砂漠のJeffire

Jeffirean Stories

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Another 8hrs+ before I take flight to Taipei for a breakaway from the boring environments of Singapore. Just completed some last minute work.

Murphy's Law is always at play when you are at your tightest time. This is one of the worst traits I possess -- being last minute! I tend to think that many tasks are very easy (with the help of the computer these days, things are really fast) but in fact, even though they are relatively easy, they are time-consuming. Take for example if I write an email from my hotmail to you about my trip to Taiwan. I would take 30 seconds to power up the computer, 30 seconds to get Internet Explorer to start, 10 seconds to log into Hotmail, and perhaps a minute later I would have written "regards" and clicked on the "Send" button. So writing an email to you took me 2minutes rather than if I would to type an SMS which probably will take me half the time. Or even faster, I would call you and the message would be across in 30 seconds. This is what I observed from our obsession with making things more efficient. We made things easier, faster, but not necessary time-saving. It could be due to the nature of today's environment, that the time-savings obtained is no longer enough compared to the relatively quick pace of life. In the past, an overseas mail could have taken months to reach, but an email now takes 2 minutes to write. The time-savings looks substantial here, but hey, we are no longer living in the mail era. Rarely someone would expect to wait for your mail for 2-3 months. Rather, they expect the mail to be in much faster and therefore even though 2 minutes seems fast, it is still not fast enough by today's standards.

I drifted away from my original topic, which was to complain about my loss of time due to the oversight by the reception of the Work Permit Centre at Tanjong Pagar Complex. Not only is the drive there long and boring, the wait there is absolutely a killer. To think that the receptionist told me that my printout was unacceptable and yet still admit me into the queue only to find out that my printout was still unacceptable. Isn't that stupid? I admit that I could have saved the trouble of going down again later (on a real time-tight day, it is an absolute killer task) by making the printout perfect, but what the heck, this is the stupid MOM's software fault because I clicked "Print" just as instructed on that page but the printout was cut off at the first leftest line (meaning the first 1-2 letters of every line was missing). If there was a blame-sharing approach, I would only share 10% of the fault as a "naive, assuming, lousy computer user". Why don't they just make things easier?

The other stupid thing is that the Work Permit Online (MOM's website) only opens from 8am - 10pm (Mon - Sat). This is not making use of the internet's prowess! Shouldn't it be 24-7? Now I have to wait till 8am in the morning before I can access the page to remake the printout. This is absolutely dumb. To think that 60,000 civil servants are going to have a pay rise.... not all of them deserve it, definitely.

Well, that's life for you when you have the deadline looming. I should take the bulk of the fault, of course, for having pushed myself to this timetrap...

The one last thing to write here is that my 7 day trip to Taiwan will be entirely centred in Taipei and nowhere else due to the multitudes of adventures available in Taipei alone... I guess I have no fate with the rail, the tranquility of the countryside. Hopefully, the mountains and parks inside Taipei would at least make up something for that.

Here's a new Jeffirean quote for you to ponder:
"Understanding someone is not just knowing what about him but knowing when, where and how to know what about him"

Frustrated
Jeffire

Acknowledged my existence at
4:32 AM