Category Archives: Life

Pet Peeves

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Yesterday while going home from work, I came across this woman who was quite irritating. It was a bit of a bother for me to stop going to her and get her to stop doing what she was doing. What did she do to irritate me? Read on….

We all have some peeves which irritate the hell out of us. Urban Dictionary defines pet peeves as “an irritating experience caused by others which we cannot control”. So what are my top pet peeves? In no particular order, here are my top 5

People listening to music/watching videos in public transport without headphones
This one is inspired by the lady yesterday. What I don’t understand is why do phone manufacturers give you a pair of headphone when you purchase a phone, if not to use it? There are usually a large number of people in any public transport and to subject them to the music or video you are watching is just not done! I don’t want to listen to what you are watching, in a language I don’t understand

Bad grammar and spelling
This one is also on the top of my list of pet peeves! I really don’t like when people write sentences as if they were still using old-style brink phones of the yesteryear – you know the one where you wrote words like “dis e (this is)” etc. It’s worse when people send you emails and post on forums using this style! My fingers itch to correct it, especially when these days even primary school children carry smart phones…

I am also a big grammar nazi and get super put off when there are grammatical and spelling errors in work I see – what’s the spell check for guys?

People who cut queues
Enough said about this. Even though we live in Singapore – the land of queueing, you still get people who do not understand the concept of one. When waiting for a bus, one person will bring in 10 more friends and there goes the chance of anyone else getting on the bus!

People who don’t know the concept of personal space
Another one which happens mainly in public transport here, but which is an alien concept in India!

Loud phone conversations in public
Aah! Lets all hear about your boss or back-stabbing friend while on the way somewhere! If you need to have a conversation while in public, please do try and tone it down? Actually sometimes, its quite fun actually. You get to hear gossip about someone you don’t know and the journey becomes fun, especially when you don’t have a good book in your hands….

What’s your pet peeve?

2015 Week 19 Update

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This is most likely to be a 90% work post! The week was the usual home-work-home week…

I went ahead and applied for the position that I wrote about last week, even though the chances I don’t get it is higher than I get it!

I did speak to both my ex-boss and current boss about this – my ex-boss was actually excited about this, but again, the position advertised is slightly more senior to what I am doing. But I feel, I have given out signals here – either here or elsewhere, but in 2015, I am hoping for a career breakthrough!

Another thing I want to write about – though not a rant, I want to put this here, so I remember…

There was this senior person I was working for R, whom I was helping a few months back. Now she continued to take my help and I helped her as I was interested in that field – I thought this was the best way to get some knowledge and experience in the field. She completed 100 days at work and had a review with the regional chairperson and I helped her put the deck together. Around this time, my current boss came on board and one day she mentioned that she had spoken to him about me – about what a great job I was doing, what an asset I am to the department and so on. I didn’t ask her to do that and if she did it but didn’t tell me, I would not know and I am ok with this. After her review with the chairperson, she came by to thank me and also mentioned that she told the chairperson that I helped her and what I great job I was doing. There were other regional leaders on the review, along with her boss and this has been told in front of everyone. Then the chairperson said to tell all this to my current boss and she laughed and said she already did that.

Now last week, when I pitched my candidature to my boss, I mentioned this – when I mentioned that everyone whom I work with always give me great reviews – and I mentioned R saying that she has spoken to him about me. My boss had this real blank look on his face and it looked like R has not spoken to him at all! I felt a bit funny and we laughed it saying maybe she will do that in the near future.

Now I am wondering why R did this? I didn’t go and ask her for the endorsement, but if she didn’t do that, why tell me she did it? I was going to ask her to be a referee for me when I start going for interviews as she is local, but now I may have to rethink this.

Ok, not-rant over! Have a great Monday and an awesome week…

Beat the heat…..the Singapore way….

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Most days the one consistent conversation you are bound to have these days in Singapore is about the weather! We are currently obsessed with it – it’s too hot, everyone says all the time.

The late Mr. Lee Kwan Yew, Singapore’s first Prime Minister post-independence once famously declared air-conditioning to be the greatest invention of the 20th century.
Temperatures consistently hover around the mid-thirties (in Celsius, or around the nineties in Fahrenheit) with high humidity and it’s no wonder that people staying in this sunny island feel the heat….

This is probably how hell feels like, I thought this morning on the way to work. Waking up, drenched in sweat, in spite of sleeping in an air-conditioned room, the moment you come out from a bath, you are drenched with sweat. Getting to work is a pointless exercise as by the time you reach your air-conditioned office, all the time and effort you took to get ready to come to work has come to naught!

With most places in Singapore being air-conditioned, when you actually go to the great outdoors aka the non-air-conditioned spaces, the heat really hits you and completely saps your energy. Without this, you are more likely than to wilt in the heat instead of actually doing any work.

I dream of a time when the whole of Singapore is covered by a temperature controlled dome and we live in an ideal climate! Far-fetched perhaps, but knowing Singapore, this may not be something of out a sci-fi movie, but a reality decades down the line.

In researching for this post, I asked GG & BB earlier this morning if they felt the heat in school. For the sake of perspective, they study in non-air-conditioned classrooms and have around 30 minutes of recess daily (more if they stay back in school after lunch, in which case recess including lunch time will be around 75 minutes) and another 30 minutes of PE in school daily. Both BB & GG were actually quite nonchalant about the heat and said it didn’t bother them one bit while they were in school. Is this the resilience of the young where they seem impervious to heat? Or maybe it’s just me getting old…..

2015 Week 18 Update

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Another humdrum week!

But the next one could be a one with excitement…While typing this post, I was also checking my work email and saw the position that E had mentioned some time back being posted. Only thing I was told it was a manager position, but now has been posted as a senior manager position. I checked the job scope and I am currently doing around 70% of it already. I have already written to the recruiter to say I am interested, and what the next steps are. I am also going to speak to my new boss about this. This is the make-or-break decision. If all goes well, I will be here in this company, doing something I enjoy doing and getting well paid for it with a position I am proud to call my own. If I am not considered for this position, then I am going to start my new job search aggressively. Either way, I have decided this will be my breakout year!

Actually I am very nervous now…..Please pray for me and hope things go the way I want them to go….

Happy Monday people! May this week be great for you….

Why I blog the way I do

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I keep thinking of this every once in a while. I blog anonymously and so none of my readers know who I am in real life. I share snippets from my life, my work and about my children regularly and I rant here quite often about work.

Sometimes when I browse blogs and see the blog author identified in the blog with pictures of their children, I do have a slight twinge of doubt of whether the course I have taken while blogging is correct or wrong? Whether putting up pictures of myself  and my family will pull more traffic to my blog. That’s when I stop, pause and wait till this feeling goes away. I choose to blog anonymously for a reason and everyday what I see online reaffirms that this choice has been a correct one.

I poke around on Dayre, a microblogging site, quite often and recently a blogger there, an ex-Singapore Airlines stewardess wrote her thoughts on the airline, complete with photos of herself in uniform. The post was a good one, well-intended and with the aim of actually showing what the actual work of an airline stewardess is all about – warts and all. It gave all those a greater appreciation of what they did and personally I have decided to be nicer to them when travelling. Anyway, coming back to the point of this post, someone decided her post was very good and shared it on Facebook and so her post went viral in Singapore! She got flak from everyone who felt she had a good, cushy and glamourous life where she could travel the world and get paid for it while they toilet at jobs not so fun…

This incident is exactly why I don’t want to reveal too many details about myself and my family. When I started blogging years ago, the technology available these days was non-existent. Today, it’s quite easy to find out about a person based on simple details. By putting my children’s lives in the internet where nothing really gets deleted, may pressure them in the future. This way, they start their digital lives on a clean slate.

One thing though about all this anon blogging thing is that no one, and I really mean no one who is a part of my life knows about this blog – I can’t publicise this on any of my social media platforms or even tell friends that I blog. Also since both my blogs are linked, I can’t talk about my book blog, which is a bummer

This post is probably more of a ramble than making pure sense, but I’d love to hear what you think about this….