Personally I never feel too cold anywhere.
On the other hand, I remember the malls in Penang that turned theirs to full blast instead of employing other measures to keep the cool air in. I can still clearly recall how every time I walked past an entrance, there was always a strong cold wind.
Not only did they not use an air door to seal the entrances, I often saw manual glass doors that were just left open.
I know electricity is cheap in Malaysia, but seriously?
A new office chair!
Actually it's not new at all. In fact, I had to spend several minutes dusting it. My family's been using it for storage purposes so it had been buried under a lot of old junk, including brochures and insurance documents dating from 2009.
Hence I had completely forgotten about it; I'm not even sure what it was originally meant for.
It's just some crappy 5-wheeled adjustable office chair that's bound to be terribly warm. To slow down the inevitable putrefying process caused by an accumulation of dried sweat, I've covered it with a large towel that is going to be changed every few days.
The stool was getting really painful on my ass.
So I just noticed I've a significant number of invites on Messenger. Never looked at them before. Apparently they were some kind of spam. I bet if I accepted them all I'll get fcktons of spam messages.
It's easy to tell they're not real. All of the those whose profiles I opened randomly were the same - white females in their mid-20s. Makes no sense, even though they typed personal descriptions on their profiles.
One of the advantages of being an Asian in Asia, I guess.
Also got a number of legit ones from friends who changed their emails. Ignored them as well. I don't use Messenger these days.
Everyone's busy working these days except my mum. This is starting to look good, but I'm not sure.
On the other hand, I'm beginning to see that for most people, the amount of free time they have is inversely proportional to the amount of money in their wallets.
Well, again, except for my mum. Come to think about it, I believe it's because she's so experienced in her line of work that she knows exactly how much she can push to her employees.
Yet again, I'm unsure about this. It could very well be that they're cutting her some slack because everyone working with her is aware that her health hasn't been too good in recent years.
Which leads me to this puzzling question of why they're are so eager to help me get into this business and eventually take over.
Unlike my father, I'm no artist and I've no experience with management. The closest to leadership I've ever tried was being a section leader for a year in NS, which basically isn't much of a leadership position since there were only 4-5 guys under me. Furthermore, unlike my mother, I've no experience with textiles and knitting.
In short, I was never groomed for this. Then again, I gave up on what I was groomed for a few years ago.
Doubt.
It is human to doubt. It is my nature to be cautious.
I can understand why her employees were relieved to hear I was starting to help her. Their jobs were on the line after all. But what about her buyer, the main one? What does she have to lose by losing a supplier when there are quite a few others trying to compete with us, eg my cousin? She hasn't been doing well recently according to the buyer, so she would have jumped at the opportunity.
I cannot figure that out. Are we that honest and reliable?
I don't believe I've mentioned this cousin before. It's not something I like to think about.
Before my father passed away, he wanted her to come over with her husband to help him handle his business while he was being treated for his illness. Little did anyone expect him to die back then, not even himself. Of course he didn't. He was only 50 then and had even survived a stomach surgery two decades before because he had drunk and smoked too much, something all Chinese men in this region who could afford it did.
So after he died, my mum tried to talk them into an agreement in which she would invest the money he left behind while they handled the business. Yea I know what that sounds like, but she hadn't worked for a decade (my father told her to quit her job and be a housewife) and they knew more about the operation of the business than she did. My father, who had taken the advice of his scum-of-the-society elder brother, never trusted my mother with anything related to the management of the business, and didn't even have a joint bank account with her.
I have a rather negative impression of my uncle for very good reasons. He was the reason we had to flee Hong Kong, but that's another story.
Anyway, not only did they refuse the offer, but they also tried to get my mum to sign a letter of authorization that basically would have transferred the business to them.
That was a big deal. The business had a good reputation and had clients among some of the biggest chain stores in Singapore. We no longer do now because my mum couldn't handle the work. Allowing my paternal relatives to take over the business would have been a very bad thing, almost a repeat of history, which is part of the "another story".
Fortunately, my mum handed the letter to the lawyer who handled the intestate business for our family before signing it, who told her that not only should she never do it, but to also renew her business license before it expired, because at that point they could register their business under our name.
The next part I might have mentioned before, but I think I had been referring to her as "my aunt", which she wasn't since she's one of my father's sisters' daughter, making her my cousin.
They didn't leave Singapore after that, probably expecting that my father would strangely leave his business to them. Why would any father do something like that? What sense would that have made? But why else did they try to take over the business, other than greed? I don't believe greed alone had motivated them back then. But greed might have convinced them that the above was true, that he was going to hand the business to them if something happened to him.
What they did after that was to rent an office near hers and went into exactly the same business, probably because those two were the only things they were familiar with in Singapore. At first they were successful, judging from news that she had showered my relatives with expensive gifts and even bought houses back in China.
Moreover, they were never nice or anything to us even when my father was only recently dead. Whether the offer my mum made insulted them I'll likely never know, but what I do know is that for years they were talking behind her back, trying to influence her clients to stop doing business with her. It only backfired, but nevertheless, my mum was unable to handle the amount of work that my father could, so she stopped doing business with the more demanding (and hence more expensive/prestigious) chain stores anyway.
After a couple of years, things apparently went sour for them. According to my paternal great-uncle (my paternal grandfather's brother) and his daughters (also my aunts, I guess), the only paternal relatives on good terms with my family, she wiped out her husband's entire life savings, which probably caused their divorce.
So now both of them are still here and still in the same business, but on a smaller scale. Not that it really matters to me since our business does not work with any of the stores/boutiques close to those that they work with.
But this is why I'm curious. Ours is a rather niche market, so there aren't that many people involved. The buyer could easily just buy from her when my mum stops working. Why would it be a bad thing to her if our business closes down?
Is it because this relationship has some kind of deeper meaning for her? Because she knew both my parents and regard them as personal friends? This is probably the best explanation I have for this but I can't confirm.
Here's an interesting read that touches on a lot of things I've read about but never dwelled on.
I think I'll copy and paste some parts. This is by no means complete though.
Given that Singapore’s poor are amongst the Developed World’s poorest, while living standards are amongst the highest in the world, it is not difficult to see why the Government’s ridiculous salaries are distastefully inflated.
Environment Minister Yaacob Ibrahim said that the government knew the diversion canal was not big enough to take the rainwaters. He claimed that because this sort of “freak events” occur only once every 50 years, there was nothing the government could do about it. The Bukit Timah Canal was constructed in 1972, almost 40 years ago – about time something that happens “once every 50 years” would occur. Additionally, meteorologists reported that ‘this flood comes three years after one of Singapore’s worst floodings in recent history, in December 2006‘.
It is a well-known fact that GIC and Temasek Holdings, Singapore’s two sovereign wealth funds, are both headed by members of the Lee family. Both have reported a ridiculous loss of $41.6 Billion and $39.91 Billion respective and have yet to answer to the real stakeholders – Singaporeans – on how this could have happened.
“When we invest, we invest for the long-term”, Lee Kuan Yew, who heads GIC, said when Temasek Holdings purchased Bank of America shares and then sold it off a few months later, losing between US$2.3 to US$4.6 billion just like that.
Masquerading as an independent paper, the Straits Times, while not necessarily fabricating facts on its own (at least I hope not), blatantly twists them. For example (extracted from here), the media was full of praise of Temasek CEO Ho Ching for earning a few million dollars on paper, but failed to highlight her disastrous investment decisions such as buying the shares of Barclays bank at a high and selling them at a low a few months later.
The Straits Times credited the Singapore Internal Security Department for providing the crucial “intelligence” which led to the capture of escaped terrorist Mas Selamat Kasteri by the Malaysian Special Branch. It turned out that the operation was part of a joint collaboration by the Malaysian, Singapore and Indonesian police and the Singapore ISD actually played only a minor role in the capture of Mas Selamat, but the Straits Times did not mention this to give the public the full picture, choosing rather to mislead Singaporeans into believing that ISD had indeed “redeemed” itself.
On 2 February 1963, just a few months before the elections, Operation Coldstore was launched and more than a hundred people were arrested and detained without trial, including the Secretary-General and other key members of the Barisan Sosialis, the PAP’s biggest threat.
Despite the heavy blow, which was obviously undermined the Barisan Sosialis’ success at the Elections, they won 33.2% of the popular vote and the PAP took 46.9%. What do you think the PAP would have gotten if it hadn’t carried out Operation Coldstore?
At the age of 22, Lim Chin Siong was elected into the Legislative Assembly, and he was so popular among the people that Lee Kuan Yew was prompted to promise that he would be ‘our future Prime Minister‘ (guess who became PM instead?).
However, he soon grew disillusioned with the PAP and left to form the Barisan Sosialis in 1961. Under the pretext of being a communist, he was detained without trial under Operation Coldstore for SIX YEARS until he was forced to renounce politics and went into exile in 1969.
Lee Kuan Yew himself said of him “I liked and respected him for his simple lifestyle and his selflessness. He did not seek financial gain or political glory. He was totally committed to the advancement of his cause“.
The fact that practically no young Singaporean knows about important people like Lim Chin Siong, or even David Marshall, our first Chief Minister, is testament to the spectacular failure of our education system. All they ever learn about our country’s history is LKY and Raffles, LKY and Raffles, LKY and Raffles, and maybe a bit about the War.
As if insensitive MPs are not enough, the PAP is fielding hyper-sensitive wimps behind the shadows with their GRC Trick. Tell me who on earth has ever been afraid of being killed by an aluminium chair slammed against a door?
tldr,
VOTE WISELY
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