laremy.sg

So I’m at a blogging workshop (for teachers) now and we’ve been told to practice blogging. One of the blogging tasks is to invent an award and elaborate on some criteria for winning that award. This is my imagined award.

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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.

The decision:

The aftermath:

As though I had never been there at all!

1. Update HR database with the courses that I’ve gone for ASAP.
   Spent an unpleasant weekend last year updating the database because I let everything accumulate.
2. Create a list called ‘All These Things That I’ve Done’ in Google Docs so I can update it with… all these things that I’ve done (at work).
   For the purposes of work review and the like.

I wonder if anyone else sees the irony in this.

I was quite curious about how and why there was a need for a 13th month payment after reading this article. So I Googled for some answers, and found a few posts on this topic.

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?

While riding along the PIE one day, two thoughts about climate change suddenly popped into my head:

1. Roads = traffic = exhaust fumes = global warming. This probably increases exponentially during traffic jams which occur during the morning and evening rush hours. Why are they rush hours? Because the bulk of the people are commuting to work/school. Why are we still commuting to work/school en masse when technology empowers us to work at disparate locations?
2. Warm temperatures in SG = increase in usage of air-conditioning = increase in electricity generation = increase in both fuels burnt (at power station’s end) and machines working (compressors and the like) = increase in output of heat = increase in temperatures in SG = global warming. Is air-conditioning the only way to reduce temperatures in SG, and on a macro level, the world?

It seems to me that both of these ‘problems’ are caused by sociological factors.

1. People, especially Singaporeans, place great value on ‘showing your face’. So be it for work or for school, the indicator people still stick to in order to measure work carried out or amount learnt is physical attendance. Perhaps this entails a paradigm shift: if we can harness the power of technology to delegate work or conduct lessons, we reduce the need for people to ‘show their faces’. Though it might mean an increase in computing power,  electricity generation, etc. which might also contribute to global warming. But at least there aren’t traffic jams, right?
2. For reasons that I still cannot fathom, we still stick to ‘Western’ dress codes of suits, jackets, long-sleeved shirts, tailored pants, etc. to go to work. Why? It doesn’t make sense to do so especially in our weather. Logically, we should be wearing clothes that aren’t so warm but we aren’t. Inadvertently, this artifically increases our dependence on air-conditioning. So will this blind embrace of ‘Western’ culture secretly be our undoing (and because I cannot resist it: what has happened to our Asian values??? LOL.)?

Your thoughts/comments?