kokkai

Mannequin
Friday, June 27



Initially she didn't catch my eye. She was sitting in a dark corner, away from the lights all by herself, and was rather dull to be honest. I'd only noticed her when I tripped over her foot and apologised to her a moment ago. She remained silent though and didn't appear to have heard me.

Sighing, I sat down beside her. I'd spent the whole day travelling anyway and needed a breather. She didn't move or say anything still, but kept her gaze focused on something in the distance. I looked in the direction her vision was trained on, but couldn't make out what had interested her. A painting maybe? We were in a nice quiet museum on a weekday, and there were not many people milling about, even less so in this quiet spot of the museum.

"It's nice around here," I ventured. Probably one of the worst introduction lines anybody can attempt. Still no response. Good. I laid back and stared up into the ceiling.

"She's a quiet one," I thought. I like her.

Zebras



I woke up this morning having barely slept and said to myself, "I want to see some zebras today."

I got up, went to the zoo, found the zebras, and sat down to watch them.

They were kinda smelly.

I took a photo, got up, went home, and continued sleeping.

This Tragic World

Dear Mr Job Agency,

I just came to Singapore last night on a boat! My stupid agent named Mr Cock Kai abandoned me say Esprit got sale up to 50% off. Now I'm all alone in this foreign country! Mr Cock Kai is bad man.

I sold my 1 house, 2 cow, 3.142 chickens and Street Fighter game back home to come here. I cannot go home empty handed the loanshark will all kill me. Actually no have but they always say this so I just follow them. I need job to support my family of 17 children back home!

Please I beg you give me job O Great One all I seek a better life in this tragic world...

Sincerely,
I. Diot

Google AdNonsense



Google's description of their AdSense online advertising program:

AdSense for content automatically crawls the content of your pages and delivers ads that are relevant to your audience and your site content—ads so well-matched, in fact, that your readers will actually find them useful.
Okay, so why am I being shown traumatizing ads telling me I should go for circumcision by some excellent surgeon, while I'm just playing Scrabulous on Facebook? What did I do?

Low and Wang



There's this small irritation that wells up inside me whenever I hear some people pronounce the Chinese surnames 'Low' and 'Wang'. The irritation comes about not because I have mortal enemies named Low and Wang, but rather because of the gross mispronounciation that seems so prevalent.

I don't understand why people pronounce 'Low' to sound like 'Lau'. Look, if God had wanted people to call them Mr or Miss Lau, he would have spelt l-a-u out nicely on their birth certificate. He's spelt it out as l-o-w instead so it should be pronounced as Low. As in high, low.

Same thing with Wang. Wang is the hanyu pinyin of 王 in most cases, and therefore it should be pronounced as such. You know, to rhyme with Huang. NOT WENG! Whenever people pronounce it as Weng in my mind I'm thinking of something longer. Or rude. Like Wenger or...wanker.

I might be totally wrong though, 'Lau' and 'Weng' might actually be the correct way to pronounce Low and Wang. I haven't gone and trawled places like Wikipedia on how to pronounce them phonetically. I shouldn't though, otherwise the next thing I know 'Ng' should be pronounced as 'Arf' or something.

Lessons from Work



Lesson #1:

Pick a cubicle (if you can) that is far away from the door.

Otherwise you'll find yourself getting up every 15 minutes to open the door for colleagues who forgot / lost / spoilt / cut / lent / etc their access card. Or for those who are lazy to dig around for their card / no free hands / looking for someone etc. You get the idea.

Once in a while you'll open the door for weird foreign workers gesticulating wildly and spend 5 minutes gesticulating wildly yourself before figuring out that they want to come in to clean the aircons.

The guy from the IT Department will suddenly come by and you'll spend another 5 minutes complaining about how slow the Internet is today; the cleaning lady drops in and she bitches to you for 10 minutes about her boss who just reprimanded her even though she's cleaned the toilets THRICE today.

Then you decide you need a cup of coffee and find your friend from Human Resources in the pantry. You spend the next 10 minutes deciding on where to go for dinner after work.

Coffee mug in hand, you go back to your cubicle, sit down, and someone knocks on the door. She's forgotten where she left her access card.

It's not good for productivity, especially when you realise you've spent the last 45 minutes (add up the figures - they tally!) trying to reply to an email so yeah, pick a cubicle far away. Far, far away.

The Bus Stewardess

We landed late one night in Bangkok, and after supper, got onto this coach headed for the mountains in the northern part of Thailand. Accompanying us on this trip was a transsexual with a severe bob. She was dressed in a bright pink suit, heavily made up, and goodness gracious me, was our bus stewardess. You know, like flight stewardesses. Except she was not as pretty, looked rather mannish, and was much more creepy.

Someway through the journey she totters up to me, holding a tray full of plastic cups. "Cola-cola?", she asks brusquely, adam's apple quivering and all. I take a cup and she promptly dumps some cheap bun and a wet towel on me.

One thing I noticed was the fact that she was wearing VERY high heels. Pink ones. She's inhuman. She's wearing these killer heels, holding a tray full of cups filled with "cola-cola", buns, towels, on a bumpy bus ride, in the darkness, and she can keep her balance?

*BUMP* The bus flies over something on the road, we all fly up in our seats, the cola-cola in her tray fly up, and she's still standing. The cola-cola are still upright, not a drop spilled. Marvelous heels. Just marvelous. NASA should get their scientists to take a look at those heels, or even better, just sign her on as a spaceship stewardess to serve cola-cola in space or something.

We stop somewhere to refuel, and the substitute driver, who she chose to sit/sleep beside, complains that he hasn't slept at all - he's too scared.

At the end of the journey, when we get off the bus, half frozen, chattering, asses hurting et al, she skips off the bus in her bright pink suit and catwalks over to the travel agent's dingy office, small handbag hanging off her shoulder.

Marvelous. Just marvelous.

Strawberry Fields Forever
Thursday, June 12

We're at the checkout counter, NTUC, and I'm queueing up with a box of er, peppermint tea, in my hand. I groan in my mind as I see the weary looking mother in front start loading the mountain of groceries in her trolley onto the treadmill-thingamajig.

A tiny hand reaches up and places a pink square box on the treadmill-thingamajig.

"Mommy, I want this sweet."

It's a box of strawberry flavoured condoms.

A Conversation About Prata
Thursday, June 5