Have you tried talking to government servants? I love talking to government servants as much as I love being abused. Walk up to a counter, and if you don’t see an oily-faced, foundation-smothered person on the other end, that person is new. They don’t run beauty contests on recruitment,
Male government servants are completely different. They are usually dressed smartly, a little rotund and carry with them an air of supreme indifference. What causes female government servants to look like a Halloween-party reject brings out the best in male government servants: the experienced ones are assholes, whilst the newer ones will get there eventually.
These functionaries serve only one purpose. No, not the provision of a service to the satisfaction of the customer (they’re in government, not in professional management). That’d be disastrous. Imagine normal people receiving sterling service for the taxes we pay; almost unthinkable! No, our dear government servants serve one clear and distinct purpose: the massive accumulation of printed records (in triplicate) to rival the wildest wet dreams of a karang guni man.
The fault lies with paper. Because paper exists bureaucrats feel the need to fill its white confines with black or technicolor scribbles. Paper exists to encourage petty functionaries to engage in meaningless drivel, all typed in double-spaced paragraphs, photocopied in triplicate and filed in three folios to be delivered to soulless, totally unrelated departments. I try to imagine how officials react upon receiving reports.
Do they blow their wads? I can’t imagine anyone wasting spunk on drawn-out crap that sounds like “the mitigating sections in sub-section 71 of annex 23 of appendix A of the code of practice specifies a deletion of condition 23 if and only if the recommendations of sub-sections 2, 3 and 4 are fully complied with.â€
So if it’s obviously not for one’s masturbatory pleasure, then why insist on recording everything in triplicate, even for the most trivial of details?
Comments (6)
http://licencetospill.net/index.php/2006/09/22/kl-part-2/
i almost choked when i read your dictionary-perfect B. Malaysia ROFLMAO! over here you talk like that and people will know you’re from Singapore - unless you were Chinese and you talked like that (then they’d know you’re trying.. hehehehe)
HAHHAHA!!
*certain* gomen servants la… my mom as a teacher was also gomen servant what… but she was damn on heh. now retired.
the immigration dept cleaned up their act though. and the last time i followed someone to renew his IC at putrajaya, the ppl there quite nice and efficient.
damn slow change (so many years already) but it’s changing..
s.l.o.w.l.y.
yah that’s true - i shouldn’t be generalizing - i mean the ones forced to man counters. they are a completely different breed of human being, i swear. customs, ok, well, in JB, while it’s improved tremendously, it’s only after badawi showed up unannounced during one of their tea breaks (heh…)
but the kind of mad, zombified blurness still exists in many, many departments. anyone tried immigration officials?
i know, even singapore malays speak pasar malay. that’s why i have problems blending in malaysia or singapore. but i fit in very nicely in indonesia. strangely, in school i use Bahasa Malaysia text. but let me tell you, malaysians - whether malays or non-malays speak weird malay. your malaysian accent is so… i don’t know. kampung like? :p
and there’s the charm, mah!!! heh heh heh.. :D