Race you till the end..

OK.. I wanna talk abt a damn sensitive issue..

But this is a damn boring and long issue too.. so for those who are not into longwinded and whiny entries, click on the X at the top right hand corner of ur window..

I just need to whine, as usual.. and I have not blogged for a long time coz I didnt have anything to whine abt..

but before I go on.. lemme just say that itz not about race. itz not abt discrimination of ppl who come from any particular country. itz just abt attitude of some of those who came here.. and those who had been here..

If this can piss the authorities off, i'd suggest that they take a hard look at the situation with an angle of view coming from a minority layman.. i'm not trying to stir the hornets' nest here but just hoping that it can be an eye opener to whoever who have the capabilities to make a change.

Recently, there had been a spate of letters in the papers regarding the employment of foreign workers here.. from domestic helpers to expatriates..

Singapore had been having foreign workers as long as we had been in existence.. in fact, besides the Malays, all the rest of our ancestors are foreigners who had localised themselves thru the hundred years or so..

There had always been a social stigma and stereotyping of foreigners here..

Filipinas and Indonesians and Sri Langkans are maids.

Filipinos are musicians.

Thai males are construction workers

Thai females are formerly males

Indians are software engineers

Bangladeshis do everything that everyone else dont want to do..

Ang Mohs are good looking

Ang Mohs are smarter than we are

Ang Mohs are superior beings

Ang Mohs can fly, run faster than a train and wear their underwear outside.

China ppl play ping pong

and so on and so forth..

but of course.. there are Filipinas who are company directors, Indonesian tai tais, Filipino engineers, Indian contract workers, Bangladeshi supermodels, China nationals who works at coffee bean and Ang Mohs who are jobless and pretend to be handicapped and rent their maids out to others.

but we still stereotype.. and we look at the bad side of any given race except for the Ang Mohs..

There was a guy who wrote to the papers citing that when he was working in Australia, he was warmly welcomed and was wondering why Singaporeans treat foreign workers differently..

and i'm pretty sure that he was NOT referring to our Bangladeshi friends who help make Singapore move so precisely like the ticking of a damn expensive rolex watch..

He might be referring to why we cant accept our China national friends who work at coffee bean and cant speak English and the Ang Mohs who are the expatriate bosses of the expensive investment companies..

or maybe he wasnt..

But are we really that transparent that we dont look thru races as differences?

dont get me wrong.. I love the diversity of races that we have here and I dont have problems with foreigners as much as I have problems with the locals.. different ppl of different colours make up an interesting world as long as we dont succumb to supremacists..

again, as I had alwayssssssss mentioned, i'm an Indian man with a Chinese paternal grandmother and I have a lot of Malay friends..

so I'm really quite indifferent abt skin color as long as they are not green and with antennas on top of their heads..

but Singaporeans are not really color blind.. if the Government have not stopped companies from recruiting Chinese and Mandarin speaking ONLY candidates for jobs, Malays will all become footballers and chauffeurs and Indians become condominum security guards..

but thankfully the authorities had put a stop to it and now we all can sit in offices to work for our Ang Moh bosses..

Even then, still some places are openly racist abt job candidates..

Yesterday, while walking around Eastpoint in Simei, I spotted a shop that was looking for shop assistants, and the candidate must be able to converse with Chinese customers..

So what happens if a Non-English speaking Chinese national apply for the job?

might as well put my picture outside the shop and write NO INDIAN CUSTOMERS ALLOWED

coz i'm sure as hell I cant understand Mandarin except for wo pu che tao.

Recently, while at Coffee Bean in Forum Galleria, I was ordering some drinks and wanted to borrow a pair of scissors from the girl at the counter who was taking my order, to cut a packaging from something I just bought..

she went.. huh?

I went again.. can I borrow a pair of scissors?

huh?

sccciissooorss.. and I made a cutting motion with my two fingers..

and she asked me in Chinese whether can I speak Mandarin..

what the hell?!

I assumed that that was the question coz she said something that ends in Hua Yi and I'm pretty sure she wasnt talking abt a secondary school..

I'm an Indian man, for goodness sake.. and we are in Singapore.. I would understand that the situation would warrant it if I am in Shanghai or Beijing.. but here? in Singapore? where I had been living for the past 35 years and have a perfect Singaporean slang.. I'm expected to speak Mandarin?

I dont really care if she cant understand Singaporean accents coz she must... if I am working in New York and I cant understand the New Yorkers heavy accent, should I ask them to speak in Malay coz thatz the only other language that I know?

ok.. so now.. what would happen if I go down to the shop in Simei and wanted to buy something? and I dont speak Mandarin.. hmm.. an outcast in my own country.. dammit.. now I feel so foreign..

or issit a must now that I do learn Mandarin? what if I dont wish to? isnt it my personal rights NOT to learn to speak Mandarin?

or maybe coz itz HER personal right not to want to learn to speak English in Singapore..

My mom related to me once before abt an incident before at her old workplace where a Chinese man called in and spoke in Mandarin..

She asked him to speak in English coz she didnt understand him.. and itz not like as if he couldnt speak English.. coz he went like this..

"Why you dont know how to speak Chinese? you are in Singapore. the Government wants you to speak Mandarin"

She replied.. "no.. thatz only for the Chinese who speaks so many other different dialects. in Singapore we speak English"

and he insisted and got frustrated and asked to speak to her supervisor to complain abt her not being able to speak Mandarin.. so my mom had to transfer his call to herself.

The poor Indian woman had to be harrased by an a sub-intelligent human.

Several months ago, there had been several cases of road accidents involving Chinese nationals who got hit while crossing roads and The New Paper published their sad story abt how they came to Singapore in search of a dream and got it all shattered in the middle of the road..

I do feel sad for them.. but they should have been educated more abt how we are in Singapore..

WE HAVE TRAFFIC RULES.

Which is unfortunate for those who came from China coz the pedestrians dont comprehend the meaning of RULES.

If any of u had the chance to go to China, please do find out for urselves..

If u cant go to China, take a slow drive in the evenings at the junction of Upper Changi Road East and TPE, leading towards Tampines and see the number of Chinese workers cycling along the expressway..

I hereby suggest that foreigners who come to Singapore must be educated in our traffic rules, especially those concerning pedestrian crossings.

Those who intend to work here must be educated in our spoken English and understand that Mandarin is *NOT* the national language.

And btw, my beloved grandmother was a China-born Chinese. and she's VERY Chinese and she didnt get hit by cars.

She died of old age.

My condolences to the family of the dead China nationals but to prevent further accidents, do not cross the road while a vehicle is approaching towards ur direction, even though u might assume that the vehicle have brakes.

now come the Ang Mohs..

i'm not an anti-SPG or anti Ang Mohs coz when they marry our local girls, they produce Pan-Asian supermodels that we can be proud of.

an Ang Moh friend of mine used to say that he loves being in Singapore coz of the preferential treatment that he gets here and in surrounding Asian countries coz we treat the Ang Mohs like kings.. we cant really blame them for liking it coz if u have a privilege, u'ld take it right?

so blame who?

Ourselves lor..

or if u dont want to blame urself for putting them on such high pedestals, dont whine when they take ur girlfriends away.

I have to reiterate the fact that I am neither xenophobic or racist, but merely stating an opinion. and if God had created so many races, who are we to hate them?

letz whine abt something else.. some geeky stuffs..

HP.

I sent my laptop for repair in late October coz it just konked out on me one day..

Waited for 8 days and still no call from them to even give me a quotation. So I called them..

Took another 3 days for the engineer/technician/whoever-the-servicing-fella-might-be to call me and gave me a quotation..

Took them abt 3 weeks to change a stupid motherboard..

they waived a $95 service charge coz I told them that their service sucks so they shouldnt charge for it..

All the 4 ppl who attended to me at the HP Service Centre were abrupt and unfriendly, even though they had a poster stating that if we catch them unsmiling while attending to us, we'll get a surprise gift.. but looking at the faces of those unfriendly ppl.. i'm almost pretty sure that the gift can surprisingly explode and their mission was to kill their customers.

so of course, being me, I told them that they should remove the posters.

But being them, they didnt understand sacarsms..

After making a complaint to the SERVICE QUALITY girl, she told me that she takes it VERY seriously and she will look into it and will email me within 3 days. even after I told her that I cant be bothered abt the reason behind the stupid delays as long as I get back my laptop, she insisted that "it's her job and she will definitely investigate and get back to me by monday"..

hah!

it had been TWO FREAKING WEEKS AND STILL NOTHING.

so apparently, complaints that goes thru to the HP SQU are taken VERY VERY LIGHTLY and they might be sitting inside the office laughing their asses off talking abt how crappy the complaints that their customers have..

Service Quality... but they didnt say Good Quality or Bad Quality..

so in that sense, they are not really wrong. It's just me being petty. They were merely trying to upkeep Bad Quality Service.

poor HP people.

And when I brought back the laptop with the change of motherboard, the DVD drive couldnt be detected even though it can be physically accessed (open/close/read) .. and the CMOS does not include an option for the IDE settings so the DVD was listed as Unknown Hard Drive in Windows..

So it was obvious that the drive was not set to be auto detected in the CMOS and we cant change it.

And for two weeks I had to bear with it till I had the time to go back to HP Service Centre and met up with another SQU fella.. or rather.. SQU SPECIALIST by the name of Haizam.. and the girl who attended to me was mysteriously missing even though my case sheet had her name on it..

My unit was sent in again and a few hours later an engineer/technician/whoever-the-servicing-fella-might-be called me and told me that my DVD drive had always been working and suggested that they could FORMAT my hard drive for me..

FORMAT MY HARD DRIVE FOR WHAT?!

Stupid fella.. I asked u to just set the CMOS setting and u want to format the drive and talked to me like as if I am so stupid.. I could just hit his stupid head with a book full of 8086 instruction codes.

Aiya.. u think I dunno that u had set the IDE settings before calling me meh?

HP SERVICE SUCKS BIG TIME.

Next time I'll buy a Mac.

yeah.

right.

ok.. end of whining..

now letz talk abt the good times.. :)

things are almost all prepared for the wedding.. and now we hear bad reviews abt the wedding planner at Lagun Sari..

dammit.

time to take out my whip to whip anyone who screw up my wedding plans..

3 weeks to go before we become legal. and itz so seriously exciting.. things between me and my wife-in-3-weeks-time is fantastic and now the stress of planning for a honeymoon.. met the Mak Andam to choose the costumes that we want and finally managed to get for her bridal gowns that are beautiful.. so we can forgo the one given by the Mak Andam contracted by Lagun Sari..

and seriously serious.. she look gorgeous in those gowns..

but then again, she always look gorgeous.

I love you, Nur Zahirah.