The Atrocity of Things

While at the LRT station (at around 10 p.m.), you bought a ticket from Sri Petaling to Sentul. Not being used to taking LRTs, you looked for the correct platform to board the next train but there was no proper signage so you turned back to ask the old woman at the counter for information. Before you could even walk halfway to the counter, the old woman gives a frown and starts shouting at you and with a rude voice telling you which platform to take.

You are going to graduate from a university. Before leaving the university for good, you are required to fill up a clearance form and have the form endorsed by six different departments in the administrators office. The problem is that all six departments are located in six different locations that are not adjacent to each other, and you are required to go to each department in a specific order. Most of the time you are forced to walk because no vehicles are allowed at that particular area.

You are renovating your house. You have submitted all the plans required to the city council. While awaiting approval for the plans, you decided to start the renovation work first because you want to complete it and move in before Hari Raya/Chinese New Year/Christmas/Deepavali. At the same time, three other houses are undergoing renovation, too. One day, an officer from the city council comes to check whether you have the approved renovation plans. He goes to the other two houses first before coming to yours. Unfortunately, you are not there. The officer asks for the plan and the site supervisor simply ignores him. One week later, you get a letter from the city council demanding for RM650 as fine for starting work without the approval of the city council and you are required to submit your concrete foundation plan. You are enraged by this letter and therefore you enquired about it from the neighbours who are also renovating their houses. Upon your enquiry, you find out that not only did they not get the approval from the city council to renovate their houses, they have no renovation plan at the first place! But they got away without any penalty. You soon learn that they escape the fine by giving bribes to the officer who came.

You are driving. The road was busy and there was a slight jam. You notice that some people are just plain impatient and attempt to cut the queue. Whilst they cannot do so from the right (as it should be because we are right-hand drive), they swerve from the left at the narrow shoulder of the road, zooming past you and barely missed your car. You want to cut the queue so you switched on the signal lights to go into the right lane. Not only do other drivers accelerate more in an attempt to overtake you on purpose upon seeing your lights, but they sound their horns at you even when you're halfway out.

You are in an aeroplane flying from Los Angeles back to Kuala Lumpur International Airport. You have to stop at Hong Kong for a transit. Upon changing flights, you notice that you are with a new group of passengers who are locals; even the flight attendees have changed. During the next six hours from Hong Kong to KLIA, other passengers keep asking the flight attendees for food, such as instant noodles, peanuts, beverages (fine, this is normal). Most of the food reserves have run out and on of the passengers starts to argue with a flight attendee because he was informed that they have run out of instant noodles. This last for about five minutes that the flight attendee ends up quarrelling with the passenger and the whole commotion is subdued only when the captain of the flight shows up. (Thankfully, this did not happen in Malaysia Airlines.)

There is a big empty piece of land just opposite your house. People love to use this big space as a place to throw rubbish, such as household waste, stones and bricks from renovation sites, agricultural waste and so on. You are angry with this so you decided to telephone the MP who is in charge of your area to look into this matter. Not only did that MP denied his identity, he tells you that this particular MP has gone "pokai" (bankcrupt). Yet you still see him in newspapers as a "Yang Berhormat Datuk 'so-and-so'". You are fed-up with such an attitude and lodge a complaint at the cicty council. Two days later, upon coming back from work, you find that all the rubbish is gone, but not to your delight, for they did not throw all the rubbish elsewhere; they merely set everything on fire!

You recently attended a debate held by a medical university. You arrived two hours early for registration and preparation. The debate should start at 1.30 p.m. but the motion was not even released at 2.30 p.m. because five other teams from one particular university had not turned up yet; they were still on the way. Upon asking for the reason to why they were late from another participant from the same university who turned up early, the reason was that they allegedly claimed that no debates would start punctually, therefore they came late on purpose. The irony is this: all teams had arrived and the organiser wanted to release the motion on time but couldn't do so because five other teams simply didn't have any sense of time. Therefore, all thirty-nine teams had to wait for an additional one hour. The debate was scheduled to end at 5.30 p.m. but because of the delay, it only ended at 8.00 p.m.

Need I say more?