My first day in another part of this Hell. I feel like quitting already. In fact, I feel like quitting the moment I got the job. Never had anyone in this world been so negative and I am sorry to say that once again I have achieved the impossible. I have been feeling a bit unhinged these few days. At times my anger, black and pulsing with malignance threatens to pour forth from me. Sometimes fits of melancholy engulf me. They are always tinged with anger and regret – anger at the people who have a cushy job in Shenton with a good salary to boot, and regret that I was born a Sinkie and to make it worse, I took the wrong career and chose the wrong course twice. They say that writing is therapeutic but for me it often has the opposite effect. My words maim even me. I apologize for the haphazard description of my first day in Hell. I am too tired to really bother and fuck me if I really care about structure. It is random and I like it this way. It is my blog and I do whatever I like.
Getting to my gulag is very difficult without gulag transport or your own. The queue at the bus interchange can easily stretch to nearly a hundred metres in the early morning. If I rely on the bloody bus, I’ll have to wake up at 6 am, which is damn ridiculous. If the gulag minibus ever breaks down, I'll blaspheme so hard even the dead will rise.
My office is a rickety, dusty and sorry affair. I have no access to a computer, nor do I have a table of my own. Three of my gulag mates occupy the tables in the main room – my superior also calls the room a ‘storeroom’ – and my superior and I do our paperwork in an enjoined room. For now I sit across him at his desk. Folders and files stack the shelves next to us. It is a bit messy and the paperwork, while not hopelessly untidy, would give any self-respecting office girl in Shenton Way a fit.
The work area is quite big, maybe fifty yards by fifty yards. Shelves holding slings, riggings, wireropes, blocks and other engineering stock fill much of the area. An overhead conveyor lift or crane, used for carrying heavy objects around, is fixed at near the opposite end where my ‘office’ is. Pallets stacked in a small area, while machines are placed and lifting vehicles are parked randomly. A flight of stairs led to the second floor, which balcony overlooks the entire floor space. For a factory in the heavy industrial area of Sinkieland, its toilet is surprisingly clean. Unfortunately, it has no toilet paper, and the portions of the sink are caked with age-old soot.
Lunch is only 45 minutes. With the nearest canteen hundreds of metres away, we have to rely on the gulag’s transport to ferry us for slop. It is a far cry from the leisurely lunch hours my colleagues and I enjoyed when I was still in my former gulag. The scenery was much better, and so was the air quality.
After my superior was called on site, I was left alone for nearly three hours. There was little to do save to read the horrible catalogue book and attempt to memorize the names of the different types of blocks, slings, hooks and whatnots. I came close to falling asleep on a few occasions. Try as I did, I could not get much into my non-technical brains. Occasionally my gulag mates would walk in to run some errand.
My interviewer told me they hadn’t prepared my employment letter as they were still undecided of what title to give me. I thought it was ‘sales coordinator’ but obviously they thought that since I wasn’t doing sales, it would not be appropriate for me to have the word ‘sales’ in my job title. Okay, I said. After lunch they finally got my employment letter ready. It says that I am an ‘admin and technical support’ – whatever that is – and the woman (my interviewer) explained the contents of the letter to me. (As if I do not know how to read. By the way, there are a couple of grammatical mistakes – pathetic.) After satisfying the general terms of contract (10 days leave and three months probation and so on and so forth) I signed the damn thing. I have a haunch that the woman knows I am probably going to leave in a few months. She kept saying things like, ‘If you stay long enough’, and ‘….may find the job not to their liking.’ Smart woman.
My gulag mates consists of Sinkies, Indians, and Chinese, with the latter comprising most of the technical workforce. From my first impression, my gulag mates in the administrative/sales/accounting/operations departments are typical Sinkies, not intellectually inclined and mostly unappealing, especially physically. The Chinese are your typical factory worker: hardworking and impatient at times. I don’t think I will make any good friends. Although I am a philistine by the standards of my atheistic friends, I do have to dumb down a lot when I talk to people. Sigh. I am neither intellectual nor boorish. Stuck in between. Neither here nor there. I expect to go to Limbo after I die.
I think my gulag is quite shambolic with its business processes and job delegation. While I was trying to digest the damn book I was tasked to read, my interviewer came to me and asked if I could furnish a transcript of my polytechnic results. I told her that I lost the damn thing long ago and few employers, if any, will ask for a transcript of the results in poly as they are contend with the diploma. She said it would be quite helpful, as it may be good for the gulag to know more things about me to afford me opportunities Besides, the Accounts girl asked for it. I was quite befuddled. Why in the Hells is a accounting staff doing the work of the HR?
My superior shot the shit a bit with me and told me they were actually looking for a person with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. My interviewer said that he needed someone to help him do the paperwork and now he tells me differently. I don’t think good interdepartmental communications is the norm in this gulag.
On the operation side, there seems to be a heavy reliance on paperwork and ‘scribbling’. If some joker cleans the whiteboard or my superior loses his notebook, we are going to suffer in our documentation. Why not computerize it? The gulag has been around for 30 years already. Surely it should have had a decent business platform by now?! Lastly, the gulag website sucks. It looks like something a child would come up with!
60,000 foreign trash from India coming in. Whether I quit tomorrow or six months later won’t matter. I don’t think I’ll ever manage to get a business-related job in the city area even on contractual basis. Why in the Hells did I get a business degree and why in Gehenna did I suffer so much for this piece of academic trash?! I should have spent the money on whores. Either way I get fucked, but at least I would have gotten a fucking good time!
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Sunday, May 15, 2011
What a Dreadful Existence!
The BBC reports that a passerby pushed a suicidal man off the bridge.
If a man wants to off himself, he should go to somewhere remote where his final contemplations regarding the worthiness of continuing his dreary existence will not be interrupted by curious onlookers and social/security services workers. If non-human animals can slink off to some obscure corner to wait for their demise, humans can do the same too.
A passerby who comes across a suicidal person should let him be. He is neither friend nor family. Attempts to convince him may only serve to delay the inevitable. Even if he does not off himself this time round, he may succeed at a later time. His existence is dreadful enough as it; he does not need to listen to platitudes from any do-gooders.
A petrol bomb was thrown into a bank in
Every day we get all kinds of news. A few reports are irrelevant or even uplifting, but the majority of them are bad, most often than not horrible. It amazes me that people are still procreating and producing babies into this wretched world. Have they seriously thought about the implications of having children, the moral responsibility they happily forget for the price of an orgasm? How can anyone who claims that he loves children possibly want to bring them into existence in this acrimonious world, where these animals will grow up to be nothing but animals competing against one another and exploiting themselves and their fellow animals?
There are those who will argue that the news agencies prefer to report bad news as these cater to their readers’ tastes. Bad news and scandals mean more copies sold. While I do not disagree with this view, even the most cheery optimists must admit that our world is seriously fucked-up. We live in a world where children and women are abused, wars and genocides occur with alarming regularity, 40% of the world population earn less than a dollar a day, millions of innocents are prosecuted and persecuted, and their basic rights violated with impunity, nature is being raped to the point of death and her resources are depleted at a shocking rate, politicians and bankers are allowed to reward themselves with million dollar salaries, bonuses and pensions for fucking the rest of the world up, wealth and power are held by a few elites, and costs of living go up and the wages of the masses become depressed. I can go on and on but it does not change a damn thing. To simply say that news agencies report bad news to sell copies is the sign of a blinkered outlook. The media reports on wars and other armed conflicts, crimes, scandals, human rights violations, disasters and other depressing news because they are there to be reported in the first place!
To reiterate my point, to bring a child into this inhumane world is irresponsible. The extremely rich, powerful, and wealthy, who can shelter their children from the ravages of the ‘real world’, probably has a case for propagating their genes, but by cloistering their whelps they will inadvertently deprive them of the experience of living a real life. It would be better if these plants in a greenhouse have never been born. Resources are already scarce as they are; do not deplete them further by producing more consumers. Either you guarantee your child a great life, one that is complete, or you do not reproduce. It’s all or nothing. No other way.
I have finally found a job. My new gulag is in some obscure and stinking corner in a heavy industrial area. The environment sucks, my pay sucks, and the benefits (if you can call them that) sucks as well. I would kill to work in the city area but with the market flooding with foreign ‘talent’, it is really incredibly difficult for a Sinkie to find decent work. I was turned off by the horrible environment but I have to eat. The bills do not stop when you stop working and they certainly are not going to pay themselves.
The Times of India reported that as part of a free trade agreement with
To those who voted for the regime, you have no fucking right to fucking complain about conditions in Sinkieland for the next five years. If you lose your job to a foreign ‘talent’, find your wages depressed, have to work longer hours to show your slavemasters that you are cheaper, better and faster, find yourself unable to afford housing and have to deal with rising costs, are bullied by foreigners and treated like a second-class or third-class citizen in your own fucking country, or suffer whatever grievances that arise from the regime’s traitorous policies, I have four words for you:
SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Friday, May 6, 2011
I Despair
I have been attending political rallies for the past 8 to 10 days. This Election has been described as the 'watershed elections' by the media and while I cannot agree or disagree with that right now, I think regardless of the label, it has certainly been the most exciting event in this insipid island in a long while.
With 82 out of 87 seats in Parliament up for grabs, it is certainly a very contested elections. As expected, we have the usual gerrymandering, name-calling and mud-slinging from the regime. But this time, things are different. Most of the Opposition are well-prepared. They have credible candidates who are highly educated and have good credentials. Their speeches are fiery and stir the emotions of the oppressed masses. They give the audience what they want: bread-and-butter issues that have been ignored too long by the overpaid and bloated regime. And the people have dared to express themselves a little more.; there is strength in numbers, and courage and fortitude in shared misery. The state-controlled media, even with their gutter journalism, no longer dominates the airwaves like they used to. Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other social media are now the people's media, and one whose potency the regime, just like their counterparts in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, have been slow to recognize.
The regime loves to criticize the Opposition by saying they have no proven track record and experience of running a country. Their sole and limited idea of improving the people's lives is to dangle a carrot (which has being bought using the people's money) and going on ad nauseam about upgrading. Thinly veiled threats about what would happen if the regime lose seats only serve to inflame the population and spur the Opposition and their supporters to greater vehemence.
Caught off guard by this development, the regime decided that an apology is necessary to stem the tide. Four days before polling day, the leader of the regime issued a half-baked apology for the inadequacies in his administration. One minister dropped a few tears and another mumbled something approximating an apology. The contrition shown by a few of the regime high-ups for their incompetence are as false as they are forced. If the huge turnout for the Opposition rallies hasn't worried them and shocked them out of their smug complacency, would they have admitted to their shortcomings and the cock-ups for the past five years of their rule? According to the mainstream media, some voters may decide to 'forgive' them for their mistakes and vote for them.
Sinkies are a strange people. We live in an unforgiving culture in which people are marked as failures when they make 'unpardonable' mistakes like being sent to prison or failing an important examination. The stigma of failure is stronger than a lack of morals. While we do not forgive one another for our shortcomings and mistakes, it is a given that we forgive authority for even the most heinous offences. Lifetimes of indoctrination, of existing in a culture of blind obedience to authority, and in one that authoritarian figures in white are deified and an old man has his own personality cult has destroyed much of our innate sense of liberty. We pride ourselves on being mindless drones; step out of line and prepare to be marked for termination, regardless of intentions. Under such stifling conditions, is it any wonder that Sinkies are little more than educated dogs?
I have no high hopes for the Opposition, and by extension, for democracy and making the regime accountable to people this Election. Five years ago, we witnessed spectacular turnouts for the Opposition, only to see the regime secure the 'mandate of the people' with a 66.6% vote. Although the regime has screwed up considerably subsequent to their victory - and these cock-ups have been discussed, debated, and argued to death - I suspect that fear, inertia, and simple antipathy may combine to kick ourselves in our faces, making the next five years more Hellish than the previous five.
My mates are going to have a bachelor's night tomorrow. One says he wants to spoil his vote, another supports the regime because of perceived business interest, and as for the other fews, I don't think they will know what the Hell is going on. It has been claimed by many that the young are independently-minded and not afraid to vote for change, but I suspect that for these people, they are living on faith and faith is a belief, a hope, which is not substantiated by evidence.
I will not be joining them in their bachelor night bullshit. They can go to the Hells with our regime for all I care and I bid god-speed to them!When the dust has settled and the Opposition has found themselves betrayed by the people whom they martyr themselves for, I may choose to end it. And whenI do, I prefer to be alone. I deserve a little dignity.
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