it was two years since i first joined this project unit, and this is the first time that i felt inclined to write again.

two years of which consultants come and go, and i had 3 projects under my belt, 2 years of which was the longest year of my life.

2 years ago, i never knew what i was getting into, but we ate challenges for breakfast. seriously. there was a time where i was kneeling on the floor, at the back of a main distribution frame, inside a dark local exchange room, sorting papers with tears of frustration dripping on them. that was 3 month after i joined the team, at the time, i thought that that moment will probably be the lowest moment in my life. until i learnt that, i have no inkling of what lowest moment really meant.

but there wasn't any moment that i regretted joining the team, cuz it was here that i had most fun, most interesting problems and met good people.

yesterday, i got lambasted. slaughtered alive. in a room full of gms & vps and where i was the only minion sorry enough to have stood up and presented progress and raised actual issues. received bullets and endured bulletholes. i was ripped open and sewed back in the same instance. and i am sure that the waves of expression flashing on my face does not help the cause. i am sure disgust and annoyance can be pretty transparent. tried to fight back and explain the rationale, but the ripple effect was already triggered. people sways. away from anyone with the muck thrown in the face. hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? in this case, some of the heads are woman, in a roomful of men, they are finally the only one talking. and screaming. and hurling insults. one guy joined the furor. but was soon outnumbered. his vocal frequency was too low, but the vocabularies he chose burned through. i blinked. and blinked. and 2 years worth of work went down the drain. and effectively, whatever passion i had was stomped out then and there and i stood there an empty shell of thoughts.

today, i am disillusioned. change does not come without hard work. but it takes seconds for a roomful of emotional idiots to undo that change. and there will always, always be fools in big leather chairs, with big hair, sitting high up and away from reality that will run the show.

and basically, i don't have any more new episodes of anything to watch. and i need something to numb my head. so today, for the first time in months, i took up a book to read. the delightful world of dead people and post mortems by patricia cornwell.

itchiness forecast
mom's getting a bit restless nowadays. especially if she called at night around 8-ish and i'm still at the office.
u could hear the thick hmmphh resonating through amplified from one celcom basestation to the other all the way from kota tinggi.
well if that was for me than the hmmph probably is thicker for eha cuz she practically sleeps at the hospital so i guess i was the lower bound in the equation.
looking at previous trend this itchy behaviour of hers is seasonal and can be usually forecasted to become more temperamental towards the end of year where wedding bells are ringing loud n fast. i can rightfully predict then, the hmmph is gathering momentum towards a full blast lecture storm come raya.

shoddy affair

oh for fucks sake lord help me what kind of shit are you giving me? dont' you have any artistic inclination at all?

- well i dare say no one's ever complained about my slides before but i guess the level of shittiness have a wide range of variablity and by usual standards i usually ranked above average, but since you guys introduced a whole new meaning to absurdity and actually rank slides by levels of sexiness, i guess we need to realign our measures and you need to reset your expectations by reducing the notch a few exponents down.
(nope. i dindt say it out loud i just blinked and swallowed)

following gov's new bband initiative target of x% bla bla we can save a y million if your company do a,b &c. that's a fuckload of savings we can give for you for just paying an extra z million for hiring us.

guys..can i know how u came by the figure x, y and z?

it's a system called POMA. u never heard of it?

err. not really. whassat?

those are numbers Pulled Outta My Ass.

word by word quote, i'm now living in a colorful dictionary world.


other parts of the food chain

am now looking at the light at the end of the tunnel. blinding.
the light of freedom. twoo weeekkkksss to gooooo!!!

i need to hash out some numbers on str*myx fault resolution today.oh the mind numbing joy of number crunching. so i was thinking what the heck anything's better than being in a cooped up room with a bunch of annoying workaholics.

so anyway there i was voluntarily spending the day at the v*ds call center..listening to as much calls as i can without resorting to suicide.
and it is not an experience that i would wish on my meanest enemy.
it's just pure torture
if you think your job sux then please, by all possible means, even if you have to knock out the security guard out cold, just barge past him and spend a few hours at the str*myx call center.
that's where you will find out that your job is a bed of roses compared to theirs.
forget being a poor farmer or a fisherman or a bricklayer. at least they are not being mentally tortured, having their physcological health shredded to pieces while being cemented to their chair the whole day, with zero possiblities of an escape route.

i was there with another colleague.. and before long both of us were already a depressed pair. after listening to a painful 20 minutes of one of the agent trying to help a customer locate 'control panel' ..and another 10 minutes of a thoroughly absurd explanation on 'ping is not a color' that colleague simply walks out to the nearest exit. i stayed on to hear a completely racist caller demanding not to have a 'malay male' handling his calls, because, according to his years of living experience, an agent who fits the category of being both Malay and Male, will tell him that his internet problem is due to CKC cable problem and hence will refuse to help him with his connection issues. This hyphothesis is apprently justified by the fact that his brother is a computer engineer, and therefore we shouldn't judge his intelect on the fact that they shared the same gene pool. And so the conversation is basically littered by his intelligent retort of 'you need to troubleshoot me!' every few minutes or so. I know the caller is an Indian based on the accent, but I reserve any further comment on this as not to sink down to the same racist level of this idiot.


But that, was the point where I have to go out to take a breather to preserve my sanity.
and suddenly.. i felt like i have the most wonderful job in the world..
well, at least for 5 brief minutes...that was my chain of thoughts. that.. and imagining future technologies will have IVRs that allow agents to poke the eyes of computer illiterate (and racist) callers.just for the general merriment of all call center agents in the world.

found out the extend of my temper today.
used to thought that i have an emotional range of a teaspoon, you know, like the usual happy>sad>mad cycle with a slight variation of the happy portion, being either really happy or just indifferent. used to be able to contain my anger and deal with things reasonably because i have world record endurance(says me). let's just say that i used to rather err on the side of pleasing people.

i dint know i that i had the ability to go scathingly hopping mad and give no regards people around me, spew out curses to the unsuspecting casualties (most of the time they deserve it) and just plain make myself a radioactive speciment. don't come near without protective space suits.

let's just say that stress, and f*cking annoying consultants just brought out the worse in me. and let's just hope that the habit of hissing at every innocent passersby in the discussion that displays the slightest sign of idiocy will die down as this project ends.

hisss..

i'm now no longer in my comfort zone. the new assignment's a strange territory and we are all crazily trying to grasp a foothold. it was nevertheless fun to explore unchartered waters.. but if the consultant frowned at me again and blurt out that condescending this-is-easy-math talk i sure as hell will gut out his beer belly belly.

and because the daily traffic to work is driving me nuts, in a crazy bid to beat it i am now in a dark office at 6.20 am. totally empty highways and i could just lalala pick my own parking lot.take that, traffic! and now all i have to do is wait 2 more hours for the others to arrive.

for some reason or other.. 5 or so stray cats will insist on sleeping under my car. ev'ry freakin night, rain or shine.
it doesn't matter how many times i chased em out yelling 'bad kittyyy baddd bad kittyy' ( cat chasing lesson by Saamia) they'll still come back and sleep and sometimes poop within the compounds.
maybe my car tyres smelled like fish.

well yeah. i became a year older. felt like time's zooming too fast as usual.
glad to receive ev'one's wishes.. guess i haven't become invisible. yet.

and in a few days time.. will be another year for all of us.
to me this year was the best year of my life, and i am glad i took the chance.
hoping the upcoming year will be a better one.
at the moment..my shopping list is longer than my new year's resolution list, as there's zilch on that list compared to the 20 or so must buy item of 2010.

at the moment tho..i'm just pretty bored.

owh yeah..what do u do if a 5 yrs old crush came crashing back? =P

orang minyak - ep1

+kaklong, nanti makt*m passkan barang kat budak tu..adela alasan pgi jumpe die.
- uhh takpe la time kasih je la. sy baru start keje nih..bz sket.
+ pegi je la. sblm pegi tu bli minyak aura jenama *toot* ni dulu. baru pgi jumpa.
- ape tu? aura? produk mawi ke
+ bukan.yang ni special. satu kampung dah pakai. boleh membuatkan orang sayang kita. boleh membuatkan orang tertarik nak bekenalan.
- owh. susuk ke?
+ bukan.minyak..
- minyak pengasih?
+ bukan.. ini aura.carikla online. boleh beli online.

*** advanced betul orang kampung skarang.

orang minyak - ep2
reading the online advert..
"berupaya menyebabkan diri anda lebih disayangi, memberi tenaga positive dan memotivasikan diri, boleh memutihkan kulit"

*** gile multitasking minyak ni. susahla dr fadzilah kamsah nak carik makan.

orang minyak - ep3

+ kaklong..macamana dah jumpe ke budak tu
- tak la..sy bz.
+ ingat.. kalau jumpe dan tak suka, tak boleh kata tak suka. kita jangan reject, biar die yang reject. nanti ape pulak orang kata.
- owh. kalau die tak reject?
+ rasenye die reject kot.

*** oh.sungguh motivational.


the matchmaking virus has now spread to my aunties. owh the mental torture.
if buying the minyak aura will get my aunt(s) to leave me alone, someone please pour me a bucketful. who knows. maybe it'll gimme fairer skin too.duh.

moved! yeah. although the rent is a pain in the ass and the travel time to work is now 30 mins on normal mornings, not having to face other people on my own sweet time is heavenly. yay. now i need someone who can loan me a hammer, some nails and a screwdriver. erm. and maybe a maid. a lengchai preferably.

what do you do when a person tries to hide all trace of your existence?

and i don't mean the one on TV, the one with that guy from Angel.

the general rule of having housemates would be first and foremost, reduce irritation to the lowest possible level. one shouldn't irritate the other based on what one's definition of irritating action could be.

shrieking at 1 in the morning, belting out a song and getting the lyrics wrong should be carved permanently, in blood, into that Irritating Actions list. more so if the action will wake up the rest of the household. more so if the shrieking only consists of the same line, over and over, designed to purposely torture a half awake, half in Korea mind.

biar putih tuuuuuuulaaaaaaaang..||PAUSE||. biar putih tuuuuulaaaaaannggg.

or maybe.. the general rule of having housemates should be one shouldn't be having housemates in the first place.
especially if one is a well known hermit to begin with.

There’s this account executive who used to be from Sales who came up to my place to exclaim in a high pitch voice so as not to let anyone in the vicinity miss what she’s about to proclaim, who blurted out that I’ve grown fatter; and in a candid matter, specifically pointed out the obvious fat proportion increase on my face and my butt. So much for the ‘disappear for one year’ theory.

i always knew cheeps blog will be blocked by the authorities one day.
but i always thot it'll be due to illicit contents. not due to advertising.
dude. go n buy the IT guys or nasrang bananas .or something.

after a few hundred days of deliberate slobbing with the occasional reading to keep the neurons alive.. i stepped foot on menara tm. not expecting any changes. except maybe hoping they'd changed San Francissco coffee to Dominoes Pizza. or just Mc D. overpriced coffees are just not the in thing anymore. and the first thing i saw was jin notti. and mawi's face. i actually stood in front of that poster.. trying to fathom notti. and the fact that mawi's face is welcoming people to menara tm, and why we are helping to alert the masses on his attempt at acting. and then i saw the phrase 'jgn naughty-naughty'. owh..the notti jigsaws falls to places. and then i remembered cheeps also approved of mawi.. somewhere along the reasoning that he can sell stuffs cuz he's a people's person. i meant mawi. not cheeps. and another jigsaw piece fits the puzzle. the Mamees sale must've been record breaking.

there was a girl crying next to the stall i'm using in the ladies. it was a heart wrenching, continuous kind of sobbing that makes me felt so uneasy and depressed at the same time. so i attempted a speedy exit. only to collide with her in our haste to speed to the mirrored wall. and continued her sobbing next to me. i tried to resume my escape route.. but she asked for tissue. her face was the absolute picasso. streaks of blacks and blues. the art of semi waterproof eye makeup. she should've used Clinique. it must be a guy problem. if it's an office problem she would've cried in front of her boss wouldn't she. i never asked.. but i heard a positively loaded barfing sound as i went out.
maybe it's not a guy. maybe she just weighed herself. it was post-lunch hour time after all.

owh.. and although kak ina and cheeps adamantly disagreed.. people kept telling me i am thinner now. and taller. somehow. although i wore the same 3" heels that i wore before i left.. and although i weighed practically the same as one year before .. i'd rather believe what people told me. someone once said believing will make things happen. i think i read it in The Secret.
i should've told the sobbing girl to just stay away from her friends for one year.. and she'll come back thinner. barfing into public sinks isn't going to work. unless she can selectively barf out fat layers.

i'm like.. surfing the net mindlessly like all homeless person would do when they are dead bored with nowhere to go but the lab. i'm also in grave danger of posting one entry per hour if i can't find anything better to do with my mind anytime soon.
and so i turned to the universal mind numbing solution. Nope they don't have the Astro here.
just facebook.

and found out that i have hundreds of notification/requests.. half of which are farmers wannabe on Farmville, requesting to be neighbours and whatnots. and the rest are invitations to the usual idiot quizzes in the line of 'apa maksud personaliti di sebalik kuih raya kegemaran anda' or 'ramal nasib anda bersama Pak Nujum'. well yeah...it defies my intelligence as to why anyone would want to find a link between their hard found personalities and Almond London, other than finding out they might be potentially diabetic, but people do go bonkers on facebook don't they?

Last month an 18 yrs old teenager here was arrested for bullying a schoolmate on fb. read here.
and we've all read about the numerous divorces and fights caused by fb.
and who haven't heard about the rumours about fb being owned and monitored by the CIA.
Earlier this month, the fb team announced that if fb were a country, it'll be the third largest in the world, with 300 million active users, homeless or otherwise.

my point being, fb is now such a commanding presence in our lives, at par with google and wiki, only worse, cuz it causes large scale addictions with brain rot possiblities as the side effects. and if almost one third of the world are puzzling through these biscuit personality quizes as well, it's no wonder i'm hearing the aliens cackling with mirth everynight..

now excuse me while i accept a Baju Raya request...

Show all

11.01 pm.. alone in my lab..bidding goodbye to the stuffs that has been an excellent companion to me this past year. good listeners and never disagrees with me on any occasion. the PCs, the smartphones, the sensors, large screen monitors.. i'm gonna miss all of you. not surprisingly, no living things will miss me, nor i them.

will be staying here all night until the flight home tomorrow..playing diner dash and doing the occasional soul searching when i get bored of serving tables...all the while wondering where did the Time went to..

If Time is a living thing.. it'll probably be chilling out at Greenwich.. it's like the perfect Time home. The clocks and time gadgets there, from ancient sun clock to digital grandfather clocks, it could make any Sylar a tinkering happy man.

The Greenwich Meridian Line.. taken at the Royal Observatory,
Greenwich 0º0"0'

what are the odds that a mutated apple is found, halved with different colors in a perfectly symmetrical line? 2 days ago it was found by a 72 years old fruit grower in Devon, and it was pretty fascinating to me. the first thing to pop in my mind was.. what about the taste? would you be able to taste both the sweet red apple, and the slightly sourer green apple, all in one fruit?
well they say.. just like the original apple, the red side will taste sweeter as it has seen more sunshine during its growth..

and the odds of getting this xman apple.. is one in a million...

and what are the odds of me getting an award for masters with distinction? well that too.. is about one half of a million chance..like the odds of getting a purple striped apple.
but i seemed to be lucky these days.
Well dad..now you can't say that all I do here is getting on and off trains and flights ..
some useful stuffs do get stuck in my head at one point or another..somehow..

had an interesting conversation with a fellow alien watcher a while back.
nope.not about feet, enticing or otherwise.
we were killing time with reruns of South Park, and suddenly felt like Kyle's immortality is getting pretty irritating. void of other distractions and determined not to do our actual job,
we talked.
and the theory of evolution crept up. having been brought up in a typical English household.. he was fed the full package of storks and babies, santas and tooth fairies..and of course, the theory of evolving apes. as much as we both agreed that all Brits are born bonkers, it had always makes him uncomfortable to know that every members of his family believes that they came from apes.

Given the alternative, he'd rather believe that Jesus blows Adam and Eve from his nostrils. Or the Big Bang blows up some random planet, sending alien sperms and ovums flying over to Earth, mating on the way... and Adam was actually a green man with feelers on his head.

Told him the Muslim's version of evolution, where the Quran describes all living things are made of water, devils from fire, and the human, being a special case, a creation with soul and knowledge, was made from clay..and hence human have a fundamental attachment to the Earth.
He seems to like this explanation better, even if its for no other reason than this version of evolution theory does not include upgrading him from an ape. or storks. or flying sperms.

-oh dear, then Pinocchio was actually a factory defect item wasn't he?
*Pinocchio wasn't clay u idiot. he was just a self pitying bit of wood with a Brit's nose.
-but why apes though? why not bears? or pandas..
*Charles Darwin was a Brit. They go bonkers for apes, Katie Price and Harry Potter.

"nuclear explosion"

"STOP FOLLOWING ME!"

"somewhere, something went terribly wrong"

-can u show me again how to read those upstream power readings?
*uh huh.ok.
- . . . .can i ask u something embarassing?
* uh huh. yeah.
- can i see your feet?
* u huh.. ok.
- can u take off your socks?
* uhh?
- can i see the sole of your feet?
* uuh?? the what?
- and i also need to hold it..and test between your toes if you are ticklish.
* owh.. i see. well i'm not ticklish..no need to test it.
- can i give u a foot rub then?
* owh geez. it's ok i don't need one.
- well for some reason your foot entice me so i need to hold it.
* ....
- ....
- now, about that power reading..
* uhuh..

and that's a weird conversation to have while monitoring radio frequencies in a satellite farm ain't it.

road trips aside, the raya i had this year was an all together a super miserable affair.
not that i missed the balik kampung trips that usually involves 8 sugar high kids using high pitched bickering in various frequencies while attempting murder to each other out of boredom, stuck in a space limited van for an excruciating 5 hours drive.And i most certainly did not miss the golden bonanza question that every relatives will valiantly try to ask,subtly or out right, of the estimate timeline of the year that i will successfully managed to hoodwink a decent, unsuspecting guy into the family. (to which the template answer will be, wonbin is still busy acting and have a fully booked calendar..)

well it's all generally cuz of people..or thereby lack of. since i always tried my damdenest to steer away from the crowd..i generally get what i wished for , like the grinch who hates christmas, minus the snow and egg nogs. worked the night before, and the night after..and basically just didn't see any of my friends for the whole week of raya. because of work, because i didn't feel like it, because i was just a miserable excuse of a raya grinch who had the conscience not to go raining on anyone's parade. and that parade being the super excited students in their flowing, colorful baju kurungs whipped silly in all directions, completely useless against the gale of autumn winds.

and i spent the week just following my whims. went shopping, went roadtripping everywhere from the peak of the Wales mountain to Greenwhich's main meridian line, only to feel the same indifference. i guess it's time i seek the company of people once again.
well, maybe not nosey relatives just yet. just those 7 high pitched brats.