever wondered what is it that we are giving away to gain what we want? Have we ever wondered what is it that we are ‘crediting’ in this big account?

Recent events reported in our local media indicate exactly what is it that we are ‘debiting’. Day after day our media reports cases of fraud, theft, robbery, murder, rape, exploitation, con-job, bribery and all sorts of other creative crime. Even cases of snatch theft resulted in death for some! And we Malaysians need not to be reminded of the gruesome murder of a little girl by her very own mother.

We may not be directly involved in such things, but can we say our hands are really clean? Just look at our daily lives, in our normal course of work, how many times have we, in the name of convenience, ignored our conscience? I don’t even dare to think about it myself. Just because our discreet deeds did not result in any lost of life (or money), doesn’t really mean we are not guilty. Perhaps guilty is a heavy word but, are we crediting our conscience to debit our affluence all in the name of convenience?

It will be a noble act for some of us to actually put our foot down and do the right thing. However, such individual will only be branded as stupid. Let’s face the fact, our hands are tied, we’ve all been hand cuffed to something we cannot live without. We all want to be affluent, and we will do almost anything to achieve that. In our quest to gain our 1st million, we don’t care if the million is going to come from a million people who probably need 1 to survive.

In debiting our affluence, have we lost of conscience? I think we are. And can we do anything about it? Looking at our history in the light of our foreseeable future, the account is definitely going to balance. As we continue to debit our affluence, we probably must continue to credit our conscience.

This affluent society is slowly losing its humanity. Robbers, murderers are rapists are no longer fearful. They seem to be having fun in their act. Just look at the news about how a break-in resulted in the son being forced to have sex with the mother and the countless rapes which happened here in Malaysia where the boyfriends were made to watch. Crime has reached a whole new level.

I once heard that conscience is the only thing that hurts when everything else feel so good. I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I will admit my tolerance to his ‘pain’ has been increasing day by day and I am sure many of you will probably be developing this same immune system. So the account will continue to balance. As we continue to debit our affluence, we will continue to credit our conscience, perhaps in the name of convenience.

But I am terrified at the thought of the account running into overdraft. Or maybe, it already has.

P/S: This article has been posted by me in TheStar before. Been modified in the light of recent events.