BEFORE THE SONG IS OVER
I don’t know about you, but coming back to the office after a weekend is something that I always look forward to, especially if the weekend is particularly long.
I’d normally feel refreshed, re-charged, and raring to resume work -- although I’d have to admit that after certain weekends it’s hard to feel refreshed and re-charged, what with loads of chores and scores of screaming children.
And raring to resume work? Rarely, actually...
Anyway, I would always try to come in a little bit early to settle outstanding matters, and clear as much correspondence as possible before my day starts. It is quite amazing to see what your email box accumulates over the weekend – junk mail, business proposals, queries, as well as notes from friends and distant acquaintances.
I used to feel a bit uneasy when friends, family or acquaintances send personal correspondence to my work email box, especially when the correspondence contained nothing else but recycled Internet jokes.
And I did voice my concern to a couple of friends, who in turn advised me not to be “too uptight” about this. After all, they said, the correspondence – however nonsensical it may have looked or sounded – was the senders’ way of keeping in touch, of saying they were thinking of me.
Well, when they put it that way, my friends made a bit of sense, although I still make it a point to attend to these “you’re on my mind” notes after hours or through my personal computer at home.
My personal favourite email is a poem called “Slow Dance” (see my Sept 5 post) sent by a friend years ago, which I still keep. The gist of the poem is, slow down, set your priorities right – keep in touch, with your children, family, friends. “Hear the music, before the song is over.”
Come to think of it, it is true that some of us do not keep in touch enough with our family and friends. It’s not that we do not want to, but work schedule or things that happen around us somehow always manage to prevent us from sending that “I’m thinking of you, too” email, or making and/or returning that phone call, or making that trip home.
It’s only after when we lost our loved ones or friends that we start to regretfully reflect that we ought to have made more efforts, call more often and do all the other “could-haves” to keep in touch.
I lost a younger brother to a terminal illness a couple of years ago, just as we had just begun to get to know each other better as adults.
I lost a younger brother to a terminal illness a couple of years ago, just as we had just begun to get to know each other better as adults.
We sort of drifted apart, even when we were children, as I was always away from home – at school, university and on to work. When we were in school, would only see each other during term breaks, and after we both started work, only at family gatherings during Hari Raya or extended vacations. Even then, our encounters or conversations always seemed more like those between two strangers.
But after he got married and had his son, we started to warm up to each other, and he opened up to me more than to my other siblings.
I realise now how little I knew him and wish circumstances had been different. Alas, there’s always a lesson to learn. Now I go the extra mile to ensure that I don’t miss my weekly telephone calls to my mother, and the bimonthly calls to my other brother and sisters. And I try to visit as often as I can.
I also make the time to keep in touch with friends. It’s quite easy, actually, once you set your mind to it. I would call friends while driving home from work where I just go through the names listed on my phone and start dialing.
It feels good even if I could only talk to one friend per night. If you have 30 names, by the time you dial the last number, you’d have called everybody on that list once a month.
Now, if only my friends would reciprocate!
OF NET SCARES AND SCAMS
A few weeks ago, I met up with a couple of old friends at a restaurant within the vicinity of Suria KLCC. Anna, who now resides in Switzerland, had briefly returned to Kuala Lumpur to solemnise her marriage to a German citizen. Magda, the other friend, and I attended the same university -- oh my God -- aeons ago.
After dinner and coffee, which was rather late, they began fidgeting. It turned out that they were both nervous about fetching their cars from the shopping centre’s underground car park.
They told me that they had read, and heard, many horror stories about the KLCC car park: from tales about riff raffs and rogues to rapes and robberies, all transmitted to as far as Geneva and Munich via the Internet.
I walked them to their cars and told them not to believe everything that they read, or heard, especially if the stories came via the Net. Most of them were the products of over-imaginative, and sometimes demented, minds.
Admittedly, the cyberspace has become the fastest and most efficient conduit for news and information, whether they are true or conjectured. Because people have this perverse habit of forwarding information or email -- the more horrible or exaggerated the content, the better -- something that originates in Kuala Lumpur on Monday may find its way to email boxes in Los Angeles on Tuesday, if not sooner.
It is not so bad if the information is valid and would actually benefit the recipient. However, it could be quite disastrous if the forwarded mail contains little else but lies, or if it is meant only for a limited circle of recipients.
I came across some newspaper reports about some guys who got fired from their jobs after the email they sent to trusted friends boasting about their sexual adventures made the rounds across the globe, tarnishing both their reputation as well as that of their employers’.
The first case involved an executive of a New York-based financial institution who had just been transferred to Hong Kong. Life -- especially the sexual part of it -- in that former colony was apparently so, well, satisfying, that he had to share it with his friends in the Big Apple.
And his friends thought the good news were just too good not to share with everyone else, on a world scale. Yes, we are living in a borderless global village, after all. After his bosses found out, they decided that they’d have no place in their employment for this potential liability.
The other two cases I read about happened in the UK; one had become a national sex triangle fiasco!
And there are those email from some exotic countries in Africa, soliciting for assistance in what would be the transfer of money – sometimes to the tune of hundreds of millions of US dollars – out of these destinations.
And there are those email from some exotic countries in Africa, soliciting for assistance in what would be the transfer of money – sometimes to the tune of hundreds of millions of US dollars – out of these destinations.
The stories are similar, whether the mail is sent from the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, or South Africa. The senders would claim that they are relatives – and sometimes lawyers – of some deceased, formerly high-powered persons who had during their service or tenure in these countries amassed a small fortune.
Somehow, this huge amount of money cannot be accessed unless it is transferred into a foreign bank account, and that’s where they would like the recipients of their mail to come in. If you help, a handsome percentage of the money would belong to you, they entice.
I would send a short, curt reply, something along this line: “Please stop sending unsolicited nonsense like this to us. We are not idiots.”
But you would be surprised that quite a few Malaysians have fallen for this scam. Some time ago, a local daily carried a story about a lady who became a victim. And she was a lawyer, no less, who ought to know better.
When she responded to the email sent to her, she was asked to electronically transfer a few thousand dollars, a few times, as certain fees before she would receive her share of the fortune.
The poor woman (well, she is, now) followed the instructions, blindly. In the end, she gained nothing, and lost tens of thousands of ringgit.
Hmm, a fool and her money are soon parted, you’d say? Me, I’d only say: “Orang tamak selalu rugi."
Note: A longer version of this post was previously published elsewhere.
OUR DOOM LOOMS ...?
According to a local daily, our national crime rate has risen exponentially over the past year. This year's January to September period recorded a total of 170,481 cases, compared to 151,444 cases the whole of last year.
Year-on-year, the crime index rose 12.6%, and if you break this down, you'll see that violent crimes went up by 18.01%, property crimes 13.87%, commercial crimes 17.98%, while narcotic crimes went down by 8.07%.
The article says rape cases went up to 1,833 in the nine-month period this year, compared to 1,384 cases in the same period last year. Armed robbery: 13,537 cases against 9,548 cases; gang armed robbery: 54 cases against 27 cases; and murder cases rose to 473 cases compared to 475 cases last year.
And the crime rate has been on the uptrend the third year running. Who to blame? I don't know.
The article also says with the crime rate on the rise, so is the number of cases or incidents where peole/civilians take matters into their own hands -- and violently too -- when they encounter crime perpetrators.
A case in point: a foreign woman who was caught stealing was pounced upon and hit by a group of men, who then stripped her naked, all the while while cheering and jeering, for about 20 minutes before the police arrives.
What does this all say about us as a nation, as a people? I don't know.
What I know is that things are not looking good. The whole country is in a big freaking mess, and no one seems to be in charge.
Makes me wish that I could just go hibernate and wake up when some semblance of order has been restored...
CREDIT, DISCREDIT ...
A lot of things have happened in the past few weeks. A four-eye meeting took place, a helicopter crashed, a mansion mentioned, an editor copied, a body blown to bits. All fodder for mamak stall and boardroom conversations for weeks on end, I suppose, until something else comes along.
Me, I took particular interest in three other recent topics, which I think were relatively more obscure but needed to be put in perspective.
One. The swiftness of some newspapers in giving credit to the police over what they (the newspapers) thought was the success of the most recent Ops Sikap. Remember the police reduced the speed limit on federal roads to 80 km/h from the usual 90 km/h during the past Deepavali/Hari Raya festive season?
According to some newspapers, the move was proven to be successful as the rate of road deaths went down by, get this, entirely five people compared to the previous year's campaign. During the 2005 Ops Sikap, there were a total of 233 road deaths, compared to 228 in 2006. Wow. But, get this also. The total number of road accidents increased by more than 2,000. If during the 2005 Ops Sikap there were 13,659 accidents, the number for 2006 was 15,716. So what success crap were these newspapers talking about?
Two. A certain former/sacked Deputy Prime Minister who is now advisor to a certain political party issued a Press Statement questioning the wisdom of a "half billion-ringgit contribution" to Cambridge University. The statement was issued through the party's information bureau.
According to him, the Malaysian government had agreed to allocate more than RM500 million to the said university, with Petronas and Khazanah Nasional each agreeing to cough up RM190 million. The rest would be obtained from foreign banks based in Malaysia.
Excerpts of his Press Statement:
"The amount of more than RM500 million is too excessive to be donated to any foreign university or institution for education or research.
Do the government leaders have no confidence in the capability of our universities, specialists or research centres to increase the quality of their research and performance?
And is the proposal intended to satisfy the extravagant desires of any personalities to be associated with prestigious foreign universities?
It is regretted that the government are not at all sensitive to the problems of the country and lack the ability to deal with education and research issues of the country. Furthermore, what is more worrying is that this irresponsible decision is made at a time when our economy is sluggish."
Needless to say, the statement was picked up by a couple of Opposition publications, which, like the issuer, had not bothered to verify the accuracy of its contents.
A simple check/internet surf with would have informed him and his party's so-called information bureau the following:
- there was a proposal by the government to set up a Malaysian branch of Cambridge University, mooted some time last year by a certain minister who was then a Special Envoy of Education.
- the proposal was in line with the government's aspiration towards making the country a centre for educational excellence (whatever that is).
- the money was supposed to have meant to cover the cost of setting up the branch university.
- the proposal is still at a proposal stage, and no money has been "contributed".
But I suppose the search would have been too much work and would not have served his agenda. This I find "worrying" and "irresponsible".
Three. Then there is this Cabinet Minister who called on the rakyat to congratulate the current administration, particularly his boss, for successfully concluding two deals in China recently. Which almost made me puke. Good thing I was still fasting.
Just because his boss was there to "witness" a signing ceremony does not mean that credit should go to him. In clinching deals, particularly in countries like China, negotiations would have to start a few months, if not years, beforehand, and not during a one- or two-day official visit.
Which makes me wonder -- why the desperate (and lowly) need to credit his boss for everything in the first place?
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