Category: AutoBio

Auto-Biography

The one that didn’t get away

If there’s anything I dislike, it’s being wronged for something I didn’t do, or people trying to pull a fast one on me.

When I was a prefect in Secondary School, we were not allowed to bring food and drinks back to our classrooms. I spotted this guy trying to sneak a drink and I nicely told him to consume the drink in the canteen. He went back to the canteen and I later happened to spot him attempting to leave the canteen by a different route.

Being sufficiently annoyed, I tracked him to his classroom and promptly booked him for that “offence”. He was similarly annoyed that I actually bothered to track him down. Well, I was just doing my job that day…

“Keep to the left!”

I had to utter that phrase countless times while I serving my duties as a prefect in Primary School. There was a system set up in the school staircases where a line was drawn down the center of each flight of steps and all students were supposed to keep to their left so they will not collide with students coming in the opposite direction.

Siesta Time

One of my fond memories as a child was siesta time in kindergarten!

There will come a time every afternoon when the teachers turned off all the lights and all of us little kids will help them to lay out some coloured straw mats (I distinctly remember some of the mats were red and blue) on the floor where we will all lie down and take our naps.

Too bad we all have to outgrow siestas (at least here in Singapore)…

Notebook Post-Mortem

It was sometime back that I went on a tirade against a company (sounds like “aged pee”) for their abysmal quality in notebooks and you might have wondered what I have done with the notebook since then.

Well, even though they acknowledged that there were critical engineering and quality issues with that line of notebooks, they were willing to let me trade it in for about 10% of its value so I could purchase another piece of junk that they pass off for a notebook. Once bitten, twice shy. Twice bitten, go and die.

Rather than throw good money after bad (which is what I told the person), I dismantled the entire notebook in a futile attempt to see if anything else other than the RAM and HDD could be salvaged.

Nearly Pickpocketed

This incident happened a few years back when I went on a holiday to Italy with Esh…

We were done with our shopping and we decided to take the Metro back to our hotel as we thought it will be cheap and safe since there were 4 of us travelling together. We were soon to be proven wrong.

The moment we stepped into the train, a group of gypsies immediately surrounded the 3 girls (Esh was with 2 other girls) and I tried to intervene but the gypsies kept getting in my way. They gypsies then all got off the train at the next station and we quickly took an inventory check. One of the girls (not Esh) lost her wallet, and Esh told me that in the confusion they nearly managed to unzip my waist pouch but she pulled their hands back in time!

My first digicam

I went on a Europe tour during my Uni days and I specially went to buy a digital camera because the tour was expensive and I didn’t want my photos to be screwed up. Bought a FujiFilm FinePix 1440i (or something like that) and 2 16 MB SmartMedia cards that cost me more than $100. Each!

Those were the days that digicams were still unheard of and I was the only one in the tour group wielding one. Quite a few of them were puzzled when they saw me holding the camera away from my face to use the LCD screen instead of using the optical viewfinder.

What’s the alternative to a Table Mountain Tour?

While I was doing my National Service, I had the opportunity to go to South Africa. The exercise went smoothly and we headed for some R&R. One day, we had the choice of either going on a tour to Table Mountain (but we had to pay extra since it was not part of the programme) or explore around on our own.

Well, you wouldn’t believe it but I decided to pass up on the Table Mountain tour because I thought I wouldn’t be interested in seeing a mountain that was like a plateau. However, there was only so much exploring I could do on my own, so with a bunch of guys we decided to catch the latest “blockbuster” that was in the South African cinemas…

G.I. Jane…

Walking to JC

Not sure why, but I thought it would be healthy to walk to and from school everyday even though it took about 20 to 30 minutes. So that was my daily routine for 2 years…

One thing I liked about walking to school in the mornings was the mist from my breath in the cool morning air.

Jumping Tim Tim

In our ritual display of one-upsmanship, there was a bunch of classmates in Secondary School who would stack up chairs and see who could jump over the tallest pile of chairs.

I was not keeping score, but I think the person with the best vertical leap (or best technique) was Tim. He was able to clear higher chair stacks than anyone else!