laremy.sg

I don’t normally do this i.e. criticise things/people/places in public spaces, so you can guess how pissed off I must be in order to make a post about this.

My friends and I had actually planned to head to Five Izakaya Bar for drinks, but we took a detour to have a very late dinner.

Unfortunately, we hadn’t taken into account the Bar’s early closing time, so we headed to the next nearest dig, which was Bar Opiume.

I will never go back there again, and I hope you don’t either, because that place is the dumps.

First, we had to wait for someone to ask us if we wanted a table. Then we had to wait for menus which never came.

You might think I’m being unreasonable here, but:

• when your entire table has been seated by a somewhat reluctant server (which is stupid – you’ve got a table that wants to spend its money), and
• the table has been waiting for menus for five minutes, and to top it off,
• the table has been glaring at a bunch of bartenders and servers who are looking right back at the table and laughing and joking about god knows what,

this is a bar that must be brought down. Why?

Because it not only has bad service, it has bad service to good customers like myself:

I was once a waiter and now I’m a customer. I go out to eat … and I have boatloads of sympathy for servers and tip generously. But the reason the staff … pissed us off was because we acted like perfectly reasonable customers and they still treated us like shit. If we had been demanding and pushy I could understand, but we weren’t.

– Waiter Rant, Vive La France

Remember, ladies and gentlemen: avoid Bar Opiume like the plague.

Winds across water.
Paper boats without sails will
Change course once again.

Or: Why I have stopped adding people I know as friends on Facebook.

1. Hey, many updates in my ‘Live Feed’!
2. Hey, that’s a funny comment on someone’s status message/picture/video/etc!
3. Hey, that name/face sounds/looks familiar!
4. Hey, it’s a person I know/used to know!
5. Hey, let’s add that person as a friend!
6. Hey, perhaps I should ‘Add a personal message’ to let the person know who I am in case she/he has forgotten me!
7. Hey, perhaps I should let said person know how I found her/his profile in case she/he thinks I actively went to search for her/him!
8. Hey… The message looks over-explained, over-apologetic and hence, extremely creepy.
9. Hey, er… Delete.

I don’t add students either, though I approve friend requests from students. But that’s another story for another time.

I spend more time deleting what it is I don’t want to say, as opposed to writing what it is I actually want to say.

Perhaps it’s symptomatic of age. More likely it is because I am too afraid to name the beast.

Why? For context:

1. I think most people should know by now that I have a keen interest in issues that deal with the Singapore military and with National Service.
2. I’ve also been reading David Boey’s blog quite a bit.
3. Mr Wang’s latest post provided the impetus to write about something close to my heart.

So I was once a PIONEER writer too.

Fortunately or unfortunately, it didn’t happen during a posting while I was serving my NSF. I managed to score an internship with PIONEER under the Singapore Civil Service Internship Programme in the ’summer’ of 2006.

According to Edgar Lee, one of the Senior Editors then, the choice was between myself and another girl. We weren’t shortlisted; we were just two kukubirds who were interested (or silly) enough to apply for that position.

Well, I thought I got it because I sounded earnest enough during the telephone interview. Actually, I got the gig because the other girl didn’t pick up her phone.

Oh, well.

The internship was one of the best things to ever happen in my life. I had just finished my second year of University, and was somewhere between being willing to write well and being able to write well.

I thought I was destined for academic mediocrity, but the stint at PIONEER was the turning point.

Being forced to write coherently – and consistently – helped me to see what I was doing wrong before, and provided me with more self-awareness when it came to improvement.

You can check out a list of the articles I wrote here. There is a distinct immaturity in each article but I improved at a very rapid pace.

To illustrate: this is the first article I wrote, this is an article from the second month of my internship, and this is the last article I wrote. See the difference?

Anyway, unlike many other people, I haven’t cancelled my PIONEER subscription.

I still read the magazine every month with a fervour: ripping open the plastic sheet that PIONEER comes wrapped in; devouring the publication from page to page.

Is it because I am a military nut? No. I follow what the SAF does  “out of a desire to ensure the system is accountable for the lives of Singaporeans who step forward to serve in uniform”.

That is my only motivation, and PIONEER provides me with one of the few links that I have to a military system that has much room for improvement.

In fact, PIONEER magazine itself provides the most apt example of the change that needs to happen.

The publication is a symbol of how the Singapore Armed Forces wants to portray itself – a glossy, polished, professional entity.

But silences speak the loudest words, and the features that are missing from PIONEER are the very same ills that plague the SAF.

For example, there are no critical commentaries from learned individuals that analyse and evaluate military policy. Neither is there a forum page for soldiers and citizens to air their views.

In spite of this, I will continue to subscribe to PIONEER.

I believe the day will come when more citizen/soldier involvement and engagement takes place. PIONEER, like Singapore and the SAF, has evolved slowly, but surely over the last few decades.

This evolution isn’t going to stop – unless something happens to derail progress, of course.

Change will happen, and I look forward to being able to thumb through an issue of PIONEER and feeling like it’s worth more than the forty cents per issue I’m paying now.