So I’m filing medical certificates and letters from parents, and I come across a document which a student passed to me some time back as proof of her/his absence from school.

This document is an important one; it marks a point in the life of someone the student knew.

I hold the document up to the light, to differentiate between fine print and photocopied smudges.

I read the document, and then I read the document again.

I do some calculations, then it hits me: said student’s life story is contained within the digits that have been inked on the document.

I wonder what the limits of professionalism will allow me to ask said student.

I remember that it is not within the limits of the job to wonder.

The document returns home, slipping into its plastic folder like a late night out at the clubs.

The folder, like its compatriots, is crinkled. Each bears its owner’s name, scribbled with a marker on a white sticker, pasted on the top right-hand corner of each clear sheet.

I carry on sorting the stack of papers that sit on my desk, sheaf after sheaf a demonstration of  presence, of absence, slotted into its assigned vault.

The bell is going to go in a few minutes. There is marking to be done when I go home from work. There will be papers looking for lodging tomorrow.

Strongly-worded statement about real-life issue that matters a lot to me.

Provision of radical solution which, although controversial, is commonsense.

Acknowledgement that current society is not ready for radical solution, for one reason or another.

Resignation – or desensitised dismay.

~

This award encourages employees to adopt best practices at work in order to achieve a work-life balance. The criteria for this award are as follows:

1. 8-8-8
   Employee actively makes spending an equal amount of time at work, engaging in leisure and getting sufficient rest (i.e. 8 hours each, hence 8-8-8) one of their Key Performance Indicators.
2. Fastest Finger First.
   Employee is consistently one of the first to ‘clock out’ from work after the stipulated working time.
3. 80-20 Rules!
   Employee consistently innovates new ways to achieve the greatest output with the least amount of effort.

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.

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.

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.

Read them first, bad English and all, before coming back here:

• 13th month bonus?
• The truth behind 13th month salary/bonus
• 13th month for locals
• 13th month bonus is a bullsh*t

Actually, they all say the same thing (with some variations) so the summary here:

• We are paid according to the British system of accounting i.e. based on 28 days of work (one week has seven days; therefore four weeks has 28 days).
• Since our salary comes in monthly, we have 12 payments in one year.
• But one year has 52 weeks. 52 divided by four is 13.
• So the 13th month is something that is entitled to us. However, we have been conditioned into believing that it’s a ‘bonus’.

Hmmm. Any thoughts on this from anyone?

Something I’ve been thinking about recently – it’d be nice if developers at Facebook, Twitter, etc. came up with options to allow users to streamline their messages so that users can decide which messages they want to broadcast (general audience) or conversely, narrow-cast (specified audience).

I know someone is going to attempt to rebutt this idea by saying something along the lines of “But Twitter allows you to protect your feed” or “But Facebook allows you to create privacy settings”.

Well, that’s not what I’m talking about.

The features I mentioned above are very ‘all or nothing’ in that we only have the options of saying something to everyone or saying nothing at all, when in essence, we might be in situations where we want to say a particular something to a certain group of people at a certain point in time.

Let me illustrate with the example of my Facebook profile. My profile is protected in the following ways:

• Only ‘friends’ can see my entire profile, so you’ve got to add me as a friend before you can view my profile, and
• Only people who aren’t on my Limited Profile can see my status updates.

Now, let’s say I want to post something about work on my status. The colleagues whom I’ve added as friends can normally see my status updates. However, this time round I might  feel that this particular status update isn’t something I want my colleagues to see, perhaps because I’m afraid they might ‘view’ me in a certain way after they’ve read what I’ve said.

At this point, I’d like to be able to have an option whereby I can decide: alright, let’s publish this status message, but let’s exclude this person and that person from knowing about it, for the reason I’ve mentioned above.

Think about my idea this way – it’s the digital equivalent of speaking in hushed tones in the office, so that you get to control who gets to listen in to what you want to say, and who doesn’t.

At this point, someone else is probably gonna ask: “What about using private messages then?”

Well, private messages are precisely that – private. They have a different social connotation from status messages i.e. we’d only use private messages if the information was strictly meant for private consumption. In a face-to-face context, it’s the equivalent of whispering – and whispering to a few hundred individuals at one go doesn’t really make sense, does it?

So I think it’d be nice if social networking tools could start to reflect some of the nuances in face-to-face communication/social interaction that haven’t been duplicated in the digital arena yet. It’s probably one of the issues that will mark the next step forward in the evolution of the Web 2.0 landscape.