Cogito ergo scribo

I'm really lagging in my blog updates. Being busy and tired would have been good excuses, but the fact is that i was spending most of my free time reading comics (ya, still) instead of blogging.

I've mentioned that i have much to write about the trip, but so many days have passed and i've kinda forgotten what i wanted to talk about. I'm having bad memory recently. Maybe there are too many things on my mind, or maybe it's the age factor, or maybe it's simply because i read too much comics.

Oh well, i'll just keep a record of whatever i can recall; whatever i can't probably doesn't worth remembering anyway. This also means that i'm gonna be blogging in a random manner about the trip.

Three return flights from Singapore to KL within two weeks time are really wearying. Thursday (28-Jun), SG to KL; the next day (29-Jun), KL back to SG. On the following Monday (2-Jul), SG to KL; Friday (6-Jul), KL back to SG again. Then the following Monday (9-Jul), SG to KL once more; finally on Wednesday (11-Jul), back to SG.

Seriously, no matter how comfortable the hotel might be, this kind of travelling could still drain out all the energy. That was why i took the liberty to stay at home and not go to work on Thursday (12-Jul), though i called in sick, and i really was because i was having my period and was feeling terrible this month, probably due to the lack of rest.

Frankly i feel that it was a waste of money to send me to the KL office. I think i haven't done anything to help them out at all. Their system was still in a mess when i left them, so i don't know what was the use of having me there for two weeks for i've contributed nothing at all.

Their problems are not something that can be easily resolved. To sum it up, it was a project mismanaged from the very beginning -- no proper planning, no control, no communication between stakeholders, no cooperation between departments, and too much office politics. Now that the system has so much junk data and it has been too long and too late to fall back to the old system, i think they really need a miracle to make it work.

In fact, similar things may be said about our side too, except that our impact is of a smaller scale because we are only partially switched over to the new system. Users hate the system, and i think it won't be long before they start to hate the IT people too. My boss was pretty fed-up and managed to escalate the problems to Micro$oft. They sent an expert to our company to have a look at our system while i was in KL, and that expert will be going to KL office tomorrow to do the same thing. My boss thought that if Micro$oft can't fix it, then no one else can anymore, but i wonder if this so-called expert can really make things better. We shall see.

Anyway, back to the trip. The KL office is located at a rather old area of KL, or at least that was what i could derived from looking at the old shop lots along the road. There wasn't a canteen in the company or any decent restaurant nearby, and i didn't feel safe in walking down the busy road, so lunch was a problem for me.

For the week before, i bought lunch from the roadside Malay stall in front of the KL office. I tried not to think about the dirt and polluted air from the road and the flies i saw around the food. I just told myself that if the staff there could eat the food there, so could i. I'm a Malaysian, not a Singaporean.

Then last week, since a colleague from Singapore was with me and she's a vegetarian, we couldn't get our lunch from that stall (i doubt she would dare to eat anything there anyway). So we gotta get a cab to go further down the road and had lunch at one of the shops. Let's just say that for that two weeks, having lunch was just something functional, i.e. just to fill up our stomach.

The traffic in front of the company premise was terrible (but then isn't the traffic condition in KL is just the same everywhere?). I have a short video clip taken with my mobile phone that shows the non-stopping traffic flow in front of the company. I'll see if i can put it up here tomorrow.

With the traffic condition at where the KL office is located, i could never successfully call a cab every evening from the office back to the hotel. I called three cab companies everytime and the reply was always "tak ada teksi lah". In the end i always gotta stand by the road and hail a cab. You can imagine how dangerous that was, considering the safety situation in Malaysia now and i'm alone after dark, with my handbag and laptop hanging on my shoulders. Sometimes if i was lucky, i could get a cab soon enough. The longest time it took me was about 40 minutes one evening, and that was after i risked my life in crossing the busy road to the other side where there were more empty cabs passing by.

No hard feelings to anyone from KL but i find it really hard to like the place. The air was heavily polluted, the weather seemed to be hotter, and the traffic condition was horrendous. I had worked in KL before back in 1998 for about half a year and i hated every minute of it. So many years had passed and i still don't enjoy working there. Going there for holidays is fine, but i just can't imagine myself staying there. I guess the feeling is probably the same as the people who came to JB from the north.

Of course, i still got something from this trip. I went shopping at KLCC one evening when i was staying at the Trader Hotel. I bought a pair of CK jeans for just SGD80+ and an eye cream that claimed that it could miraculously cure under eye dark circles and cost SGD200+.

Many people would probably think it's ridiculous that i would actually spend more money on a cream than a pair of jeans, but just imagine that you are bald and that makes you look like 60 years old even though you are only 30. Then someone said that after applying a particular tonic, your hair will definitely grow back and there were clinical experiments to prove it, wouldn't you give it a shot?

Ok, i don't look like 60 years old even though i have panda eyes. In fact, someone from the hotel even though that i was lying when i said i was over 30 and he said i looked like i was only 22+. But then of course, i'm smart enough not to take a hotel staff's word to a guest seriously.

Oh heck, why do i need to justify what i spent on as long as i could afford it? And yes, it's pure vanity and i see nothing wrong in that. It takes great effort (and lots of $$$) to maintain a pretty face, ok?!

And so i digress.

Never get a woman started on anything to do with looks, as she may get defensive and forget about what she's supposed to be talking about. Then time will run out and other things will have to be left till another time again.

Uh huh, it's about time to sleep, for i'm in JB now and will go to work directly tomorrow morning, which means i gotta get up early.

Will continue tomorrow.

Labels: life, trivia, work