All in a day's work

2 AM : Set alarms for 7:35AM, 7:40AM, 7:45AM,7:50AM, 7:55AM and also set reminders in phone diary for 8AM and 8:15AM.

8:20AM: Wake up.

8:35AM: Search for a cab which will accept Nets payment(the alternative being accepting 4 dollars 60 cents in 20 cent coins)

8:45AM: Find the cab.

9:10AM: Enter office in a rush, pretending to have climbed up all 34 floors in a bid to reach on time.

9:12AM: Realise that no one actually cares.

9:16AM: Turn on office computer. Open mail box.

9:17AM: Receive mail from HR department extolling the virtues of a Pear, the choice fruit of the week.

9:19AM: Search for last week's Fruit of the day mail and perform Change Management analysis. Figure out how a Pear is more efficient than a Lychee.

9:22AM: Keep hitting refresh button on mail box in hope of receiving a new mail.

9:35AM: Give up.

9:45AM: Walk over to pantry, make self a nice cup of Lipton Yellow label tea, with 2 tea-spoons of sugar and some amount of 60%fat free milk, along with hot water.

9:55AM: Walk back over to desk.

10AM: Drink tea. Appreciate how everyone seems to be so eager to work on this fine morning.

10:20AM: Message every person in a 600m radius asking if they are free for lunch. Every person with a double digit IQ. Which usually left out most of my comrades from NUS.

10:45AM: Keep spamming till one of them replies.

10:50AM: Start thinking about a second cup of tea. Decide on Milo instead.

11:00AM: Walk over to pantry and make self a cup of hot Milo.

11:10AM: Drink Milo, once again appreciating the dedication and commitment flowing through the surroundings.

11:30AM: Wonder if Watch has stopped. Attempt to synchronise Watch with the clock on the computer.

11:40AM: Attempts fail, as Watch apparently has not stopped and needs no synchronization. Watch doesn't realise that that wasn't quite the point.

12:00PM: Be the first one out of the door, beat the crowd to the food court and lunch in peace.

1:00PM: Having finished milking every minute of the hour, slowly make way back to desk.

1:05PM: Realise that another mail has been received. Again from the HR department, but this time explaining the benefits of the Employee Shareholder Program. A big N.A.

1:15PM: Analyse mailbox and realise that 60% of the mails received are from HR. The rest being from the IT Support team informing everyone which system wasn't functioning that day.

1:30PM: Congratulate self on getting through half the work-day. Decide to drink a celebratory cup of Cappuccino.

1:45PM: Go through the rituals. Enjoy the taste of instant coffee while a few billion dollars changes hands in the background.

2:00PM: Start pondering about meaning of life.

: Try to come up with name for third kid.

5:00PM: Complete pondering. The meaning, found, seems to be 42. Or 6x9, for the daft.

5:30PM: Last half hour.

5:45PM: Observe with some curiosity as a couple Corporate Services amble over to a nearby desk. Congratulate self on identifying the breed so accurately. Steve Irwin would be proud.

5:46PM: Curiosity fast vanishing, watch with no little trepidation as the topic at aforementioned desk turns towards "some Sheep Song".

5:47PM: Wonder, "Baa baa black sheep"?

5:48PM: Shut ears tight and begin praying in a vain attempt to save self as notes of "This is the song that never ends. Why dont you wait for it to begin.." or some such thing is heard.

5:52PM: Thank lucky stars as Janitor shoos away the flock. Admire his quick thinking and intelligence. Sing his praises for a while.

5:58PM: Log out of computer. Get ready to make a dash for it.

6:00PM: To quote Mel Gibson, FREEEEDOOOOOOOM

Why?

"No seriously, give me 5 reasons why Uttar Pradesh should still be a part of India".

That is actually a very thought-provoking question.

Have you ever wondered why there are somethings so obviously wrong with the world, which can be easily remedied, but somehow no one seems to want to correct it? Its a strange phenomenon. You are sitting at Subway and are talking about Khalistan and Operation Bluestar while at the next table, the most intellectually stimulating observation your colleague from the other end of the country(albeit not from the region in question, but close enough) can make to his friends is "Abey, this phone doesn't have a camera!". The least he could have done was think about why his home state is called the "Rice bowl of India", that is if there were schools in his township and they actually teach things there. Or he could atleast wonder why he and his compatriots are the only people in the whole freaking country(be it a small one) who still say "iskool".

There is something about watching 30,000 fanatical Croats singing "Deutschland, Deutschland Auf Wiedersehen" while Ballack and co. are getting their asses kicked. And it makes going to office half an hour late worthwhile.

Ah, the joys of Euro2008. The world finally realised that wunderboy can only be wunderboy against Newcastle Utd and Bolton Wanderers. And R.Mad still want to pay a few billion pounds for him. Oh well, boys will be boys and fools will be fools.

Quote of the day : "Amitabh Bachchan has a bad boy image in Sarkar Raj".

Murthy somehow never fails to amuse us.

Incidentally, I think Portugal was suffering from the "Dasavatharam-disease". It fell for its own hype. I thought it was a decent movie though.

I am ofcourse talking about c.ron diving around like a little girl.

Points to Ponder?

I am amazed at the number of people who aren't aware of the existence of the word "oppress". They all seem to think it was something TR made up while giving this passionate speech. Kinda sad when you think that TR apparently knows more English than most of the people I know.

Another thing I dont get is the purpose of fire alarms. I was sitting in the YIH the study room a few hours before exam. Its usually a very very quiet place, people frown at you if you as much as sneeze loudly. Suddenly the fire alarm started ringing, but no one paid it the least bit attention. They just took out their headphones and tried to drown out the noise of the alarm with webcasts. It was apparently obvious to everyone in the room except me that the alarm was tripped by accident and that there was no fire. It turned out that it finally was a mistake but I wonder what the point of alarm is, if it cant even "alarm" anyone into not studying for a couple of minutes. How do you tell the difference between a real fire and bobby smoking under the Smoke detectors by just listening to the alarm anyway?

As all of the three of you know, Im working these days. One good thing about work is the flexible lunch hours. Working in Raffles Place has its own advantages, like the numerous overpriced foodcourt and fastfood joints that surround each building. When I get sick of the overcrowded foodcourt(where people reserve seats with PAPER NAPKINS ), I walk over to the starbucks(there are 4 very close to my office, I walk to the furthest) because its usually quite empty during lunch hours, and I can also read the newspaper while eating. For those who dont stay in Singapore, there are two kinds of news.

1) Singaporean "news", which usually goes like this :

Headlines : Minister Mentor Lee's message to the nation and/or "JC Girl wins 100m race in Singapore Invitational International JC Athletics event!"

National News : Minister Mentor Lee's views on the nation today

Financial News : Minister Mentor Lee's views on finance

International News : Minister Mentor Lee's thoughts on why and how China uberpwns the West.

3 pages are now dedicated to NTUC's latest bargain offerings.

Weather Forecast : Minister Mentor Lee's views on the weather Its sunny, and will remain sunny for the next 3 days!

Sports news : Uzbekistan 7 Singapore 3

Editorial : Everything is pleasant and wonderful! The rest of the world has problems, but lets not worry about all that! There is a beach party at Sentosa this weekend!

2) The second type of news is, of course, real news.

Let me give you an example. I was reading the Straits Times one day, because some scum bag had beaten me to the Herald Tribune. There was an editorial on why China is uberawesome because it has as many nuclear missiles as Japan or something. He was arguing that China having nuclear missiles and continuing to make them was for the greater good. All this was fine, it is his opinion after all, but suddenly in the middle of the editorial I read this statement "China follows United's strategy, a strong defense automatically translates into a powerful offense". I spent two minutes wondering if he was talking about United Airlines or United Arab Emirates or maybe the United Nations. After reading the next line, which I cant recollect right now, I realised he was actually talking about Manchester United. It was unbelievable the way he referred to a football club in a cavalier fashion in an article on world security, where most journalists wouldn't take the liberty of mentioning "Bush" without suffixing "President of the United States", if only to confirm. Everyone knows most of manUre's fanbase is in Southasia (after all, there has to be SOME reason why Park Ji Sung is still playing) but show some class man. Maybe it says something that the editor of the national newspaper mentions football clubs and expects all his readers to immediately understand what they have to do with China's nuclear weapons. It means that Mancs are commies. Kill them all.

Well there is still a lot to rant about but no time right now. I shall be bach.

Insights

Someone mentioned to me a while ago that it was amusing that I had a separate tag for "Stupid People". Thinking about that, Ive come to realise now that I didnt write about them because they got on my nerves. I wrote about them because it was endlessly amusing and entertaining. And besides, ranting was always more of my style. So in keeping with a time honoured tradition, here I go again :)

Some people might say that if you get annoyed by what someone is doing/saying/making videos of, just ignore them. Sure, thats what the whole world did when Hitler started expressing his opinion on the size of Germany on the world map.

Dont get me wrong, I am all for freedom of expression. I dont hold anything against people who claim that Eragon is a real book, I might just point out to them that they are douche bags. It is their opinion after all. But when you make a video of a bunch of people, all of whom rave about the writing talent of Christopher Paolini, and then label the video "Greatest Books of the Twentieth Century" and put it up on YouTube, thats when you start to piss people off. There is general silliness, there is stupidity and then there are affronts to public decency. Videos of people speaking about how they would rather be good at many things than be great at one thing, because thats what the cue card reads, falls under the third category. If you want to make videos about Valentines day, or "Accommodation fiasco@NUS", go right ahead. But please, dont take up intellectual topics, make Miss.Teen South Carolina's descendants speak about it and make a complete mockery of the issue, if I can call it that. Thats all I wish to express on this topic.

Oh, and it is not cool to make your videos "Video responses" to random videos which have no relation to your topic. Just some food for thought.

Moving on, I was looking at Singapore GP circuit map the other day, and I saw that there was a Esplanade Steps "Grandstand". And a "General Walkabout Area". Wow, I cant think of many other places which would charge you $200 to sit on steps from where it usually evicts you 363 days of the year. But it shouldnt be too hard to find some 30 storey building within a few miles of the track to watch the race from, which the organisers havent spotted and ticketed yet. Then again, you never know.

Apologies if this post is very contextual, that cannot be helped.

A game plan?

As the keen-minded among you might have realised, it takes something drastic these days to get me blogging. And "A Game Plan" was exactly that. It was a truly horrible movie, with terrible acting and a conspicuous lack of a meaningful storyline. For one, I didnt know if the movie was about American Football or Ballet. Maybe it was about American Foolet. Or BalBall. Or maybe it was about Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's complete lack of acting skills. Whatever it was about, the only thing worse than the movie was Dwayne Johnson trying to do the ballet. The only thing worse than THAT was Dwayne Johnson trying to play American Football. Which was probably why the "football"ing scenes were cut mercifully short to "The Rock" scoring the winning touchdown in all the games he played, except ofcourse the Championship game in which he selflessly passes the ball thingy to some other dude who scores with a zillionth of a second remaining. I wont accuse Dwayne Johnson of trying too hard in this film. In fact, it didn't look like he was trying to act at all. There could be no other explanation.

On a different note, I went to the barber's today. When my barber saw my hair, he first accused me of trying to cut my own hair, and then threatened me with crew cuts and oil treatments. He seemed to take my hair as a personal insult. I did manage to escape eventually, but not before he felled most of my curly locks with a pair of unforgiving and apparently very starved scissors. I was bruised but thankfully still in one piece.

It is a dangerous world we live in.