The Flavours and Concept of Home

 

OK, it wasn’t my idea (since I had just flown in from Singapore) but since my American stepdad was hungry for Malaysian and Singaporean food, we decided to go grab a mean at the C&R Café and Restaurant, which is located in London’s Chinatown.

In the three years of being in university in London, I avoided going for Singapore food for a simple reason. I didn’t see a great need to pay several pounds for a dish that I could get back home for a third of the price (this being back when the exchange rate was three Singapore dollars to the pound and six Malaysian ringgit for the pound.)

However, my experience at C&R today got me questioning one of the issues that many of us face today, which is the issue of moving to different places. Like it or not, we live in a world where many of the opportunities that are available to us, are quite often in different parts of the world. Staying in the home market is more often than not a limiting factor to career growth, especially if you work for a multinational. Key buzzwords for career building are “multinational,” and “multicultural.”

However, despite all the chatter about the need to be “multi” this and that, many people, particularly in Asia, are hesitant to move abroad, even if its for a few years. One of my father’s friends who was a Vice-President at Citibank in the 1990s made the point that although he probably could get a “multinational” job, he wasn’t going to do it because he’d have no idea when he would get to come home.

So, here’s the question – what defines home? Governments around the world love telling you that the country you were born in is your home. To an extent they are not wrong. Chances are, the place where you were born is the place where you’ve lived in the longest. It’s the place where your family and school friends happen to be. It’s the place where the sights, sounds and smells are familiar to you and therefore comfortable.

The question that is put to many people when they think of locating elsewhere is why do you want to leave a place which is so familiar and comfortable. In culinary terms for Malaysians and Singaporeans is “Why do you want to go to a place where you can’t get your laksa?”

The experience at C&R today, however, showed that many of the experiences of “home” can, in fact be replicated elsewhere. C&R’s story is about that. The place was started by someone from Johor who got homesick for home food. So, the restaurant was formed to create the flavours of home for Malaysians and Singaporean living in London.

Sure, prices are not what they are in Malaysia or Singapore. However, you can’t expect someone operating in London to sell at Malaysian and Singaporean prices when they’re operating in London.

However, what you can get is that little flavour of home and if you look at the what C&R is offering, you’ll notice that its fairly extensive (my stepsister made the point that she had never seen a menu with so many pages).

 

 While the prices may be significantly more than in Malaysia or Singapore, they also offer pretty generous portions and their flavours are “authentic.” One of the surprisingly good dishes was the rotti cannai/prata (given that the place is operated by Malaysian Chinese). It was crispy and the curry was decent.

 

 How did they get the right ingredients? The answer is simple. Across the road from them is stall that specially imports stuff from Malaysia into London – including stuff with musang durian (which given the aversion that most Caucasians have to durian, means the shop is expecting Malaysians and Singaporeans to be their main customers).

Moving to another place does require compromise. I lived in the UK for seven-years at a boarding school. At no time, did I ever insist on getting Chinese New Year as an official Public Holiday. My right to celebrate privately was respected (which involved enough time to go to a public phone to call relatives) but the compromise was that I could not even think of imposing a public holiday on the majority.

However, as long as you are willing to compromise on certain things in the public sphere, you can always recreate many of the elements of “home” elsewhere. Food is one of the best examples. We can enjoy the flavours of home wherever we are and we can share the beauty of our culture with other people.

The Westerners have done it for years. They have travelled overseas and brought their flavours of home with them. The Westerners have brought “flavours of home” with them rather than allowing the “concept of home” from stopping them from chasing opportunities beyond their shores – so why can’t we do the same?

The Problems with Trying to Close the Door Tighter.

 

I’m now in Margate, England to celebrate my sister’s wedding, which will be in a few days’ time. It took several journeys to get here. First, I had to Kuala Lumpur (There was a significant costs savings to fly from KL instead of Singapore). Then there was the 13-hour flight itself and finally there was the taxi ride from London to Margate, which took around three hours.

As with every cross-border journey, there’s the inevitable dealing with passport control. I noticed that when I left KLIA for London, the queue at the outbound immigration was particularly long. What made it particularly noteworthy was the fact that all of a sudden, the two of the four officers manning the booths decided to go for a break and were never seen, which meant that an already slow process became slower.

 

 Taken at KLIA International Outgoing Immigration

I remember someone behind me asking “they are happy to be so slow and are they going to compensate me if I miss my flight?” My only response to him was to tell him that KLIA wasn’t the worst. KLIA may have been slow on the outgoing immigration but seemed to forget all about outgoing security checks.

My worst experience leaving a country was in Vietnam at Noi Bai international, when I left to return to Singapore in March. My flight was at 9:30am, which meant that I had to check in at 7:30am. I was actually early for the flight but between the check in, immigration and security clearance, I caught the plane with barely five minutes to spare:

 

The Queue to check into the flight to Singapore from Noi Bai International

 

 This is immigration - , let’s not get started on the security checks.

From my experience, I’ve never had much of an issue entering either Malaysia or Vietnam. It’s only the leaving.

However, in my first trip back to the UK, I was reminded of one of the less pleasant parts of traveling to the UK – long queues at immigration. You could hear the officers barking orders at people and if you were Asian or African, there was the inevitable “are you working,” “have you got family here,” and “why are you here,” interrogation sessions. I will admit, that my personal experience with immigration in the UK was very pleasant. Got served by a cute chick, who then told me that I could have skipped the queue and gone through the automated gates like British citizens – I guess, one has to give Singapore’s government credit for doing something right in giving our little red passport accessibility around the world.

 

That’s on the way in at London Heathrow.

The experiences of leaving the UK, US or any of the countries in the European Union have been very pleasant and easy.

While I don’t have scientific proof for this, I suspect the experiences at immigration do reflect what countries around the world want.

Malaysia and less developed countries like Vietnam, need people with money and skills. As a foreigner, entering the country is relatively easy because they take the view that you’re inevitably going to spend the money you made outside the country, which will benefit the national economy.

However, these countries make it difficult for you to leave and in some cases, if you are a “departing” national, they go out of their way to make it unpleasant for you to leave. They think of it as a loss of investment in talent.

By contrast the developed countries of the West have the opposite fear. They are terrified that people who want to come in are going to steal from the national economy. Hence, the interrogation on the way in.

While I agree that there needs to be some control on the flow of people, both versions of the immigration policy are flawed and ironically do the opposite of what they intend to do.

Let’s start with the developing countries that make life difficult when you leave. What is their objective? Since I am not a government official, I can’t give an official answer but it would appear that what all developing countries need is capital and skills. They want people with the potential to contribute to the economy to stay, hence anyone with the potential to contribute finds it difficult to leave.

However, making it difficult for people whenever they leave isn’t going to dissuade them from leaving because it simply does not address the fundamental problem as to why they want to leave in the first place. People will not want to stay where there are no opportunities, safety or basic food regardless of how difficult you make the outgoing immigration process.

Then, if you look at the converse in the “developed countries,” that are trying to keep people out, you’ll find that people become more desperate to get in. In famous “Brexit” in the UK was supposed to be about regaining control of borders, where highly skilled people were encouraged to come in and less skilled were supposed to be kept out. Furthermore, the UK has had two Home Secretaries who have been driven by an obsession to keep people out.

However, the reality has been very different. According to the UK’s Office National Statistics (ONS) found that between June 2021 and June 2022, the UK had a net migration gain of 504,000 people.

https://www.dw.com/en/uk-immigration-nearly-triples-despite-brexit-promises/a-63878757#:~:text=Record%20numbers%20of%20people%20are,331%2C000%20non%2DEU%20citizens%20arrived.

To make matters worse, Amnesty International has accused the UK government’s policies on migrants of causing deaths in the English Channel.

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/uk-governments-failure-open-safe-and-legal-routes-critical-factor-tragic-deaths?utm_source=google&utm_medium=grant&utm_campaign=&utm_content=immigration%20statistics%20uk&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI1aC5gp-c_wIVh9_tCh24hA0SEAAYAyAAEgJTcfD_BwE

Shutting the doors harder on people trying to get into the country creates an incentive for people to try and get in. Think of the law of economics which states that value is created by scarcity and when people are desperate enough the lure of illegal means of entering a place becomes more tempting.

Slamming the door on people trying to get in, does not address the fundamental issue as to why people are trying to get into the country in the first place; which is usually down to the fact that you happen to be a place that offers a degree of stability and opportunity and ironically the people you want to let in are usually the ones who want freedom of movement whilst the ones you want to keep out become more desperate to get in.

If you take Brexit as an example, you’ll find that it has effectively given the UK the worst of both worlds. The people that they wanted to keep are leaving (EU citizens with skills). The people they wanted to keep out (unskilled people from unstable places) are more desperate to get in. To make matters worse, businesses complain that there are labour shortages.

Rather than closing down legal routes into the country, developing countries need a better way of managing people coming in. Making it easier for businesses to utilize labour would be a better start than letting them sit in asylums funded by the tax payer would be a good start. Coming up with a better system won’t be easy but surely anything beats the current situation.  

Summoning

 Towards the end of last year, I found myself talking about my marital status, when the person I was talking to asked “How come a guy of your caliber went for a Vietnamese girl and not an “Ang Moh” (Singapore slang for Caucasian) girl?”

While the person I was speaking to meant to compliment me (I wasn’t aware that I was a person of caliber), I remember this remark because it reflects a strange mentality that many of us in Asia have about having Westerners in your life is automatically a step up whilst have Asians from other parts of Asia is a step down.

I am aware that many of the Westerners who come to Asia often come in executive positions and I am aware that many of the Asians who do come to Singapore often come as domestic helpers, construction workers and yes, I am aware that many women from places like China, Vietnam and the Philippines do work as prostitutes.

However, just because one group work in nicer places than the other, it does not necessarily make that one group better. Sure, I may have a lot more in common with the lawyer and banker than I would with the construction worker, but I’ve found that the likes of lawyers and bankers aren’t necessarily better people than construction workers. They merely have more money. As the adage goes, the only difference between what goes on in Orchard Towers and Geylang is the clientele. The Westerners at Orchard Towers are merely paying more for beer and sex than the Bangladeshi, Thai, Indian and China workers at Geylang for the same thing. What makes one better than the other? I guess the answer is that one is has more money to pay for his vices.

If anything, dismissing people from third world countries as being a “step-down” is often a mistake. It assumes that you have a natural sense of superiority because you were born in a particular country or you went to a certain school.

If you take away all the arguments about good manners and decency, dismissing people from other parts of the world limits you in where you can go. Like it or not, the big markets of the future are inevitably in “third world” countries. China and India grab the headlines because of their vast size and geopolitical clout. However, they are not the only markets opening up. Here in Singapore, we have the wider ASEAN region and even Africa, long regarded as the basket case of global economics is becoming known as an “emerging market.” At the same time, the developed markets of the USA and EU are becoming more closed as politicians bend to protectionist pressures.

So, why do you want to automatically want to shut yourself of from people from the places that could give you future opportunities. It does not make sense

The second point is that people from third world countries have certain skills that make up for their “lack of education.” They are, for example, good at reading people. I remember a former colleague who ran into my wife. The former colleague told me “I know Vietnamese are only interested in money – I’ve done my research.” Funnily enough, the wife didn’t need to do her research. She told me – “That girl thinks you have a lot of money. She eyed up my ring.” Given my former colleague’s expectations when it comes to picking up the tab, I can’t say my wife is wrong.

The other thing area in which we lose out to is in the area of human connections. Yes, I am sure that I will be bombarded with complaints about why I am supporting people who “help their own kind.” But if you think about it, isn’t it the most natural thing to do in a foreign country to look out for people who are similar enough to you?

I’m not saying that migrant communities don’t have issues and their petty jealousies. However, by and large, they try to help each other out. The more established ones try to find jobs for new comers and help them out with the paper work that makes bureaucrats around the world salivate. Why do they do this? Firstly, they do so because they were once helped and then, there’s an understanding that the people you help will one day help you should you need it. I think of my good friend Porna who is now working as a chef in the Shangri-La. The man who is now Singaporean (National Service Completed) helps his friends from the Nepali community and in turn he’s never been out of work.

We seem to have lost this ability to network and help each other. Instead, we divide ourselves into entitled little cast. One of the best examples I can think of is a young little thing (Yes, Singapore Chinese Graduate) who after three months in a new job developed a habit of getting the boss’s PA to call people in the same office (which is a small office).

 

 Behaving like that probably works well in Rune Quest and other types of fantasy games. In the real world, you expose yourself as a person of low social status and you put people off wanting to deal with you. This is something that we as a small nation cannot afford to develop a knack for.

Working Balls and the Meaning of Meritocracy

 

One of the biggest points that gets raised in Singapore whenever there is a debate on the cost of living and wages, is the fact that Singapore is a proud meritocracy where people get promoted according to their abilities rather than their race, religion or gender.

If you look at Singapore on the surface level, you’ll believe this to be true. I remember the renowned journalist Tom Plate gushing about how Singapore had come up in the world many years ago because it treated its women so well. Mr. Plate had completed a series of interviews at MediaCorp where he had been interviewed in connection with his biography of the late Mr. Lee Kuan Yew by a couple of ladies and felt that this experience gave him an incredible insight into the way Singapore ticks.

However, if you look beyond the headlines and actually live in Singapore, you’ll notice that meritocracy is a very loaded word. Yes, if you compare us to some other places, you’ll notice that gender, race and religion play a relatively minor role in promotions. However, what does play a major role in things is academic qualifications. As long as you are from the right junior college, scored significantly well in your exams and went to the right university, you are considered a person who has achieved “merit.”

The paper qualifications imply that you are not an idiot. Places like the Oxbridge universities or the American Ivy League to demand certain standards and you could say that our top people (who inevitably go to those places) must have some brains to get good degrees from such places.

However, as everyone who works in the productive sector (non-government) of the economy will tell you – just because a person has the right papers, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re any good at the actual job they’re assigned to do.

Funnily enough, one of the most prominent examples where this plays out is in the military. We have generals who get the top jobs in their early 40s. None have seen any form of action. All have great paper qualifications. Are our generals clever? The qualifications our generals have, imply that they have brains. However, are those brains good at leading men in a war front? Nobody knows because nobody as been tested.

This on its own would be bad enough. However, what makes it particularly bad is the fact that proving that you have the abilities to be a good military leader might actually be detrimental, especially if you don’t have the right papers. Case in point, Major-General Tan Huck Ghim, who lead a task force in Timor Leste and was praised by everyone, including the Australians and New Zealanders he led. His reward was to get knocked down to Brigadier-General on his return to Singapore. As far as our ministry was concerned, he was “old.” Second case in point was Rear-Admiral Bernard Miranda who led a task force to combat piracy in the Gulf of Aden. Everyone said he did a fantastic job. That is everyone except the bureaucrats in the Ministry of Defence who saw to it that the Rear-Admiral got bumped back down to colonel and retired from active service as soon as possible.

Here were two men who proved that they had “merit” to do the job that was assigned to them but they failed to meet the official definition of merit and so they were actually demoted.

Meritocracy is a wonderful idea on paper. If you think about it, why shouldn’t things be run by the best and brightest. Our scholarship system is often praised by everyone else outside Singapore because the idea looks good on the outside.

We, the people, are a little less enamoured with the idea because the results are well, a little less desirable.

The problem here is not only the definition of merit but the fact that system tends to waste brains by placing them in bureaucratic silos. Scholars who proved their intelligence and ability to study are essentially placed in environments that ensure they never have to face challenges. The brain, like the other muscles in the body, has way of rotting when its not challenged. In military terms, good officers are never placed anywhere near problematic platoons and get promoted half-colonel within six-years as long as they sit there and behave.

Bureaucracy has a way of stifling the desire to be better and when you have situations where its about climbing up the ladder and position becomes a sign of godhood, you get the worst of many worlds. Yes, there’s a meritocracy of sorts but its not necessarily the meritocracy of ability to the job.

If you think of the outsized role that the government has in our economy, you’ll understand that many private enterprises end up trying to model themselves on the government bureaucracy, which is essentially the main customer. I think of someone in the construction industry who made the point that one of the most important things in the business was ensuring that you had a “Godfather” in the organisation above you. The skill that becomes essential in business is “Por Lamba,” or “Angkat Bola” (the Hokkien and Malay, which roughly translates to “carrying balls”)

https://sg.wantedly.com/companies/wantedly_sg/post_articles/197850

 

Now, as one of the smoother operators I’ve known once said “it doesn’t cost me anything to say nice things,” and one has to accept that every relationship needs to be greased. An ego stoked boss is bound to be more malleable when the ego is pumped.

However, the problem sets in when the man on top only values the skill of ego pumping. There are, for example times when the man on top needs to be told that his idea is downright suicidal. When I worked freelance, I had to make the clients feel good. However, I also needed to have enough respect from the client to tell them when they were being ridiculous. I am pleased to say that I had clients who respected that.

If you, for example, depend on a boss who is more interested only listening to praise than in what you actually want to do to make business better, sooner or later you’re going to find that its actually better for you just to sit there and smile and nod at whatever the boss says, regardless of how idiotic.

Is Singapore like that? Again, let’s go back to the issue of foreign worker dormitories. Activist like Jolvan Wham have spent years trying to raise the issue of conditions in the dormitories. Nobody wanted to listen. In fact, the activist were often wacked with all sorts of lawsuits for being trouble makers. Why? The activists were trying to tell the powers that be that things were not hunky dory on the ground. The construction industry on the other hand were talking about how great things were. What did the government want to hear?

So, I guess you could say that we are a meritocracy – it’s just a question of what we are actually good at that matters.

The Work You Don’t See

 

Back in the days of my first marriage, everyone wanted me to become a teacher. My parents felt that I had an “academic” personality rather than a commercial personality. My then wife and her family kept drilling in the fact that teaching was an “iron rice-bowl,” and then there were people told me that teaching was great because teachers finished work by 12 noon and instead of being stuck with two weeks paid leave like everyone else, teachers had school holidays.

I’m reminded of this because this is not the reality of teaching as a career. Let’s start with the working hours. It’s true that the official work day ends at around 12 noon but it also starts at seven in the morning, which means that the official working day is around six-hours, which is nearly the same as any office job. That is before you have factored in things like extra-curricular activities, committee meetings and let’s not forget the marking. When you add up all these things, the working day of a teacher is pretty darn long.

As for that great perk of teaching – holidays – some bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education who probably never went near a school since they left, decided that teachers needed to do more and so, more often than not, teachers get called back to do all sorts of things that make bureaucrats behind desk happy. It even reached stage where one of my uncles who was a teacher at the Institute of Technological Education (ITE) found that he had to apply for the standard two weeks of leave like the private sector because holidays for teachers was essentially redundant.

It goes without saying that my teaching career was short lived. I took an $800 a month pay cut to return to the private sector. My resentment towards sitting at a desk started when I was faced with the very prospect of having to sit in committee meetings. One of the worst memories was Valentines Day, where the unmarried head of department decided to hold the rest of us, who happened to be married, should stay back for a meeting, which only took five hours. The only person who was let off this marathon meeting was the only other unmarried person in the English department.

I bring up this rant about my inglorious days in the school system because it reflects something many simply don’t see when it comes to jobs that are off the beaten path. For those of us in corporate jobs, we tend to look at anyone who isn’t in a job like hours as having it easy. We think of teachers as having lots of free time. We think of construction workers as having it easy because they don’t face office pressures. Most worryingly we look at entrepreneurs and the self-employed and we get the idea that these guys have it good because they don’t work standard hours and somehow end up richer than us, average joes.

Success is very attractive. Who doesn’t want to be successful? Whenever we see someone with the signs of success (the right car, the right home etc), we become caught up in the good side of their lives.

One of the most prominent examples of our attraction to success was best seen in the 80s and 90s, when boxing was dominated by “Iron Mike Tyson.” Mr. Tyson was the dominant fighter of his generation. He was so dominant in the early part of his career that he had effectively won before setting foot in the ring because he terrified his opponents. One of the most memorable fights was against Michael Spinks, which was lasted all of 93 seconds. For that fight, Mr. Tyson bagged some US$20 million.

Couldn’t believe that anyone could earn that much for 93 seconds. Then, my uncle (the one who recently retired from ITE) made the point that the average boxer has to train two hours a day more than what the average person works.

That stuck with me and although Mr. Tyson has since retired from boxing, I thought it was worth looking at the way he trained. Thanks to YouTube, I found two videos which talk about the way he trained. To say that it is beyond belief is an understatement. The man woke up at 4am everyday to go for a three to four mile run every day. He did something like 500 push ups a day. I struggle to get 50 done every other day.

 

One of the more interesting videos on the way Mr. Tyson trained can be found in the link below. Note the expression of the guy’s face after going through the calisthenics portion of the day and that’s just a single day. Mr. Tyson trained like that daily.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NOzRshvQzE

 

Getting up and making yourself train like that requires iron determination and focus. I think about the way I have to push myself to get through my four-minute morning work out or how 5 BX in the army was a challenge. Whatever I went through was nothing compared to what Mr. Tyson went through every day.

Sure, he had the hot chicks, great mansions and cars and at one point over US$300 million. That was the good part that everyone saw. We got excited by the way he could demolish people in a matter of seconds and earn millions.

Nobody saw the training and the hard work and the type of training he had to go through. Let’s also not forget that for every Mike Tyson, there many more going through this type of training who will never earn a percentage of what he made and many probably end up with severe brain damage.

What is true of top-level boxers is also true of entrepreneurs. You may not have to sit in a cubicle for eight-hours a day but you actually have to work very hard just to stay afloat. People won’t see that and should you fail (which is more likely than not), you’ll get a lot of people, including friends and family, take joy in telling you that you made stupid choices. Just like it takes a special something in boxer to get up after he’s taken a beating, an entrepreneur needs to know how to get up from taking a beating.

So, just because someone doesn’t go through the same things you do, it doesn’t mean that they have it easy. If anything, they could be going through things you would never want to go through. Always be sympathetic to people struggling to get by.

Would You Change Places with Him?

 

I remember catching up with my oldest friend, who had transitioned from a corporate law career into teaching. She mentioned that in the course of new job, she actually had to “sweep” the school she was teaching at. She then reminded me that back when we were kids being a “sweeper” was something that parents always used as a “threat” – “If you don’t study hard, you’ll end up as a street sweeper.”

I think of this conversation that I had with my oldest friend because it hit upon the topic that is a hot topic for discussion but one which nobody wants to do anything about. That is the topic of work. My friend had a point in as much as she reminded me of how professional middle class families use the threat of a future as a manual worker to get their children into what they considered “proper” jobs, which inevitably involved needing paper qualifications and sitting in an office.

This mindset isn’t particularly limited to those who are “born” into working professional families. My former father-in-law put two kids through university by selling eggs. His pride was having two kids who were joining professions (my ex is a teacher and her brother works at DSTA) and not taking over his business. My former brother-in-law in particular was regarded as something of a star in the family because he had the “ultimate” job working in a government related job that paid very well and had the prestigious label of being an “Iron Rice-bowl.” I knew I was probably not fit for mainstream Singapore when at the last meeting with my ex, I told her that her family had the wrong hero. Instead of idolising her brother for doing what everyone else does (thus betraying my middle-class background), the one they should have admired was her dad who put his kids through school by selling eggs (how much does one make on an egg).

Now, I do get the value of “professions.” Houses, for example, do need to be designed by architects and engineers are needed to get them up. Should one ever need surgery, one would want the person holding the knife to have studied everything there was to possibly know about surgery. The same can be said of lawyers – would you want to face a law suite without a lawyer who knew the law like the back of his or her hand?

As the pace of technological pace speeds up, the importance of continuous learning will only become more important. The adage that the best investment that one can ever make is “education” is not only true, its going to be more so as things progress.

Having said what I’ve just said, I believe the majority of us in the “professional sector” need revalue our perception of the world. Too many of us grew up with the idea that work outside the office was not “real work” or that it was only people who were not going anywhere in life. To be fair, I believe this attitude is generally true in just about every place on the planet. However, in Singapore, it becomes especially when you notice the fact that people in manual-labour tend to be darker skinned and from other parts of Asia.

The fact that I took a waiter job in my late thirties put me at odds with mainstream thinking. As mentioned on a few occasions, one of the great pick-up lines I ever received was “Are you a Yellow Ribbon Criminal, you’re working here and the way you speak don’t gel.”

Then, when I joined a proper profession in the insolvency trade, I remember a lawyer telling me “Oh you do the easy part,” when I mentioned that I do the running around whilst my boss does the paper work.

I don’t dispute that my boss has the harder job. I am very clear about what I want and don’t want to get involved in based on my situation in life. However, I find it strange that people who sit in airconditioned offices think that manual work is easy.

It hit home today, when I went out in the afternoon. May 2023 has seen some high temperatures and today was no exception. Even in a short distance, I made it a point to stay under shelter. Then I noticed a construction worker behind me and noticed that he had come from the sun. Then I noticed a group of them across the road working.

 

 These guys were out in the sun working on a Saturday, whilst I was avoiding the sun on what is officially my “off day.” Then I asked myself – where do people sitting in airconditioned offices staring at screens get the idea manual workers get it easy?

If manual work is “easy,” why aren’t people rushing to do it? Surely, if the manual workers are having it easy when compared to the office workers, you would find people who would be willing to do it.

Yet, this clearly isn’t the case. I know people who are considered “long-term” unemployed from their last office job. Instead of taking on manual work to supplement their income, they prefer to stay at home. It’s a case of having too much pride to be seen doing manual work but plenty of pride to beg friends and family for money to smoke.

Why don’t people want to change places with manual workers, since manual work is not real work? Some would argue that it’s the pay. I mean, I earned from a single press release than I did in a month at the Bistrot. So, assuming that manual work paid the same as office work, would people still want to change places with the manual workers since manual work is not really work?

I know I don’t want to change places with the construction workers. I like the comfort of not being in the hot sun on a Saturday. I have the privilege of being flexible with how I make my living. I can hang around the periphery of Cubicle Land and on occasion wait tables here and there. I might even get a few cents in advertising for this blog piece.

It’s not that me and the rest of middle-class doesn’t have struggles. However, if you look at everything we do, we are the ones who have it relatively easy and our work, is well, not real. We are not the ones out in the sun on a Saturday. I can think of a number of construction workers who would happily take my place. I wouldn’t want to take theirs.

So, the next time someone gives you the idea that manual work is not “real work,” you should perhaps ask them if they’d happy to change places with the manual workers.   

Adventure in Cubicle Land

 One of the traits that I notice about “working professionals” or the people who dwell in cubicles, is the fact that they have a curious pride in being under stress. If you talk to any cubicle dweller for long enough, you will inevitably hear them brag about all sorts of strange things like how many unreasonable tasks they were asked to complete, how many hours they spent in their cubicle and how they burnt their free time in the said cubicle. If cubicle dwellers were to form a single nation, they would probably the most patriotic nation around.

Cubicle dwellers get particularly snooty about people who do physical labour. If you tell a cubicle dweller that you do physical work and leave the paper work to others, they will inevitably tell you that you have it easy. My current employer, for example, likes to tell me that I have it easy because although I might strain myself in the sun, I get to go home and empty my mind, whilst he continues to face all sorts of pressures. He has often reminded people that he has spent half a decade begging me to study to get qualified for Cubicle Land and I have refused.

It's not that I am ungrateful to the stint I had there. I needed a steady income to build CPF reserves, which helped towards paying for my home and Kiddo was growing at the time. It took a poor excuse of a human who engaged us on an assignment for me to understand that the promised “career riches” that Cubicle Land promised was not worth the price. The time spent looking through what the awful wanted me to look through robbed me of time that I could have had with Kiddo and the second income I was earning at the Bistrot. Being expelled from Cubicle Land was a happy moment.

 

 Copyright Mike Kiev – Cubicle Land, a place where people proudly go to in search of stress Cubicle Land Dwellers believe they are getting rich and take pride in the misery of their jobs. For me, the price wasn’t worth paying.

Modern life, particularly in an urban jungle like Singapore, means that one inevitably needs to have some connection to Cubicle Land and so, I try to keep myself on the periphery of Cubicle Land. I do what I need to do to justify earning my keep from Cubicle Land. So, when the people of Cubicle Land need me to carry boxes and run errands, I do so with joy. I treat every trip to a construction site or a warehouse as a new journey of growth and discovery.

As mentioned before, one of the best experiences that I ever had in Cubicle Land, was an opportunity to work with the Ah Peks-in-Shorts. The experience of working with this group was an eye-opener into the people who make Singapore great – small time traders with a nose for opportunity. This was a group who didn’t need top-down corporate structures to function. They were individuals who came together, pooling their various skills to make their various projects work. They looked after their people and I grew to admire for their thinking which was free of constraints.

Cubicle Land is significantly less enjoyable – no, it is downright disgusting when I had to look at files and read through documents. Then, I am reminded of a time when I wasn’t beholden to bureaucratic masturbatory fantasies. The act of looking at documents and creating spreadsheets, which have no meaning otherwise fills me with a sense of self-loathing. It’s hard to explain to people who have come to see a standard office job as an expectation but the “normalcy” of Cubicle Land frightens me. It’s like this, when you hang out with the Ah-Peks-in-Shorts, you feel energised. Their mindset is about how to cut through the crap and maximising profits so that there’s more in the pie. Hang out with Cubicle Land Dwellers and the conversations are inevitably about how long they spend in their little part of Cubicle Land (which is, I suppose logical, when you consider the fact that Cubicle Land Dwellers believe in being paid for the hours, they spend looking at a screen, regardless of whether there’s any profit for the person paying them).

I can’t live in Cubicle Land forever. I acknowledge that I am close to the half century mark and with nothing to show for it, I need to generate things based on whatever I have. Staying beholden to a Cubicle Land is comfortable but its also the surest way for someone to be moaning on their deathbed about the things they wish they did.

Rich People Problems – Poor People Solutions

 

I had a very strange experience this morning. We were sent to clear out a vet clinic, which was part of a company that my employer was appointed as the receiver of. By some fluke, we managed to find a buyer for the vet clinic and as part of the sales process, we had to clear part of the unit.

One of the biggest issues in clearing this particular clinic was the fact that there were several containers of used syringes. The key issues with a used syringe is that it is not normal waste that can be tossed into the bin. Used syringes are classified under “Medical Waste” and we, the clever people with qualifications and comfortable jobs, didn’t know what to do. The clever young thing who was part of the team, proceeded to seek advice from the clever things that had appointed us and the clever people who used to run the clinic.

Nobody had a clue as to how we could dispose of this stuff, until by some fluke, we saw a member of the town council touring the estate with his contractors. Chatted them up and before anyone could think a clever thought, the town council rep told us to engage his contractor on a private basis. The Bangladeshi chap knew how to dispose of the stuff and for a token fee, he got his guy to do the job. Our problem was solved.

The problem was a “rich” person’s problem. Vets around the world, are known to make good money. In the UK, there was a quip that it was the smart ones who left medical school to become vets. The reason being, there is no NHS or any form of socialized medicine for pets. Everything is dictated by private enterprise and funnily enough, people are willing to spend good money on pets to ensure that the pets get the best.

Yet, it was the simple Bangladeshi worker who had the solution. In the Singapore system, Bangladeshi workers are classified as “poor” people. These are the guys who build our homes, keep our roads working, the sideways green and clean. To the jobs that Singaporeans won’t do, a Bangladeshi worker would consider himself a lottery winner if he was paid anything more than S$3,000 a month (As a British friend who works in a shipyard points out – “It’s the Bangladeshi guy who runs the how but gets paid the least). Then, let’s not go into the conditions that most Bangladeshi workers live in other than to say that Singapore’s explosion of covid cases came from dormitories inhabited by construction workers. Sadly, the only reaction you’re going to get from many Singaporeans is “Well, they’re better off than where they came from.”

This got me thinking. How many of us, who are for all intents and purposes “rich” people do things without thinking of who bears the consequences.

 

 

This is a problem …… if you can afford the car……copyright Car Throttle

Take the debate on climate change and rising sea levels. Look at who are the people denying that climate change and rising sea levels are an issue. For the most part, they live in the “rich” part of the world like the USA and Europe. This lot will inevitably feel most at home in gatherings of members of the Republican Party, which have infamously been funded by the oil industry. Ask any of these people if they think that climate change is real and they’ll tell you that it’s a “hoax” invented by left-wing members of the “wokerati.” They will “rubbish” any discussion on the move to renewable energy and continue to guzzle oil through high consumption cars or through using their toys live private jets.

As long as this crowd can use their jets like there’s no tomorrow, climate change is at best, a topic that gets certain Swedish teenagers all worked up and that on its own has become enough of a reason to continue flying private jet and encouraging the use of fossil fuels.

Let’s look at the other end of the scale. The people who know that climate change and rising sea levels are very real, happen to live in the insignificant atols in the Pacific Ocean. These are “poor” people who nobody cares about and whenever the people in the rich world are told they may need to give a bit of room to people from places like this, they will scream for greater border controls to keep the poor people out, without any thought to the fact that their actions may have been the very cause of what sent the poor people scurrying to reach the countries that are rich both in monetary terms and geographical ones (for example, your country is not in danger of sinking into the sea).

Let’s go back to the example of the Bangladeshi who solved my disposal issues today. Do people really care about him? This is a man who works day in and day out to solve our issues. He keeps the trash bins empty and our common spaces clean. We have no “cleanliness” issues because of people like him.

Yet, we don’t care about him. When he goes back to his dormitory, we think of him as a “darkie” who should bless the day we allowed him to clean our crap. When Covid broke out in the workers dormitories, we thought of it as a problem and there were too many vocal remarks from people who felt that Covid out breaks were deserved.

We keep seeing the poor as a problem. Poverty is something that needs to be solved and there have been plenty of innovations to make life easier for the poor:

https://borgenproject.org/innovative-solutions-to-poverty-and-hunger/

 

There are many people trying to help the poor and needy and these efforts need to be commended. However, shouldn’t we also work at understanding that our actions have consequences and these consequences are not always paid by us but more often than not the less fortunate?

Singapore Economics – We Increase Competition to Create Monopolies

 

I decided to do something which I haven’t done for a long time and ended up going late last night. Went to chill out at a bar and didn’t finish until one in the morning. The bar was fun and I had a really good time.

However, once I left the bar and wanted to head back, I ran into one of the harsh realities of the laws of economics with a Singapore twist. I had a problem looking for a means of getting back. There was no public transport and the only option to get back would have been by car, which meant “Grab” (Southeast Asia’s answer to Uber) or taxi.

There was only one snag to this. Grab drivers have learnt the laws of supply and demand. They are well aware that after midnight, demand for transport goes up (there’s no bus or train) and so their rates go up. Like their cousins in the conventional taxi business, they have learnt to wait till after midnight when the rates go up.

However, the pricing of Grab has far greater fluctuations. For the metered taxis, the post-midnight surcharge is 50 percent of whatever the meter says. Hence, a S10 taxi ride would become a $15 ride. In the case of Grab is whatever the customer is willing to pay. To my horror, the pricing for Grab shoots up to past $40 for a ride that takes less than ten minutes. I thought I would try my luck and move to a prominent hotel, where I assumed would have more demand. Well, that journey proved that assume means making an ass out of you and me because the pricing was pretty much the same.

 

 

What made this journey particularly noticeable was the fact that I did try to hail down metered taxis, which were few and far in between. Whenever I saw a green light, which indicated that the taxi was available for hire, they would either ignore me and turn their lights red. It became frustrating when I hit a hotel lobby and say an entire row of taxis with taxi drivers happily chatting away. I was told “all of us are on booking.”

 

 I did get a taxi after almost an hour’s wait and contemplating if I should jump into a cheap hotel to wait until the public transport would start working again. That taxi ride cost me a grand total of $13.

 

 

I think of this frustrating effort to take a taxi because it reminds me of one of the weirdest facts about Singapore. We have managed to twist the laws of economics onto its head. We are on one hand a place that is exceptionally competitive but at the same time, we have too many monopolies that take fleecing the customer as a God-Given right.

At one stage, this was most prevalent in the media. You had Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) which owned the print and MediaCorp which owned the broadcast. When the government told them to encroach on each other’s territory, they bled money and then went squealing back to the government crying that Singapore was “too small for competition.”

The executives at MediaCorp and SPH spent their time snipping at whether readership or viewership was better and didn’t bother thinking of the consumer. So, the consumer decided to value neither readership or viewership and went elsewhere. SPH went from being a listed company to a non-profit at the mercy of the Singapore Government.

Media isn’t the only place where executives believe in the divine right of the monopoly and this is clearly seen in the taxi business. When the government allowed ride hailing platforms like Grab and Uber to enter the market, the metered taxi drivers complained that their business was being affected (Metered taxis being a business that is reserved for Singaporeans). Consumers rejoiced because suddenly there was a choice. You were not at the mercy of a single provider. You were no longer, for example, held hostage by the whims and fancies of cab drivers who didn’t want to pick you up when it rained or when they didn’t know where to go (Singapore being a place where taxi drivers need to be told which route to take).

However, Uber couldn’t hack competition and surrendered its position in the market to Grab. The end result is that Grab is to all intents and purposes a monopoly and sets the prices as it sees fit.

What surprised me in my post mid-night attempt to get a taxi was the behavior of metered taxi drivers. They didn’t seem to want to take my money, which I needed to give. Taxis that had flashing green lights turned away from me when I tried to hail them.

Now, I get the monopolistic behavior when you talk about say the media, which is run on a top-down model. The journalist in either SPH and MediaCorp can only do so much because they are employees with bosses to report to.

However, the taxi and Grab business is different. The taxi company owns the infrastructure but the taxi driver is a self-employed entrepreneur whose earnings depend on what he or she can get.

Now, given that Grab has a monopoly on the ride hailing side of things and jacks up prices up after midnight which are four to five times what the meter in a conventional taxi, you’d imagine that the after-midnight shift would be an opening for conventional taxi drivers. Entrepreneurs are after all, supposed to fill a niche that everyone else ignores.

However, that does not seem to be the case here. The metered taxi drivers are behaving like they have a monopoly and not rushing for customers. Let’s remember this is a group that complained that life had become harsher because of the ride hailing competitors. Well, they need to ask themselves why they’re suffering when they’re not taking advantage of a market niche.

Competition amongst businesses is good. It makes businesses remember that they have to look after the consumer, who pays their bills. As such you get innovation and product and service improvements. You get pricing improvements. Competition is not meant to turn one big monopoly into a myriad of small monopolies who then fix the market to screw ordinary consumers.

The Nice Guys Formula to Success – Go to Work, Do Your Job and Be Nice to Everyone

 

If one were to look at my “colourful” work history, I guess you could say that the only clear theme is the fact that I’ve met more than my fair share of interesting characters. For a person with no “real” work experience (In the PR industry that means employed by a multinational agency led by New York or London), I’ve managed to do government-to-government work, handle listed companies during results announcement time and arranged cross border interviews.

In the course of my work, I’ve worked for the ambassador of a very prominent country from geopolitically visible part of the world and arranged interviews for a man who would become the rock-star head of one of the largest economies in the world. I’ve been in the proximity of people who have been bought out by larger companies and I’ve even had the privilege of having a former President of Singapore come to speak to me.

For all my lack of “achievement,” I am very blessed to have been around so many successful people in my working life. I’m lucky in that I’ve kept in touch with many of them and remain on their radar, no matter how distant my presence.

Yet, despite all of the great and good who have touched my life, I believe that the most important person for me to celebrate is my friend Porna who now works as a junior sous’ chef in the Shangri-La hotel.

 

 If I look around me, the only conclusion that I can make is that the human race is setting itself up for a nervous breakdown. Things which were once considered an aspiration are now necessities. Back then, a basic degree was an achievement, today it’s the basic to get into most corporate jobs. Back then, a million dollars put you in a special class of wealth. Today, a million covers the mortgage of your “government subsidised” house and unless you have more than a million, you better be healthy enough in your old age to work in McDonald’s. This situation has made people ridiculously competitive and everyone is trying to show that they are smarter, better qualified and dare say, better looking than the next guy. With women, it can get ridiculous. Once went out with an older woman who wanted me to show the world, I was willing to sell my soul to keep her in style and wanted me to know that I was lucky to do so because every Sultan on the Malayan Peninsula (including Brunei’s) was trying to get into her pants.

Porna stands out in this hyper-competitive world where people are trying to show that their pet rats are better than others. He has found a simple formula for success. He goes to work every day. Does his job and is nice to everyone he meets.

I met Porna nearly 15-years ago. He was working at a roadside restaurant on the junction of Serangoon and Deskar (Cripples Red Light District), cooking dishes. We managed to click and became close. Thanks to him, I managed to celebrate Dussehra at the Gurkha camp in Mount Vernon and found an extend family. Leaving the camp and the Nepali community there always felt like the tearful goodbyes of leaving family friends in Darjeeling in my school days.

His first marriage broke down and for a time he was pushed into having to rent a room, where he slept on the floor. Yet, he continued to find work, worked diligently and shortly after he got married for the second time, he found a job in the Orchard Hotel, where he stayed for six years. Worked diligently and was good with customers and ended up getting “best employee” award twice.

He had a failed stint trying to start a restaurant for some friends in Guatemala but managed to return to Singapore and within a year or two of his return, he found himself in the Shangri La. In the two years, that he has been with the Shangri-la, he’s been sent to the Shangri-La-Fort and the Shangri-La Mactan in the Philippines as part of a task force.

 

If you look at the fact that he’s jumped from cooking at a roadside restaurant in one of the less pretty parts of town to being someone that one of the most prominent hotel chains sends overseas and how he’s gone from sleeping on someone else’s floor to owning his own flat, you could say that he’s living the Singapore success story.

His formula has been simple. He goes to work and treats everyone he meets with courtesy. He is generous with his friends and tries to help people. His people skills have meant that whenever he’s been down, there’s always been someone who has been willing to hire him. Because he’s willing to work, he consistently in work.

In his stints at the hotel, he has always been good with customers and so gives his employers more of a reason to keep him around.

It’s a deceptively simple formula for success. Not many people can do this simple task of going to work and being nice to everyone. I’ve known people with more qualifications and were good at the pushing paper part of their job but somehow couldn’t help but insult colleagues and customers alike. I know highly intelligent people with enough qualifications to fill a library and also have a genius for creating complications to an extent that very little gets done.  

My friend is what you call the living example of how you can come up in life by being a decent enough person. It’s for this reason that I believe he deserves to do well in life and in a world of increasingly complicated bitchiness, we need to celebrate the nice guys who simplify life.