Friday 27 February 2009

Crutch

Where would I be without you? What would I do without you?
You give me the strength to keep on going. Without you I would be hopeless…

I can't deny it. I would be lying if I said that there were not a few nights where I laid in bed thinking that you are the only thing I had to live for.

How did it come to this? I have let you become my life crutch. Most of my life is spent waiting for you to come. When you come I am happy and when you go I am back to sad.

I need to find a replacement. I need to replace you. You have been good to me, but I guess you are just not enough. You are way too short. You are only two days. Only a mere 48 hours. But that is not even an accurate representation. When you take away sleep time you are much, much less.

I hate sleep. We waste too much of our lives sleeping. It would be cool if the clock stopped while we slept, or if we only needed 1 hour of sleep to tie us over.

I really hope they invent it someday. I would prefer it to be sooner rather than later though. Would be pretty pointless once I am in my 50s or 60s. I need it now while I am still young.

Although I guess I am not really young anymore. I am at best relatively young. I am at a stage in my life where if I don’t stay on top of things, I might wake up tomorrow 50, broke, lonely, singing “No woman, No cry” on a rocking chair on my front lawn.

But it would still be really cool if they could invent it. You know, a sleep replacement pill. Instead of going to sleep at night you would take the pill and it would be the equivalent to one night of sleep. Pretty awesome idea huh? Get back from work at 6-7 and still have 12 hours left to do your own thing before having to resume the rat race.

But I doubt they would make something like that. Probably not in their best interests. Just like it is not in their interests to cure aids or any other serious diseases.

It is Friday again. It is about 13:03 now. Just a little bit more to go. A few more hours and we will be together again. In a couple more hours it will be the weekend again.

Pokemon Politics



Update soon to come.

Thursday 26 February 2009

A Day in The Life

2:30. That is the time I saw when I looked at my PC screen. I have a few different ways to find out the time in my house. My phone, PC, TV and laptop. But oddly enough I don’t actually have a clock in my house.

I was in a department store the other day. They actually had a floor dedicated to clocks. They had digital clocks, analogue clocks, clock radios, clocks of all different shapes, sizes and colors. There was one clock that did take my fancy though. It was a rectangular clock that had a map of the world on it. This clock could tell you the time in all the major cities in the world.

But on the downside the price tag was pretty ridiculous. It cost more than twice the amount of a more standard clock.

Buy a standard clock? Or spend a lot more on a clock that will do some pre-school arithmetic for me and tell me the difference between GMT 0 and GMT +9.

It is a toughie I tell you. But it makes me wonder what the world is coming to when it takes this much thought and deliberation to choose a clock to hang on the wall.

Before going to sleep I remembered glancing at the time on my PC and seeing 22:30. So boys and girls a quick pop quiz. If I went to bed at 22:30 and woke up at 2:30 how much sleep did I get (prizes if you guess correctly)?

My stomach started crying so I went over to the fridge. Midnight started getting excited. I threw three pellets into his cube and he devoured them promptly. Sometimes I envy you. The life of a fish must be stress free. Just swim around all day and wait for food. No bills, no problems, no nothing.

How many months have I had you for now? I guess you must be getting tired of pellets. It is all you have eaten since I brought you into my home. I guess I will run to the pet shop and see if I can get you some live feed as a treat.

That made me feel a little bit sad. Greed never got to experience anything other than pellets. RIP Greed. I am sorry I didn’t take better care of you…

I put my hand on my fridge door and was about to open it. Now boys and girls I have another pop quiz for you. I have not gone food shopping for 1 month. What is the chance (in percentage) that when I open my fridge I find any food?

I decided not to open the fridge. I am a bit of gambling man, but I did not fancy my odds on this one.

8:05 was the next time I saw a clock. It was displayed on the platform in the train station. My train is the 8:06. It was crowded as usual. I miss my old route. The train was not very crowded in the morning, although you would be hard pressed to find a seat. There was a guy that I called the scavenger who used to work my route. He would roam up and down the carriages looking for newspapers and mangas that people had left behind. I am assuming he would setup shop somewhere reselling them.

You have got to love the work ethic of the people in this country. Even the homeless are on their hustle.

My company is far from the station. The bigger slap in the face is that I have to walk up a steep hill. Walking up a steep hill first thing in the morning can be soul crushing. Especially when you have had close to no sleep. But yeah, I know, I know “It is good exercise”.

10:14. I am sitting at my desk writing this blog. Unfortunately, today I have to get some work done. Hopefully I can finish it really quickly and get back to writing blogs, speaking to people on msn/aim/skype/facebook and doing more constructive things with my time other than doing work at work.


I guess I should have titled this entry "Half A Day in The Life"...

Wednesday 25 February 2009

Good Timing

Good timing I guess. A few more minutes, or even seconds should I say, and it would have been too late. I would have been deep underground without a bar of signal on my phone.

But the timing was good and I was still at the ticket machine.

I whipped out my phone and looked at the screen. Plus something, something, super long number? A call from abroad? I don’t get too many of those.

Guess I should pick it up and see who it is.

Caller: Good afternoon, good evening.

That opening made me laugh. A lot of people I speak to don’t have a clue what time it is in my part of the world. But that’s GMT +9 for you.

The caller was my Pops. He was like, there is a pretty young lady who works in a bank he normally visits. Apparently he had been telling her that he has a son in Japan. To escalate things even further he had taken her number and told her that he will get me to call her…

Hearing that put an awkward smile on my face.

Although he probably meant well, he didn’t really need to do that. Besides, I have a hard enough time as it is fighting off the ladies when I go out (:P). And to be frank, I would rather eat my own shit than go to that country anyway…

So it looks like she will be waiting a long time for my call.

But I am slightly curious. My Pops blood is flowing through my veins. I wonder if we share the same taste in women. I wonder what my assessment of the banker would be…

Tuesday 24 February 2009

An Analyst's Tears

I am working at a small financial data provider firm at the moment. The room I am in has like 6-8 people depending on the day of the week.

On my right is a small Chinese woman with spectacles. She works as a financial analyst. We are actually doing a project together which involves calculating some financial data from spreadsheets. She is pretty cool.

The past few weeks have been pretty busy at work. I have found myself coming in on weekends, national holidays and getting home as late as 8-9pm. But things have calmed down slightly this week.

While sitting at my desk contemplating whether or not I should do any work today I heard a sound. I looked to my right and I saw the analyst take her spectacles off and start to breathe heavily. Something seemed weird. She then started crying pretty loudly.

I started thinking the worse. She has a small son who goes to nursery, did she get an email saying something happened to him? Did someone she know die or get hurt badly? From what I could tell her phone had not rang…

The four of us in the room went over to find out what had happened. I could not really make out what she was saying since English is not her first language, and she was crying pretty hard. However, I made out her saying the name of a worker in the company and point to an email on her screen.

The analyst had passed on some quality control work to a member of the data entry team next door. But the person next door had made some mistakes and there were some errors in the database. Because of this, a senior member of staff came down pretty hard on her in an email for passing off work saying the analyst should be doing this task herself and criticizing her general performance.

However, the analyst had done nothing wrong in passing it on. I guess since the world is coming to an end and the company is not doing well everybody is on edge.

The analyst’s tears made me sad for a couple of reasons.

As gay as this sounds, I think everyone should be nice to each other and treat each other the way they would like to be treated. And maybe it is just me, but there is always something annoying about seeing the most peaceful and cheerful person in the room getting shitted on.

While crying, the analysts said something along the lines of “I am doing my work properly and trying my best, but she (senior member of staff) is saying the work I do is not good!”

Her tears taught me something about her. She must really care and take pride in her work to get that worked up about it.

Makes me wonder what the fuck I am doing here. I spend half the day daydreaming and browsing the web and I couldn’t give two shits what anybody thinks about the work I produce…