Thursday, March 30, 2006
Okay just a quickie,
Something happened to me on wednesday that made my day (Well that is before I got back to the office and saw the paper work waiting for me).
As we all know amongst the arrows shot at me, one includes teaching primary two kids(and at times one AND two) english at a local school. Which is supposed to build country relations and all that sort of propaganda.
So I was teaching on wednesday and it's two classes simultaneously. Obviously the primary ones are alot more playful, doing the sort of things that typically has the potential to drive most patient and benevolent person into a homocidal rage (think mother Teresa with a chain saw). A list of just ten of the things kids can do( that for some reason I remember) includes;
1. Crying because you've coloured the man's face in picture purple not red, which you are certain is the way a person's face is suppose to look.
2. Tearing up the worksheet given to you and stuffing it into an assortment of crevices around the room.
3. Periodically running around the room and bursting out in spontaneous laughter
4. Running OUT of the room to go to the play ground, bursting out in spontaneous laughter
5. Running up to the black board and writing rude chinese words on it (that even I can understand, then again think back to your primary school days just how many rude words in chinese did YOU know then?)
6. Exchanging the sort of witty insults that seven year olds are infamous for. E.g. The english equivalent of "doo-doo head" and " My daddy's bigger than your daddy"
7. Checking the credit balance on their sim cards, repeatedly.
8. Repeatedly asking the teacher to check your work.
9. Getting into fist fights over point 6.
10. Colouring the pictures with ONE colour, that's right, a nose is yellow, so are teeth, brooms, mushrooms, rockets, chairs, roses, all manner of birds, bears, clowns, fruits and trees.
But I digress.
Anyhow what moved me is this, the kids gave me A (singular, one, uno) cherry tomato. Which I suppose it could have from a variety of places (some of those my imagination provide aren't all that savory).
But I choose to believe they gave it to me because they like me. After all, why else would they be rolling on the floor in uncontrollable fits of laughter, unless they which sharing with me one of those very special pivotal moments in their development.
Just kidding.
No i didn't eat it, but I did wonder why I got just a cherry tomato. When any good cartoon will illustrate to you, that the currency of choice for expressing gratitude towards your teacher via produce is the apple. Then again I haven't been teaching them for that long, I suppose I'll have to work my way up the food chain of appreciation. (Here's the official continuum)
Cherry Tomatoes < Grapes < Limes < Thai Limes < Lemons < People who talk to themselves < Apples < Durian
All you teachers (and students) out there take notes, nothing says " we appreciate you cher" more than a durian through your window on teachers day.
Jonathan's Gem for today: " See-saws are still great fun even if you're in your twenties, though playing on them by yourself is just plain sad"
That is all
Jon.P
Something happened to me on wednesday that made my day (Well that is before I got back to the office and saw the paper work waiting for me).
As we all know amongst the arrows shot at me, one includes teaching primary two kids(and at times one AND two) english at a local school. Which is supposed to build country relations and all that sort of propaganda.
So I was teaching on wednesday and it's two classes simultaneously. Obviously the primary ones are alot more playful, doing the sort of things that typically has the potential to drive most patient and benevolent person into a homocidal rage (think mother Teresa with a chain saw). A list of just ten of the things kids can do( that for some reason I remember) includes;
1. Crying because you've coloured the man's face in picture purple not red, which you are certain is the way a person's face is suppose to look.
2. Tearing up the worksheet given to you and stuffing it into an assortment of crevices around the room.
3. Periodically running around the room and bursting out in spontaneous laughter
4. Running OUT of the room to go to the play ground, bursting out in spontaneous laughter
5. Running up to the black board and writing rude chinese words on it (that even I can understand, then again think back to your primary school days just how many rude words in chinese did YOU know then?)
6. Exchanging the sort of witty insults that seven year olds are infamous for. E.g. The english equivalent of "doo-doo head" and " My daddy's bigger than your daddy"
7. Checking the credit balance on their sim cards, repeatedly.
8. Repeatedly asking the teacher to check your work.
9. Getting into fist fights over point 6.
10. Colouring the pictures with ONE colour, that's right, a nose is yellow, so are teeth, brooms, mushrooms, rockets, chairs, roses, all manner of birds, bears, clowns, fruits and trees.
But I digress.
Anyhow what moved me is this, the kids gave me A (singular, one, uno) cherry tomato. Which I suppose it could have from a variety of places (some of those my imagination provide aren't all that savory).
But I choose to believe they gave it to me because they like me. After all, why else would they be rolling on the floor in uncontrollable fits of laughter, unless they which sharing with me one of those very special pivotal moments in their development.
Just kidding.
No i didn't eat it, but I did wonder why I got just a cherry tomato. When any good cartoon will illustrate to you, that the currency of choice for expressing gratitude towards your teacher via produce is the apple. Then again I haven't been teaching them for that long, I suppose I'll have to work my way up the food chain of appreciation. (Here's the official continuum)
Cherry Tomatoes < Grapes < Limes < Thai Limes < Lemons < People who talk to themselves < Apples < Durian
All you teachers (and students) out there take notes, nothing says " we appreciate you cher" more than a durian through your window on teachers day.
Jonathan's Gem for today: " See-saws are still great fun even if you're in your twenties, though playing on them by yourself is just plain sad"
That is all
Jon.P
Friday, March 24, 2006
Ok so I'm duty BOS and I'm rather determined not waste this entire duty day on Drew Carey, goodness gracious me and Seinfeld.
LRI has come and gone, much as I'd like to say we got a fantastic grade and everyone went back smiling, patting each other on the back, having most of the specs go into the mess and getting stone drunk. We didn't, well they did the stone drunk bit, but mostly because we didn't do that well. I myself feel bad, after all the effort we put into it, i really don't think the grade we got doesn't justified the work that we put in. Of course there were many factors that came into play. For instance the new format in which we were tested which we didn't know about at all, until the day the testing team arrived, the new bunch of standards which we didn't know about until the testing team arrived (news kinda takes awhile to get to us over here). Needless to say we were quite taken by surprise. But all that is done with now.
Now that the LRI is over, everyone in the workshop is more or less taken it easier. As for me, now that they don't really need that much manpower in the workshop, so they've put me inside the office. Now the good thing is I get to do paper work as well as work on the ground.
Also for those of you who remember a few posts ago, I mentioned that I hated the fact that I can be a bit manipulative, okay very manipulative at times. Well I've come to see that the Lord can turn around negative personal traits that for the greater good. You'd be surprised at the amount of manipulation that's required in my new post, lots of planning ahead, loads of fiddling with time, personnel and etc to fit a schedule. I like such a positive output in my job, so much so that I even work on OFF days at times just cause it's nice to work at.
But no job is perfect.
The bad bit being that as of the new batch of people entering my workplace there are 2 more warrants, which makes it a total of 4 Warrants sitting in the immediate vicinity of my table.
What this basically translates to is alot of requests from them for things they can jolly well do themselves. I will try and describe them as well as give my opinions as to what sort of persons I think they are based on my experience with them and pray that they never find this blog. Here they are in order of acquaintance (of course with their identities changed and encoded with my very own self developed unbreakable code system : THE ALPHABET).
Warrant A, no doubt one of the most patient people I know, almost infinitely patient with the people under him, especially if they've pooped up. Polite enough to say thank you, but strict enough to do what needs to be done in terms of discipline. Though for some reason he still can't recognise my voice whenever I answer the phone.
Warrant B, hmm so much can be said about him. When he first arrived he tended to touch the guys here, alot. In fact it scared them quite abit. Though it did die down after a while, so the general concensus is that, that's the way he bonds with people or so we hope. He's a rather loud person and often in my opinion using that to bully people into submitting to him though over time that can lead to explosive confrontations. Often he launches into lecturing a person before understanding the situation. Let's have a personal example:
It was the second day at my new post and there was a request from HQ for a detail to the post office. Of course me being new and there being no one around, the most logical thing would have been to call the MT spec and ask him to either arrange or at the very least tell me how to. The genius of an MT spec upon hearing my request quick as lightning passed me on to Warrant B where I got an ear full of how inconsiderate I am for calling him, how I supposedly think he's goofing off, how I supposedly in some unimaginable way was asking him to come back and arrange the detail, that and a whole lot of other stuff that just didn't make sense and just got me peeved.
Of course one of the good things about Warrant B is that he's the first Warrant to apologise to me. I suppose he just suffers from a case of " talk before you think ". There are other incidents that he's gotten into, such as not returning the office key and getting me into trouble ( he apologised after that) and playing Bejeweled alot during office hours but this isn't a trashy gossip blog or at least not for this post so I'll leave it at this.
There's Warrant C, who is of course my direct superior who thus far is pretty alright (he once offered me a cookie. Sad isn't it? That I consider people who give me cookies as pretty alright). He does seem to be desperately trying to learn the ropes of his new job as fast as he can. He isn't around much in the office so there isn't much for me to say about him.
Finally there's Warrant D, I'm quite sure I get what he's about, but it seems that ever since he's gotten here there have been rather drastic changes in the inspection and work schedule in the workshop. Which just leads to a big headache for me, considering I handle most of the vehicle's paperwork, etc. I don't understand this, why new management or rather management in general is so addicted to change, almost as for the sake of having change. As if equating change to progress. Which it obviously isn't, more often than not the changes that the superiors implement are simply a step back. Perhaps they feel that if they don't change something they're not doing their job? Or maybe it could be they feel it undermines their authority if they let any piece of work pass their hands without finding fault or (failing to find any fault) tweak at it. I speak in terms of the general of course. But I digress.
Anyhow he too seems to suffer from " talk before you think" syndrome. For instance often when I consult him as to (for example) if the paperwork for such and such a bunch of vehicles can be put on hold and before I can even finish the sentence he shoots off a " NO!". Of course I've found a way around this, namely by ignoring his no and moving on to the reasons why the work has to be put on hold, usually the answer after that is a yes. It would also appear that warrant D has chronic infancy syndrome. For instance, I can be busy flying around the office desperately trying finish up new unexpected work and he can come in stretch out on his chair and ask me to help him call someone up on the phone for him when he's not 3 meters away from the phone. Which is not unlike MTO who this afternoon popped into the ops room and had the audacity to come in sit down and wait a good 10 to 15 mins for me to finish and then ask me to make a less than 1 minute call that is his job to make. What on earth do they teach officers, they'd better have alot more qualification to handle their position apart from nine months of idealistic training. Not that all of them are bad, just that the methods for selection had better be improved upon. Perhaps genetic testing.
But really I should be more understanding, I should try empathize more with him. Maybe he's concerned about the amount of telephone related deaths that take place around the world every year, better me than him right? No doubt he didn't want to risk getting electrocuted, because death by telephone electrocution is not only painful but an embarrassing way to go and he didn't want to be part of that statistic. Though I tell you, at the moment he was in danger of becoming part of another telephone related death statistic; clubbed to death by telephone receiver.
Anyhow the first few days at my new post have been made all the tougher by the absence of the MTL clerk who's gone on home leave leaving me to grapple with the administrative work of the MTL in addition to learning my new job and on top of that thanks to the genius of the MTO he's sent me to do teaching, quite against my better judgement. But as with most things he wants to get done, it doesn't matter what i think so long as the job's off his to do list.
Hmm looks like this is becoming more of a rant than anything else. Oh well it's good to that after this I went to Taipei for a 4 day holiday AND I took about 8 gigs worth of video which i'll be sending home shortly once i manage to find my dad a suitable birthday present.
Alright that's about it.
Jon.P
LRI has come and gone, much as I'd like to say we got a fantastic grade and everyone went back smiling, patting each other on the back, having most of the specs go into the mess and getting stone drunk. We didn't, well they did the stone drunk bit, but mostly because we didn't do that well. I myself feel bad, after all the effort we put into it, i really don't think the grade we got doesn't justified the work that we put in. Of course there were many factors that came into play. For instance the new format in which we were tested which we didn't know about at all, until the day the testing team arrived, the new bunch of standards which we didn't know about until the testing team arrived (news kinda takes awhile to get to us over here). Needless to say we were quite taken by surprise. But all that is done with now.
Now that the LRI is over, everyone in the workshop is more or less taken it easier. As for me, now that they don't really need that much manpower in the workshop, so they've put me inside the office. Now the good thing is I get to do paper work as well as work on the ground.
Also for those of you who remember a few posts ago, I mentioned that I hated the fact that I can be a bit manipulative, okay very manipulative at times. Well I've come to see that the Lord can turn around negative personal traits that for the greater good. You'd be surprised at the amount of manipulation that's required in my new post, lots of planning ahead, loads of fiddling with time, personnel and etc to fit a schedule. I like such a positive output in my job, so much so that I even work on OFF days at times just cause it's nice to work at.
But no job is perfect.
The bad bit being that as of the new batch of people entering my workplace there are 2 more warrants, which makes it a total of 4 Warrants sitting in the immediate vicinity of my table.
What this basically translates to is alot of requests from them for things they can jolly well do themselves. I will try and describe them as well as give my opinions as to what sort of persons I think they are based on my experience with them and pray that they never find this blog. Here they are in order of acquaintance (of course with their identities changed and encoded with my very own self developed unbreakable code system : THE ALPHABET).
Warrant A, no doubt one of the most patient people I know, almost infinitely patient with the people under him, especially if they've pooped up. Polite enough to say thank you, but strict enough to do what needs to be done in terms of discipline. Though for some reason he still can't recognise my voice whenever I answer the phone.
Warrant B, hmm so much can be said about him. When he first arrived he tended to touch the guys here, alot. In fact it scared them quite abit. Though it did die down after a while, so the general concensus is that, that's the way he bonds with people or so we hope. He's a rather loud person and often in my opinion using that to bully people into submitting to him though over time that can lead to explosive confrontations. Often he launches into lecturing a person before understanding the situation. Let's have a personal example:
It was the second day at my new post and there was a request from HQ for a detail to the post office. Of course me being new and there being no one around, the most logical thing would have been to call the MT spec and ask him to either arrange or at the very least tell me how to. The genius of an MT spec upon hearing my request quick as lightning passed me on to Warrant B where I got an ear full of how inconsiderate I am for calling him, how I supposedly think he's goofing off, how I supposedly in some unimaginable way was asking him to come back and arrange the detail, that and a whole lot of other stuff that just didn't make sense and just got me peeved.
Of course one of the good things about Warrant B is that he's the first Warrant to apologise to me. I suppose he just suffers from a case of " talk before you think ". There are other incidents that he's gotten into, such as not returning the office key and getting me into trouble ( he apologised after that) and playing Bejeweled alot during office hours but this isn't a trashy gossip blog or at least not for this post so I'll leave it at this.
There's Warrant C, who is of course my direct superior who thus far is pretty alright (he once offered me a cookie. Sad isn't it? That I consider people who give me cookies as pretty alright). He does seem to be desperately trying to learn the ropes of his new job as fast as he can. He isn't around much in the office so there isn't much for me to say about him.
Finally there's Warrant D, I'm quite sure I get what he's about, but it seems that ever since he's gotten here there have been rather drastic changes in the inspection and work schedule in the workshop. Which just leads to a big headache for me, considering I handle most of the vehicle's paperwork, etc. I don't understand this, why new management or rather management in general is so addicted to change, almost as for the sake of having change. As if equating change to progress. Which it obviously isn't, more often than not the changes that the superiors implement are simply a step back. Perhaps they feel that if they don't change something they're not doing their job? Or maybe it could be they feel it undermines their authority if they let any piece of work pass their hands without finding fault or (failing to find any fault) tweak at it. I speak in terms of the general of course. But I digress.
Anyhow he too seems to suffer from " talk before you think" syndrome. For instance often when I consult him as to (for example) if the paperwork for such and such a bunch of vehicles can be put on hold and before I can even finish the sentence he shoots off a " NO!". Of course I've found a way around this, namely by ignoring his no and moving on to the reasons why the work has to be put on hold, usually the answer after that is a yes. It would also appear that warrant D has chronic infancy syndrome. For instance, I can be busy flying around the office desperately trying finish up new unexpected work and he can come in stretch out on his chair and ask me to help him call someone up on the phone for him when he's not 3 meters away from the phone. Which is not unlike MTO who this afternoon popped into the ops room and had the audacity to come in sit down and wait a good 10 to 15 mins for me to finish and then ask me to make a less than 1 minute call that is his job to make. What on earth do they teach officers, they'd better have alot more qualification to handle their position apart from nine months of idealistic training. Not that all of them are bad, just that the methods for selection had better be improved upon. Perhaps genetic testing.
But really I should be more understanding, I should try empathize more with him. Maybe he's concerned about the amount of telephone related deaths that take place around the world every year, better me than him right? No doubt he didn't want to risk getting electrocuted, because death by telephone electrocution is not only painful but an embarrassing way to go and he didn't want to be part of that statistic. Though I tell you, at the moment he was in danger of becoming part of another telephone related death statistic; clubbed to death by telephone receiver.
Anyhow the first few days at my new post have been made all the tougher by the absence of the MTL clerk who's gone on home leave leaving me to grapple with the administrative work of the MTL in addition to learning my new job and on top of that thanks to the genius of the MTO he's sent me to do teaching, quite against my better judgement. But as with most things he wants to get done, it doesn't matter what i think so long as the job's off his to do list.
Hmm looks like this is becoming more of a rant than anything else. Oh well it's good to that after this I went to Taipei for a 4 day holiday AND I took about 8 gigs worth of video which i'll be sending home shortly once i manage to find my dad a suitable birthday present.
Alright that's about it.
Jon.P
Monday, March 13, 2006
Hello this is the Chinese new year's post i had intended to post a long time ago but what with one thing then the other it's out only now.
Okay so now it's chinese new year in Taiwan. Which technically means that it's spring. Bah! It's still (as of this writing) cold, inhumanely so. Mostly because of the wind, which removes the layer of water vapour covering your skin which typically keeps you warm as your body heat is trapped there. This factor if I'm not mistaken is known as wind shear. Therefore with this wind shear phenomena the temperature outside can be much colder than it already is.
But I digress.
Over here we had a sort of mini celebration for those who didn't manage or want to go back for the new years. It was a steam boat dinner with loads of processed foods and suspicious looking seafood. I'm not a big fan of steam boats there's just so little... order in the whole affair. Everyone unceromoniously dumps their food into the pot and scoops out someone else's food. Some say it fosters unity, I say a pox on them. 10minutes into the steamboat, we have people stealing eggs, sausages, cockles, mushroom heads and fish balls.
After that we had a little lucky dip sort of thing where for 50 yuan you can get a red packet, which could contain anything from 10 to 1000 yuan. I bought 2 packets and won a total of 120 yuan. A 20 yuan profit isn't bad, at least it covered the week's laundry.
Two gambling tables were set up. A Da xiao (big, small) table and other unique one that I've never seen before but it looked fun. I tried both and won another 20 yuan. Good enough for the dryer for my laundry. Satisfied with the bounty collected, I returned to my bunk to prep for a night on the town. Which isn't as wild as it sounds. Heng Chun is a very small town with not very much to offer. My forages into this area usually centers around shopping for essentials, food, the night market or LAN gaming.
Speaking of LAN gaming, that's how i spent my 9 DAYS of Chinese new year holidays. LAN gaming is ridiculously cheap over here. 100 yuan (SGD$5) gets you 10 hrs of gaming. So it was really easy to pass (waste) the time. I pride myself in ranking about 5th or 6th in the MTL. Or rather I think i'm 5th or 4th in MTL. The map that we often play with is called " Xing Chang" i have no idea what that means but as with most things in Taiwan, it's all in chinese and " Fan Ti" too. One gets used to it after awhile (it's like DOTA), what with my intense training from ypm and poly (Shhh don't let my parents know) I took to it like a duck to water.
Another thing about this small town, or rather Taiwan in general, the garbage that service the area don't do it quietly like in Singapore. No no no, they have speakers and merry music to accompany them on their way. I suppose it's to get the folks to bring out their trash, though for us, it's to run AWAY from the trash. What sort of music is this? Put it this way, never in my life has " Ballade Pour Adeline " been so rightly associated with trash (Sorry piano folks but when I was a kid, I was traumatised by a classical cassette tape).
Anyhow I ended the Chinese New year with a spot of prawn fishing, but nothing fantastically interesting.
Not much in this post, anyhow here's your Jonathan's Gem for today:
"Think out of the square"
That is all
Jon.P™
Okay so now it's chinese new year in Taiwan. Which technically means that it's spring. Bah! It's still (as of this writing) cold, inhumanely so. Mostly because of the wind, which removes the layer of water vapour covering your skin which typically keeps you warm as your body heat is trapped there. This factor if I'm not mistaken is known as wind shear. Therefore with this wind shear phenomena the temperature outside can be much colder than it already is.
But I digress.
Over here we had a sort of mini celebration for those who didn't manage or want to go back for the new years. It was a steam boat dinner with loads of processed foods and suspicious looking seafood. I'm not a big fan of steam boats there's just so little... order in the whole affair. Everyone unceromoniously dumps their food into the pot and scoops out someone else's food. Some say it fosters unity, I say a pox on them. 10minutes into the steamboat, we have people stealing eggs, sausages, cockles, mushroom heads and fish balls.
After that we had a little lucky dip sort of thing where for 50 yuan you can get a red packet, which could contain anything from 10 to 1000 yuan. I bought 2 packets and won a total of 120 yuan. A 20 yuan profit isn't bad, at least it covered the week's laundry.
Two gambling tables were set up. A Da xiao (big, small) table and other unique one that I've never seen before but it looked fun. I tried both and won another 20 yuan. Good enough for the dryer for my laundry. Satisfied with the bounty collected, I returned to my bunk to prep for a night on the town. Which isn't as wild as it sounds. Heng Chun is a very small town with not very much to offer. My forages into this area usually centers around shopping for essentials, food, the night market or LAN gaming.
Speaking of LAN gaming, that's how i spent my 9 DAYS of Chinese new year holidays. LAN gaming is ridiculously cheap over here. 100 yuan (SGD$5) gets you 10 hrs of gaming. So it was really easy to pass (waste) the time. I pride myself in ranking about 5th or 6th in the MTL. Or rather I think i'm 5th or 4th in MTL. The map that we often play with is called " Xing Chang" i have no idea what that means but as with most things in Taiwan, it's all in chinese and " Fan Ti" too. One gets used to it after awhile (it's like DOTA), what with my intense training from ypm and poly (Shhh don't let my parents know) I took to it like a duck to water.
Another thing about this small town, or rather Taiwan in general, the garbage that service the area don't do it quietly like in Singapore. No no no, they have speakers and merry music to accompany them on their way. I suppose it's to get the folks to bring out their trash, though for us, it's to run AWAY from the trash. What sort of music is this? Put it this way, never in my life has " Ballade Pour Adeline " been so rightly associated with trash (Sorry piano folks but when I was a kid, I was traumatised by a classical cassette tape).
Anyhow I ended the Chinese New year with a spot of prawn fishing, but nothing fantastically interesting.
Not much in this post, anyhow here's your Jonathan's Gem for today:
"Think out of the square"
That is all
Jon.P™
