Rant and Rant

While updating the computer system, I saw the hourly wages of the people working for the Editorial department. They are earning little over than $20 per hour, and even the contract staff are getting this amount. One can easily get over $3k a month correcting grammar and spelling mistakes. Comfortable environment, conducive organizational culture, cordial relationships and a cushy salary; what more can one ask for?

For the umpteen time I cursed my academic choices. I should have taken an English Language degree like XH. With the mostly mediocre competition and the almighty Curve, I figure I would not have any difficulty graduating. Maybe a first-class honours would be out of reach, but surely a second-upper is not beyond me. It’s still pretty decent. I may hate Shakespeare, literary studies and all that post-modernism, romanticism bullshit, but hey, they cannot be worse than the fucking Business course I am enduring right now. No online quizzes, the luxury of doing assignments solo, and no fucking video presentation. No maths as well. Just bullshit your way through. My kind of degree course.

Of course, the grass is always greener on the other side. If I were taking English Language, maybe I would be bitching about it and going green-eyed at Business students. Maybe, maybe not. In life we can’t always have what we want. Life’s a bitch and then you die. I had thought that I would be happier in a Mass Communication course. I mean, I would give a decade of my life to be paid for writing about football. Champions League matches in the morning, a hastily written match report, bourbon in the coffee, typing more bullshit for the post match commentary, three sheets to the wind while surfing porn until the next match comes along. Or covering sex scandals for Wanbao. Damn good job.

Anyway, I was a bit affected by what I saw. I felt like a fucking coolie. How much am I paid, staring at the screen for hours and risking my perfect eyesight? I kept switching back to the part of the program where the hourly wages were shown. It was as if I am being masochistic by punishing myself. Then I decided to see how much my colleagues in the Editorial department are earning, but Singapore employees are not included in the system.

Before lunch I remarked to a colleague how much people are earning in Editorial. She told me that they are qualified lawyers who decided that editing legal textbooks are better than practising law. She wondered why they gave up their practice and I replied that lawyers here are overworked and underpaid. Anyway, that is not important. The important thing is that I should have gone to college and studied Law. Okay. Maybe not. Seeing how my Business Law modules nearly relegated me, that doesn’t seem such a hot idea. But the grass is greener on the other side, like I said.

I don’t think a Law degree is a must for editing law textbooks. Most of the time it’s just grammar. The fancy Latin words they love to throw around so much in the legal sphere, ultra vires, bona fide etc, won’t give a decent English Language graduate much of a problem either. (XH, if you are reading this, quit your fucking teaching job and apply to be an editor in a book company/publishing house. Beats having to deal with bloody irritating parents and their obnoxious brats.)

True, $3,000 may not be a lot by any stretch of the imagination. In Canada a waiter can easily earn this amount. Even in Asia, there are many mediocre people earning much more. But when you consider that some skilled technicians here are earning $1.3K and ITE graduates (far better than their higher-educated polytechnic counterparts if you ask me) are offered $1K for doing a 12 hour shift six-days week job, something is fucking wrong. It is obscene. It is obscene not because the people in the Editorial are overpaid. It is obscene because people here are having their every drop of blood squeezed out and getting paid peanuts for it. What the fuck are the trade unions doing? The living costs are getting higher and higher but the wages, especially those belonging to the bottom to middle rungs are stagnant and in some cases, depreciating. Oh I forgot! We have no trade unions. Tsk tsk. People here are just commodities. Once they are past their sell-by dates they are basically like a turtle turned on its back – fucked.


My mood wasn’t helped when I logged on the stupid army website to check my reservist status (read: reslavery). To my absolute horror, I found that I have to clear the goddamn annual physical fitness test before my birthday, which is two months away. If I hadn’t checked I might have been later charged by the army for missing the dateline and then made to do remedial training with the rest of those sorry sods who can’t make it. Imagine a Brazilian supermodel standing in the midst of a truckload of Singapore car queens and you get the picture.

I am disgusted at having my time wasted like this. Instead of making me wake up early on a Saturday morning just so I could go to take some stupid physical fitness test in some stupid obscure army camp, they should just give me the money. I always get gold anyway. So just excuse me for this redundant exercise and give me the $400 so that I can go and get myself some much needed shades. It is a hostile country that I am living in – the sun here can burn your corneas. As if that is not enough I have to face the damn screen for hours every damn day. Hell, if I don’t get some shades or those fancy Transitions eyewear soon I may fucking go blind.

And one last thing. The people in this cuntry are ugly, and getting uglier as we speak. Hell, even the foreigners are looking worse. The women are short and flat, and the men weak and unimposing. There must be something in the water here. It could be the damn sun as well. And let’s not forget the stress. I foresee when the population swell to 6.5 million, abominations will walk the streets en masse. Our already inferior gene pool will degenerate further when inferior people breed with even more inferior people. Under such circumstances, it is better not to procreate. Sometimes being a responsible parent is not to be a parent in the first place.