Of Backz

If you have been checking out this page often enough and observed that there isn't any update, thanks for coming back again and again, i'm really happy that someone bothers reading what i write, what i have in my mind..

So, work has been the order of the day, order of the week, order of the month.. into my 3rd month into my current job, the traditional honeymoon period is well and truly over.. an event that took last then 4 weeks to plan and execute was concluded today, and it was not without hiccups...

as with events, i always enter the fray with a negative approach, planning for contingencies and expecting worse.. Murphy's Law always applies, more so when you are 3 months into your job and things that could have been covered by initiative by others were sorely lacking..

at the end of it all, it seems like medicoracy was acceptable.. and thus, it was the case.. so, what went wrong?

Equipment and IT - Testing the equipment the day before is no guarantee that it won't play a trick on you 30mins before the event.. as always though, the problem is solved without actually knowing why.. when the function-F7 decides to work, its does, that's nothing one can do to ensure otherwise

Ushering - where initiative should have been a norm, i was surprised by initiative being an exception in this case.. point to note: if someone ask you to usher people to seat in a theatre, they don't mean random placement, ushering is about politely convincing people that the front seats are the best, central seats provide the best view, there's no people with that person sitting there, please fill up that space instead of leaving gap every 2 person.. oh yes and finally, ushering means telling people that seats with stickers bearing words such as "WINNER", "CEO", "MD(CS)", "Dir(AM)" and RESERVED are actually, truly and really: Reserved. Please do not seat if you are not any of the aboved..

Slides - When you are an external speaker invited to speak at an event so that you can make more business, DO NOT approach the OIC of the event 10mins before the start of the event with you thumbdrive requesting for a new version of the slides to be loaded.. nope, bringing the Director of your company with you to put pressure on this OIC which is only an executive has no impact on him, especially not when he is having technical problems with this laptop(read above)

Speaker - in this case, OIC's boss' boss which is effectively his boss, please pay attention to visual cues to slow down.. i'm sorry for waving and giving you signals that seem confusing.. but then, there isn't much i can do to get your attention when you go that fast and decide to stop looking at my direction

Food - don't ever believe when the person in-charge of the venue tells you that the caterers are reliable.. CATERERS CANNOT KEEP TO TIME, CATERERS CANNOT KEEP TO TIME, CATERERS CANNOT KEEP TO TIME. but then again, no one expected the event to end 15mins earlier when we started 15mins late.. (refer to point on speaker)

So that's it, a first event that i was fully in charge of.. i worked so late this week that the taxi charges went over $50 for this week alone..

Oh yes, may i add that in the 4 years that i have worked, this is the first place where after an event of such scale (CEO-level invite, 200guests(only 120+ turned up)).. you don't get to rest.. you head back to office with tons of emails to read, tons to emails that you have read the past 2 weeks but had been to busy to follow up, MP to clear for event, contracts to sign, floorplans to approve, emails to reply, proposals to review, enquiries to attend to, cheques to chase, deposits to return, posters to put up, sites to visit, table to pack, phonecalls to answer..

yes, i'm just a 3-month old baby in this company.. I will survive

Of This Week

Took leave and spent the day with wifey, starting with a visit to gynae to take a look at Denson, all is well so far, cooked dinner for the night. The hot weather sucks.

For the rest of the week, there is one fitting word to summarise everything.

WORK.

Of Pissed Off

Just how many more cans of worms are we going see? Why is it that everything a charity organisation gets into trouble, there's always more beneath the current?

Why does GIC, funded by government funds i.e. SINGAPOREAN'S MONEY, is allowed to loan $560,000 to a staff? Why does that same staff need to borrow $60,000 from Ren Ci instead of the banks? This very same person is now an MP of some of you out there.. a PAP MP serving in Marine Parde, my GRC although i'm miles away from Marine Parade and can't even remember how to get there..

This sucks.

Vote wisely. Please.

Read more about it.

1. $60,000 loan from Ren Ci to PAP MP Ong Seh Hong sparked furore in cyberspace 

2. Latest: Ming Yi lent PAP MP $60,000

3. More questions for Dr Ong

Of Blind Man

This is not a religious post. This is not a religious post. 

Heard over a programme some days ago:

"A blind man who asks god for one eye is rewarded with two"

Herein lies a deeper meaning that involves expectations, unexpected rewards and results, amongst others.

Expectations.

If you were a blind man or woman and there being a chance that you could recover your sight. Would you be thinking day and night of having an eye back, or two? Most of us would have declared the latter, a pair of eyes to bring sight back into our world.

For the man in question to ask only for an eye, this shows us that more often than not, we ask for more than wat we really need, sometimes denying others in the process.

Unexpected rewards.

He asked for one but got two instead. It's kind of corny to talk about this now but at first though, the childhood yoodie of "yao wu mao, gei yi kwai, ni shuo qi kwai bu qi kwai?" (translate: asked for 50cts but given a dollar, isn't it strange?". Ok, lets get back.

When you go out seeking for one, sometimes you get rewarded by 2. Good deal. 

For some people, they are simply happy with the status quo and thus make no effort to aim for anything else, people who come from the "appreciation what you have and ask for nothing more" school..

So now, if the blind man(or woman) is you, what would you do? Ask for none, one eye or two?

Of Wigan 1-4 Arsenal

An hour into the game, it looked again like an Arsenel team that just fail to gun down oppositions in the mid-half of the table.. then 1 min later, walcott scored and suddenly it looked like the will be better! Not..

It took a 10min interval, the move was started from a throw-in, the ball well-control by ashravin and sent through the legs of a wigan defender to find fabregas who drilled it across goal hoping to pick out someone to finish it off.. the ball went pass adebayor and silvestre of all people popped up to score the winner. 1-2 to arsenal

And by the last 10mins of the game, it was arsenal all the way as ashravin struck the post to allow van persie to score the subsequent offside goal before ashravin arrived in the box on the 90th minute to intercept a ball in the box and finish calmy. Song, defensive midfielder by position, dribbled into the box, beat his marker and hit it low to make it 4.

I love the way we play, when we play it well

Of Friends

*Updated

Inspired by a question from a friend: "isnt it hard to have good friends the older u get ?"

Well, of course it is. While we were younger, so young that we barely need to attend school, we could smile at every kid, laugh at every cartoon and chase people around the playground regardless of race, age or identity.. we didn't have a care in the world..

As we got older, we had friends in class, almost everyone in the class were friends. We could have spoken little but still, there were no distinction between classmates or friends...

Somehow along the way, we changed. Yes, we changed. We started branding a smaller group of friends as "best friend(s)", we became exclusive and didn't want others closer to us, we draw invisible circles around ourselves and prevented people who seek friendship from getting close. We set up the barriers around ourselves and stood at the narrow gate, adamant on who gets in and out.

As we got older, most of us drop this friends from the primary school, we felt silly for having "best friends" and stayed away from them as we enjoy the new company of friends in secondary school. These people had other things to talk about, they were more fun to be with. Meeting up with the primary school friends became a chore and someone has to be "arrowed" to organise a gathering. Gatherings became few and far.

By the time we left secondary school, we had a set of good friends, a set of not-so-good friends, and a bigger set of people we don't even bother about.. as we meet more people later in life who are know someone we knew.. we struggle to remember and refrained from acknowledging these "friends" that we had when we were still in uniform..

So, "isnt it hard to have good friends the older u get ?"

Or have we made it harder for good friends to find us?

*Invitation to Blog

***Hey peeps, you folks who have your own blog that reads me. Give the same topic a go and i'll link the post up here, wha'ts your take?

"isnt it hard to have good friends the older u get ?"

Related post

Soapy "

As far as self introductions go which I have been doing quite alot lately trying to break out of an old mold, meeting new people is more like an opportunity

The Friend from Pri Sch

the whole class (or rather the majority) used to rush to the carpark to play improvised baseball when the "All Hell Break Loose" bell rings.

Of Rant again

Postedit: With the advice of a close friend, i have decided to remove/censor certain names in the following post to prevent the post from being used for defamation suits. Such is the fear that encroach our lives in this tiny island that even i, as a blogger, cannot write freely and openly. For fear of political suppression and reprise.

I have steered about from political related post for awhile.. but i guess it was always a matter of time before i return with a post..

So what now? Teo made DPM, first female min for SG.. self-renewal??? I would have said "i laughed my arse off", but on hindsight, its not funny at all, the only people that are laughing are probably those who were promoted, not because of rank, but like because of the underlying pay rise that they are getting.

Let's do a count
1x Mineester Mentos

2x Senile Mineester

1x Prima Mineester

2x Depthduty Mineester

That's a freaking 6 senior members that sits in the cabin!

Now why would a country our size, with our GDP, need so many top level guys to govern? Wait a minute, i haven't counted the Mineesters yet! 

Traditionally, ministers hold portfolios, because, well, that's why you need Ministers right? To manage work and portfolios. Defence, Finance, Education, Manpower, Health, Community Youth and Sports, u name it.. but Mineester, Prima Mineester Office?

Our Mineester, Prima Mineester Office are
Lim Ah Heng
Lim Ah Say
Lim Ah Hua

How come all Lim uh? Lim ah lim ah

So u need 3 mineesters in to help the Prima Meenister to work in his Office! 

Underneath it all, what does a big-size cabin means? Ask the man on the street, if you have a football club, how many Manager you need to manage? Real Madrid, Arsenal, Man Utd, Selangor FC, Home Utd, Geylang FC, still 1 manager right? Would you want to have 2 managers-calibre people helping to run the club? Would it work? How about 3? 4? 5? Its like asking Arsene Wenger to work alongside Martin O'Neill, David Moyes, Ramos, Hiddink etc!

Most importantly, the wage bill.. how much does it cost for a tiny country like us to maintain and pay for the wages of these top men that are governing or helping the "top man" to govern?

Would such a heavy cabin-nette help to make things easier for the man on the ground? Would such a big team mean that we, as a small country, can handle global pressures and problems more effectively? Can the same be achieved with lesser people? At lesser cost?

I wonder and cringe at the thought of it all..

I know i'm whipping an old horse, but sometimes, we just play the games we used to play:

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A senior White House official on Tuesday admitted he was floored by the news that Singapore's prime minister earned five times more than US President George W Bush.

"I'm going to emigrate and run for office in Singapore," the official said on condition he be identified only as "a senior administration official who sits in disbelief after reading that story."

On Monday, the Singapore government had announced a fresh 25.5 percent pay hike for Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, boosting his salary to 2.05 million dollars per year.

Bush gets paid 400,000 dollars per year for doing his job, according to the White House.

Combined with personal investment income, he and his wife Laura reported 618,694 dollars in taxable income in the 2005 fiscal year. They had to pay 187,768 dollars in federal taxes.

But maybe Bush shouldn't feel so bad. The Singaporean's paycheck is eight times fatter than Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's.