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Singapore National Education
Part 39
by mr brown
Week of 30 March to 10 April 1998
(Feel free to distribute for non-profit and non-commercial purposes but keep my byline, email address and URL intact please. Thanks)
I have also learned lately:
1. That those of you looking for a truly horrific time on TV, look no more. Once more, Citibank has proven that it can give us truly awful and chilling ads. No end to this tragedy is in sight. We thought Benetton was bad. We thought wrong.
The new Citibank ad had this persistent yuppie guy braving rain and sun to buy a Volkswagen Beetle from its sentimental older owner, with his ReadyCredit cheque book. Just when you thought the young hero had paid the mechanic to do up the Beetle, we discover that he just paid to cut it up into a crass and vulgar SOFA (my wife says it is creepy seeing the Beetle with only its head left)! This is Beetle blasphemy and yuppie evil at its purest form. In some countries, such sacrilege is considered a barbaric Satanic ritual and punishable by the intestinal mutilation. Watching the ad comes pretty close.
And speaking of mutilation, they could not take their hands off the song, "Can't Take My Eyes Off You", they used too.
I guess (borrowed) money can buy anything, to hell with sentimental rubbish.
2. That Singapore's courtesy campaign has reached the Internet. Courtesy now enters cyberspace with a drive for "netiquette". Council chairman Noel Hon said Singaporean Net surfers were not especially rude, but there was room for improvement.
"I've noticed personally, when I go to some sites, that the tone of language should be better," Mr Hon said.
"People are impatient when they get on the Net. We want to make sure that good manners should prevail."
No shit. I say it is about @#$!%&!~ing time. Damn, I hope they hurry up and bring manners back to the Net again. Can't wait.
3. That the courtesy campaign has at least reached one group of people: the criminal underground. A pair of polite masked robbers broke into the home of an elderly couple and politely robbed them. Their opening lines were, "Sorry, aunty and uncle, for robbing your house."
I am not making this up. And the robbers proceeded to relieve them of $1000 without harming them. Is this a new trend?
Will we soon hear of polite muggers saying, "Sorry, aunty and uncle, for stabbing you with our knives."?
Or loansharks saying, "Sorry, aunty and uncle, for spray painting your name and I/C number all over your lifts and leaving a pig's head at your door."?
Courtesy is for free, courtesy is for you and me.
4. That the Straits Times (4 April 1998) showed a wrecked BMW driven by a 16-year-old Indonesian boy, Prasestyo Alim, and the ERP device was still attached to the windscreen. Proving once and for all (no crash test dummies used this time, just a real life dummy), that should you be crushed into a pulp in a road accident, your ERP device and $20 CashCard will survive. (Thanks Jimmy)
Shameless plug: See the "Incredible ERP Unit That Wouldn't Quit" in Gallery.
5. That the minimum driving age for Indonesia is 16 years old. That may explain why the boy took daddy's car to drive his 4 friends around. One of the loyal friends left the accident scene in a hurry, to avoid the cops. He will not be invited for any more birthday parties or joyrides.
"Our law states you must be 18 to be allowed to drive," police spokesman Ng Guan Heng said, highlighting a little-known fact of Singapore driving laws.
6. That in a remarkable show of youthful stupidity, an 18-year-old junior college student with Swiss cheese for brains, bought an English-made air gun with lead pellets, and fired them from his parents' home, a 10th floor condominium apartment off Upper Bukit Timah Road. The shots injured two Indian nationals across the street. He claims he was shooting crows.
(The Straits Times, in the interest of protecting the boy's privacy, discreetly provides his address as Block 41, Symphony Heights, 10th storey. Members of the public wishing to visit this new tourist attraction and make clucking noises of disapproval outside his home, please contact ST Tours)
When asked why he brought his illegal firearms into Singapore from his trip in Germany, he said, "I didn't know the guns were illegal".
You cannot blame the guy. I figure the topic of Singapore Gun Laws was probably not covered in the General Paper 10-year Series.
"Shooting people with an air gun loaded with lead pellets is a bad thing, except when you were aiming at crows. Discuss."
"If you are a bored kid of rich parents, it is okay to bring illegal firearms into Singapore and shoot people. Elaborate. (Bonus question: Is ignorance or stupidity a valid defence in a Singapore court of law? How about a court of badminton?)"
7. That this same Young Gun will be entering National Service soon where he will be given a real gun, an M16S1 Assault Rifle, with real bullets, to play with. He is not someone you want as your buddy.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
8. That this Young Gun may even end up in Artillery or Armour. Then he will really shoot bird (or as they say in French, "pa-chiao").
9. That this young hotshot says he is sorry and says that mommy and daddy will be paying the Indian workers' medical expenses as compensation.
So what more do you guys want anyway? Come on, these guys are just a bunch of Indian immigrant workers! Getting shot at is all part of the occupational hazards. Okay, okay, we'll throw in the taxi fare home from the hospital too, but that's it.
10. That in an eerie moment of life imitating fiction, the Straits Times reported on 3rd of April, Friday, that the ban on hourly rates for hotels has been lifted. Seedy hotel owners, secret lovers and prostitutes all over the island rejoice.
Hey guys, I was only kidding in SNE Part 38 Point 3 (issue dated 31st to 30th March). Tourism is not that bad, is it? I mean, NINE out of TEN Singaporeans are optimistic, what.
11. That the new Light Strike Vehicle of the Army, a decked-out Dune Buggy (a la Command & Conquer), demonstrated its lethal punch by crashing through a styrofoam wall. I am not making this up.
This strike vehicle can be air-lifted by helicopters and dropped behind enemy lines and ERP gantries.
12. That some brave soul took a photograph of a Police car parked in a handicapped lot (number plate visible and all), and sent in the photo to the Straits Times Forum page, seeking an explanation. I hope the bloke does not drive or own a car.
All together now, kids, can we all say "Death Wish"?
13. That the New Look Straits Times has been taken to task by an alert and observant reader about the paper's poor colour registration (ie. colour photographs printed badly, where one or more of the four colours used to print a photo are out of alignment, resulting in a fuzzy photo). This problem has been with us for more than 10 years now, way before the New Look.
I think that the reader who wrote in was too harsh. That double vision you see is not poor colour registration, that's the new 3D feature. You just have to wear 3D glasses to see the photo come alive. Do I have to teach you people everything?
14. That Lucky Plaza's management, in a bid to correct the poor PR resulting from its move to "clean up" Lucky Plaza of its Sunday Filipino maid gatherings, will now allow Filipino maids to congregate and loiter in a 6ft by 6ft cordoned area behind the shopping complex, near the loading bay. But they will not be allowed to use the public toilets.
In Singapore, we welcome foreign talent and tourists. Maids, apparently, fall into neither category.
15. That following Lucky Plaza's example in "cleaning up the environment" and improving its image, the Thais who congregate at Golden Mile Complex and the Indians who gather at Serangoon road will also be chased away. Efforts are underway to locate an unused plot of industrial land, preferably in Tuas or Sungei Gedong for them to meet.
16. That according to a notice at all MRT stations, with effect from April the 1st, the "Please stand clear" will be no longer part of the message that warns passengers that the train doors are closing. Instead, passengers will hear "Ding Dong. Doors closing. TootTootTootToot". Passengers are reminded to board the train before the toots.
This is of course a wise move to cut across our language divides, as "TootTootTootToot" is a universal term that means "Please stand clear" in our five national languages, English, Chinese, Malay, Tamil and Others.
17. That SingTel will be launching its new satellite, ST-1 (Space Toy? Superduper Transformer?), soon. It is undergoing final testing to ensure that the toilets work. The satellite will be launched by the Singapore Mount Everest team by hurling it into space from the summit, to save costs. This is all, of course, part of SingTel's new global plan to increase GSM (1800 aka PCN aka Pui Chao Nua) handphone coverage all over the world.
I'm kidding, of course. The ST-1 will be used to make sure your car will still be paying ERP even if you are driving a rented Taurus on a highway in the United States. You can run but you cannot hide.
18. That, not to be beaten, M1 takes out 2 full-page ads in the Straits Times announcing that they are switching on their new CDMA network on April the 1st (no, you cannot use the new network yet), making it the most expensive publicity for flicking on any switch.
Maybe next week I will take out two full-webpages to advertise the flicking on of my kitchen toilet light. There will be scantily-clad women walking around holding the Browntown logo at the launch.
"Today mr brown switches on his kitchen toilet light." (Applause, applause, scantily-clad women to walk around the stage holding Browntown logo, cue: Titanic music, mr brown goes to toilet)
19. That it is better to be safe than sorry. When they asked the men in the church, the head of the household, to rise and be prayed for the other day, I turned and asked Ginny first.
20. That my wife says that it is a good thing that The Web (Singapore) magazine did not put my photo on the front cover for their April 1998 edition, or else people will not buy it.
They had Wong Li Lin's face on the cover instead, and put my less-than-flattering mug on Pg 30. You can read my scandalous interview in the April Edition of The Web (Singapore), complete with a picture of me wearing nothing but a bouquet of flowers and brandishing a guitar like I know how to play it (I don't). No, I do not know why sane and nice folks like The Web would want to interview me. They were on cold medication at the time, maybe.
21. That "Lower Job Expectations" means very different things in different countries. In the US, it means that employers are lowering the entry standards due to a tight labour market. In Singapore, it means settling for a job with lower pay and accepting pay freezes due to the Asian crisis and poor job market.
But Singaporeans are optimistic that the government will solve all our problems and we will be Happyland again.
22. That some guy stole a whole lot of Kao Biore Pore Packs recently, more than S$1900 worth. (Pore Packs are for sticking on your nose so that you can have the pleasure of peeling off the sticky tape and admiring the beauty of your blackheads stuck on the thing. It is the latest fad, like the Marcarena was.)
Either the guy has some serious fetish or he has a very pimply back and needs more than one piece to do the trick.
23. That they now have a Pore Pack for Men (bigger nose=bigger sticker). I am still waiting for the Men's Push-up Bra.
24. That some companies have paperwork for everything. This was sent to me by a reader (Thanks CS):
Announcement in [Prominent Union and Insurance Company]* on 8 April 98
SMOKING IN THE OFFICE
To all Staff
I have observed some staff leave the office during working hours to smoke a cigarette in the back lane. We have to make sure that this privilege does not result in a loss of productivity.
From 1 May 1998, we will require all smokers to sign the "Smoking Break" record book kept at the security counter, for each occasion that they take a break. We wish to encourage you to discontinue smoking, but if you have to, please make sure that you sign the record book.
CEO
*The organisation's name has been changed to protect the stupid.
25. That soon, we will have to sign the "Tea Break" record book, "Pee Break" record book or "Toilet Break" record book (use "Big One" book for Big One and "Small One" book for Small One) and that real productivity buster, the "Farting Break" record book.
Shameless plug: Find out some lessons another reader learned in Corporate Singapore.
By Lee Kin Mun (Copyright 1998)
All fan mail and soft toys may be directed at mrbrown@mrbrown.com
Other writings may be found in the Website "BrownTown" at http://www.mrbrown.com
