I opened my room door and was immediately greeted with a really tall ladder, a shorter one and an even shorter one.
It almost seemed like the Goldilocks bears recasting themselves as ladders. It’s not too funny when I see the whole place in quite a bit of mess. The aircon people came to fix our leakage problems. And they brought those construction foam thingy, it’s green and alien like. It’s like those party sprays and look so fun until they did that to our walls.
I took these photographs in another bedroom. The aliens have invaded. It’s soft and spongy, it must be their saliva. My room is spared from these aliens thankfully.
I was doing a bit of online reading and I found a guide on how to annoy people using instant messaging.
Disregard any presence indicators your colleagues use such as busy or away.
Your needs are more important than anyone else’s and you know that some people regularly set their IM status to busy or away even when they’re working on unimportant stuff. Bonus: if you catch someone at the computer when she says she’s away, berate her for it. She needs to set her presence indicators according to your needs not her own.
I appear as busy at Windows Live Messenger sometimes. I really don’t mind people coming to find me online. If I really don’t want people to find me, trust me, I would have signed out completely.
When I tell people I’m busy and they keep finding me back, I feel like smashing my LCD screen. Okay, I’ll smash that person’s one instead. It’s freaking irritating. It just happened and I told the person I’m busy thrice and only to get a phone call to ask how to spell Nelly Furtado after I went offline answering every question of his.
So please respect people’s status. If they show that they are busy and you really want to talk to them, message something like, “free to chat?” or “mind sparing me five minutes of your time?”. That would most certainly help lots and save a couple of LCD screens.
My father never had a good relationship with the aircon; it’s a love hate relationship. He loathe the airconditioner’s existence. He says it’s too noisy and often says that it is, well, just anything but good. My aircon is very upset of course and yells at him all night. It must be the aircon’s way of getting back at my father. It’s been pretty successful and my father’s been pretty pissed.
Once in a while, he would come into my room to lament about the aircon. He thinks it’s our fault the aircon is too noisy. But yesterday he complained something new - the aircon is too cold.
What?!
Too cold? Er, correct me if I’m wrong, that’s what the aircon is for. If the aircon is somehow unable to be cold, then we shall have its existence, er, challenged. I think it’s good. Anyway, I went to his room and it is not that cold, it’s set to 25 degree celcius. I tune it to 26 and listen to him grumble and I went back into my room.
He blamed my brother and I for not setting our room aircons cold enough. He thinks that our aircon is not cold enough to absorb his aircon’s cold air. I think that’s absurd. Especially when our aircons are not sharing the same compressor unit. It’s funny because the previous time he complained that we set our temperatures too low.
So in the middle of the night, he armed himself with the vacuum cleaner and started vacuuming the airconditioner. I can see that he is really really pissed. But I really can’t help him - I just think his claims are too dumb. Nice try - but try harder.
[I mean come'on, what's next - the aircon being too soft and thus causing him not to sleep due to unfamiliar environment? Wake up... Oh, and he did.]
These days I have been taking more taxi rides. I take taxi rides home to get home quicker. It’s just much faster at the expense of my money. But somehow I feel happier when I ride taxi.
And so the taxi driver would try to pick a conversation with me for some strange reason. Even when I’m reading a magazine, they just had to speak to me. Of course, when people speak to me, I kindly entertain them. That was until I really got too bored of entertaining them.
(Silvercab in Singapore which I took picture of.)
And the problem? They always talked about the same thing.
You see, I used to return home in green (uniform) so no points for the taxi driver figuring out where I work as. And they’ll start talking.
Taxi driver: So which camp you from eh?
Mr. Dew: Pulau Tekong.
Taxi driver: Wah… Recruit eh?
Mr. Dew: Yeah, still one.
Taxi driver: Last time my army time so bad. I was the in the worst company for… [Blah blah blah...] And… [Blah blah blah...] So which company are you from?
Mr. Dew: [MyCompany]
Taxi driver: You very fortunate already. That time, Uncle have to… [Blah blah blah...] That was… [Blah blah blah...] And… [Blah blah blah...] Then… [Blah blah blah...] So you which camp?
Mr. Dew: Pulau Tekong.
If I meet male drivers, they just talk about their army experience. If I meet female drivers, some actually went to talk about their kids. One female driver even told me her own experience in the army!
One thing I have to admit though. Most of the drivers’ stories are amazing. And the way that they’ve gone through makes me feel that the army is quite inhuman, if you get what I mean.
I like listening to what people have to say generally. Unfortunately, after listening to so many taxi drivers, I can’t help but to wish that they won’t talk about army during my ride back. I just want to forget everything about army and have this tiny little break.
I can almost visualize the moment of delight when the fire alarm sets off during my primary school days. I love fire drills. The reason is simple - too simple, somewhat shallow - I don’t need to study during fire drills.
So, as the fire alarm is ringing nonstop, much to the girls’ annoyance, I was secretly excited. I know there is no fire somehow. I don’t believe in fires when I was in primary school. I am a firm believer that the only place that a fire would be is at the stove.
Okay, I was naive. But still, I got through primary school without a fire-related accident. Basically, there just isn’t any fire back then. We has drills. We have twice per year I believe. I was tempted to make a suggestion to my principal to make it a weekly event - knowing how important these drills can actually be in times of emergency. That didn’t happen.
The alarm was sounded, the ten-year-old me and the rest of the kids left the classroom, rushing to… Well, we just want to get out of the classroom - we don’t really know where we’re going.
The teachers would be most panicky. No, they aren’t afraid of the fire. I am pretty sure they have some insider news that there is going to be a fire drill on that day. They are just afraid of kids getting lost. I mean, these teachers don’t want an accident to occur in a drill. After all, that would be such a irony because the very reason for these drills is to minimize confusion and accidents that can occur in an event of a fire or something.
We have it during secondary schools too. I love them. I just don’t have to study during that time. In polytechnic, there isn’t any fire drills. I would very much presume that Singapore Polytechnic is a very safe place and fires just don’t start despite numerous sightings of cigarettes in the dustbin.
Today, as I am typing this post, I realized my foolishness. Fire drills aren’t fun. Fire drills are a dread - especially you got to climb down EIGHT BLOODY levels and walk 400 metres to reach the assembly area of Biopolis!
I left my house at 7:40 AM hoping that I won’t be late. There was a slight drizzle but I was lazy to get the umbrella out of my bag. I walked to the MRT station. It felt like going to school (Singapore Polytechnic), only that I didn’t stop in Dover station but went 1 station ahead to Buona Vista MRT Station.
Buona Vista - that’s the area I work at. I alighted. You know this thing about morning crowds? Everyone just tries to rush to work. Singaporeans must have been a hardworking bunch. Or perhaps they just woke late you know.
When the train door opens, everybody just rushes out of the train. It’s amazing how people manage to squeeze out from the train. It’s like there is an explosion or something and everyone just got pushed out of the train interiors.
I walked towards the stairs and this lady bumped onto me. I walked aside and was prepared to apologize even though it’s not my fault in the first place. She looked at me angrily as if I offended her and her ancesters.
“‘xcuse me,” she said. [That means "Excuse me" by the way, some people just shorten it into "'xcuse me" - pronounced as 'skews me'.] She was displeased. Hence my conclusion - when they’re rushing to go to their workplaces, many people just forget to bring a couple of things, and one of which would probably be their courtesy.
Weeks ago, my mother got me a Pooh bear clock. It’s blue and it’s Pooh. I have no idea why my mother chose a Pooh bear for me, I’m quite sure our personalities differ quite a lot. Maybe my mother thought it looked cute.
In any way, I slept right next to Pooh bear every day. It woke me up in the morning by playing tunes of bird chirping. That was followed by a couple of spastic tunes and more bird chirping. It just sounds terrible.
Pooh bear is bad at singing. Every time I hear it, I get so annoyed that I feel like punching my clock. And I did - on the snooze button.
Upon hitting the snooze button, the clock waits quietly for another 5 minutes and when the time’s up, it bounces into life and start playing that spastic song again.
As spastic as the alarm gets, I can’t deny that it’s really useful. Think about it - it’s precisely the annoying tune that woke me up. What better a way to wake me up than getting me to curse Pooh bear?
I usually press “snooze” a couple of times and quickly shut it off because I simply can’t stand it anymore. I’ll leave my bed on the process too of course. Now you see how effective this alarm clock is? It’s so annoyingly effective!
Unfortunately, this morning, it failed. Instead of waking me up at 7, it decides to wake me at 4 instead. Pooh is moody today I guess, maybe Piglet wasn’t there to play with him. Maybe Pooh wants to take revenge on me cursing him every morning. Either way, the clock’s not working and I have no idea why.
I was late to school today and it’s all the alarm’s fault.
Isn’t it ironical? I hate the tune. And now, I hate to have it gone.