Keh Huay Sioh!

Today I brought my instant Crysanthemum tea powder to the office, so I can virtually have an unlimited supply of Keh Huay Sioh (Chor Bin said he's going to bring some other kind of instant oriental tea soon). The only snag is that I have to walk the entire length across my office to reach the hot water dispenser. Ugh.

Oh... YY and Yuh Chian (Huang Peng's upper) came for a visit today! I almost thought I would have questions for him but... OK lah... I'll explore by myself and spare him the trouble (I managed to solve the problem later, anyway).

Oh, and tomorrow I can finally report for work in my No. 3 uniform!

Lame chop

Today during lunch, I visited the E-mart again to shop for Army vests. This time I bought a yellow Armours vest.

Some of my colleagues were at the E-mart as well, and I was joking with them about the FBO... not the Full Battle Order, but the Full Beggar Order.:

• PT Kit (grey Army singlet + black shorts)
• Foldable canvas stool (available in all shapes and colours at any SAF E-mart near you)
• Ranger hat (or a less convincing Jockey cap)
• Camo Cream (to soil yourself a bit)

After the shopping trip, we went for lunch together, and after Huang Peng's casual mention of having a diarrhoea yesterday, we started to talk about stuff along those lines to put Jianyuan off his curry puff... I was even talking about the similarities between squeezing out the contents of a curry puff and... that other activity.

And we sort of gave him some reminder about flushing after he was done with the puff (with much difficulty).

Add OIL

Yesterday I did night guard duty again.

During the time before the shift thing (there are 3 shifts, 2200 - 0100, 0100 - 0400, 0400 - 0700) started, 2 of us would be at the counter. I volunteered to follow the visitors who parked their cars to the carpark (I had to open the barricade for them) because most of them would give me a lift back to the counter (which they will pass by on the way out), and there was an Impreza parked there... I hoped that eventually the Impreza guy would give me a lift as well.

He did.

A few days back I've been having this feeling that this time I would do the middle shift this time. Normally people wouldn't want to do the middle shift (or so I think) because you'll have to wake up halfway through your sleep (unlike other shifts when you can sleep all the way before or after doing your shift).

Since I have an off (Off-in-Lieu, or OIL, for polling day) today, I volunteered to take the middle shift.

Never mind... I managed to have adequate sleep anyway. The middle shift wasn't a busy one (duh!) and I was reading this book written by Philip Yancey (one of my favourite Christian authors) called "Soul Survivor -- How my faith survived the church". The title sounds interesting enough.

The book is actually about the lives of those who inspired him to hold on to his faith after being disillusioned with the church, which, at that time when he was a youth, was either too legalistic (lots of rules and restrictions -- he mentioned this in another book called "How Amazing is Grace") to care about real problems in the world or embraces racism (before Martin Luther King Jr and the Civil Rights Movement).

Seriously, I can't be sure whether the majority of the Christian world now is on the right side regarding certain world issues.

---

After waking up from my nightmarish 4 to 7 sleep (I saw a few of my colleagues in a place totally different from my office, and then something seemingly bad happened in that dream... I forgot what it was), I changed into civilians and, under the glow of the early morning sun of my off day, blasted off Depot camp to Bugis Junction to watch X-men 3 and look up some books in the Kinokuniya outlet there.

All I could say about X-men 3 was... how come so many people died?

After the movie, I went to Kino. Bought a Japanese-English dictionary (I currently have an English-Japanese dictionary) and some practice material for the JLPT (Jap Language Proficiency Test). Not that I wanted to take the test, but I definitely wanted to beef up my knowledge of Japanese.

Of course, after going to Bugis Junction a few times without dropping by its games arcade, I had to give it a visit today. It's the first time I saw this Mario Kart arcade game so much taked about in the Mindef Forums... It actually has a memory card system like Maximum Tune and Initial D!

Released

After wagging my tail helplessly in the mire of the low-tide period of my career (2 tasks in my work routine in which I'm facing problems I couldn't solve) these few days, I can finally say that I'm now out of it!

Again, thanks, YY, for the crucial part of the promotion thing. I did look at the program but I sort of overlooked that file.

As for the other task, all I can say is that the problem was actually much smaller than I imagined.

Which is typical of most of the stuff I'm dealing with.

Anyway, it's really like a huge load has been lifted off my chest!

Days of harmonica and hair wax

It's been a long time since I've last heard the sound of a harmonica.

Until yesterday.

Kelvin ("Keon") was telling me about this concert put up by the VJC Harmonica Orchestra which he will be watching together with Wenrong... even though I thought there was little chance I could go, Mom said yes in the end.

Everything was very last-minute... I was shopping together with Mom in quite shabby clothes, when Mom suddenly said that it wasn't necessary that I accompanied her when she shopped for clothes (a great relief), so I could go for the concert.

Wow. It's been a long time since I hanged out with Kelvin and Wenrong.

Even my hair wax was applied at the last minute; the "citrus smell" (Gatsby claimed that the smell actually fits the "citrus" description; I don't know why) of the wax was still quite strong, and it reminded Kelvin of the first 3 months in TJC (when both of us were quite into hairstyling wax).

Hmm... the concert started at about 2000 hrs, and most of the items they played are quite familiar, like "Rhythm of the Rain" (they had a very cute way of presenting this song), "Dancing Queen" and J J Lin's "Cao Cao".

As usual, during a typical school performance, members of the audience would cheer for performers on the stage that they knew, so we would naturally cheer for those former AHS students in the orchestra.

Then Kelvin the clown had to shout my name (??!!) amidst all the din.

Never mind.

And I had to make a mention of the guest performers -- Compassvale Primary School Harmoc Orchestra. They're just good!

During the interval, when we were going around looking at pretty girls and fantasising about how famous the 2 of us will be if we were to join the VJ HO (but I know I'll surely be more famous than him)... Kelvin was laughing at my shabby clothing, but I always had a secret weapon -- his GI hair! No matter how cool he is (read: claims to be), he had no hair! Haha!

But seriously, I think I'm still not good at styling my hair. My hairstyle last night... I think it look more comical than anything else.

Sigh.

Sentry surprise!

Today I reported for work as usual.

But just before lunch...

Someone called from the camp guardhouse, looking for me.

OK...

So I was supposed to do afternoon sentry duty.

"No, it wasn't me... for this time slot, the duty list (I have a soft copy of it) showed..."

My name.

??!!

I actually remembered seeing my name a few weeks ago on the list for today, but... didn't remember.

Oh fine, I wasn't too late, though...

But since I came late, the vacancies in the pass exchanging office are full, so I had to stand by this baggage scanning machine from lunch time till 6 p.m..

Wow.

I wasn't so lonely, though... there will be an RP (regimental police) with me at that post, and also, there were Kelvin's heartwarming SMSes. Haha.

And near the end of my duty, along came this RP who was famous for being the bane of all mosquitos... turned out that he killed 2 of them in less than half an hour... one of them was killed while sucking on my arm.

It was right after the whole ordeal when I realized that my left foot hurt from all the standing. It doesn't hurt anymore now. Thanks for your concern.

*Like anyone worries for me.*

Do it with pride

The key to doing things well is to love what you do.

I attended this course about customer contact skills with my colleagues... and basically the stuff we learnt are the basics... like not arguing with the customer... smiling even on the phone because the person on the line can hear it if you're smiling... (I agree that one can "hear" a person's smile. While listening to Jay Chou's "Romancing on the handphone", I swear I could "hear" his smile...) and other stuff on ettiquette...

Yeah we should really try smiling a bit more often these days... we can make each other's day that way.

Also, our instructor said that service people can provide good service if they have pride in their jobs.

After serving in CPC for more than a month, I really came to like my job... I usually have to answer queries about promotion, and it really feels nice when the other party is happy that I managed to answer his question.

Comes to show how important the customer's appreciation is.

Truly Trueno?

Today I went for the Admin Support Assistant course ar Khatib camp... a full day course, hence I had to take off from my office...

The course was OK (now I knew much more about SAF leave scheme) but the toilet there was the thing that turned me off... there were no sitting toilet bowls!

Also, I finally realized how attatched I am to my workplace now... I was thinking of my office and my colleagues throughout the entire duration of my course there.

Oh yes... on my way to the Khatib camp, I think I saw an AE86 Trueno! I don't know... I only caught a glimpse of the back of the car...

FoSed

Sorry for the plagarism Kelvin.

BUT I GOT INTO FoS (NUS FACULTY OF SCIENCE)!!!

Wow... it's, like, getting closer to my dream of becoming a Chem teacher.

If they let me do Chem in the first place.

At least it's not Computing. I'm not really cut out for this field of study... as I always say.

Anyway, I was quite blur and didn't check my e-mail regularly... I missed the submission of registration fee to NTU (they didn't tell me straight after my registration waht... they only told me through e-mail) I was supposed to submit the fee by 4 April... I checked my mail only near the end of April!

Never mind... now that I'm already in NUS...