Anecdotes of my passing...

I always enjoy my conversations with taxi drivers. From the land where kingdoms unite to my tanah tumpah darah, I’ve seen the gamut of topics.

The topics vary from personal anecdotes, politics (a pet topic with Malaysian taxis), food, economy, finance, and entertainment even.

For purposes of this post, I will confine it to my Malaysian experience. Prior to my becoming a pupil, fortunately or not, I’ve had little experience with taxis. (In hindsight, I think rather fortunately. I am beginning to despise the way they conduct their services.)

I take the taxis quite frequently these days. It gives me breathing space while I rush from X to Y and Z (these variables being the laugh-house in Duta, Dante’s Paradise and Mark Antony wannabes).

For people in the service industry, the taxi drivers are a very opinionated lot. And more often than not they’re very intelligent and sadly not much credit is being given to them for being ambassadors of the country. They are also a good gauge of how civilised a country is. They will surely find jobs being a politician or lawyer here if the stress of driving a car ever gets to them. While I find this to be refreshing and progressive for our society, it’s the bad lot of them that really gets to me. Of late, these taxi drivers are painting a very bad picture of our country.

What bad eggs do you mean? It’s the lot of them that refuses to take passengers to certain “unprofitable” areas, the ones that refuse to use the meter and the cursed ones that commit crimes. I am lucky I have not met the last category though I am beginning to feel that the first and second are merely subset of the third category.

Semantics aside, I do not understand why the passengers are being literally taken for a ride (pun and all) by their absolutely unreasonable and despotic, I might add, conduct. Sure, I get the logic of not wanting to take passengers to the less-profitable-than-usual places, but if every single taxi thinks the same way, why not just have the taxis function like an LRT ferrying passengers from say KLCC to KLSentral and go nowhere else. This is ridiculous. Cab-rank rule does not exist! (Not that it ever did) The Union/government should do something about this. The drivers tried explaining to me about how they have to pay their daily rents before they may count their profits. Big companies get the licence in bulk and then they “sub-let” their licences to the various individuals. I think there should be an NGO similar to the Bar Council or something of the same to properly address the grouses and problems these individuals are facing. The customers are the ones left taking the brunt of this joke of a system.

Lest I forget, I also totally hate the drivers who charge a flat rate quotation whenever you tell to take you to such and such a place. Reasons for this may be like the above, where the place is not so profitable, or that they’re just eager to pull a fast one on desperate passengers. Given a choice, no one would take them but I pity those who are desperate. Especially the foreigners, rich and poor tourists alike. Immigrants (legal or otherwise) too!

Let me not even go to the final category; taxi drivers who commit crimes like rape and robbery. I’ll have them flogged alive and then fed to the crocodiles.

I have had foreign friends who complain about the taxis here. Heck, I complain about them. They should start making taxi jokes soon. Now I just need to start packing a Glock before I hail any taxis here.

If you stare at something, it works faster. Now how true is this proposition? I know it is not novel but it just suddenly crossed my mind. There definitely seems to be some connection, at least psychologically, that when we stare/look at something, it will be done faster.

Of course, I am not talking in the context of your boss staring you down while you complete his latest order or when your mom looks at you while you finish eating those vegetables.

Instead, I’m referring to inanimate objects such as looking at a download bar while a file downloads, a kettle boiling, a bus/taxi from yonder, the traffic lights...i think you get the general idea.

I highly suspect that you suffer from this as well, or rather have done this at some points of your life, if not your entire life. Logically, we may or may not realise that looking at it will not make it work/move faster. Yet, we still do it. Why so? Were we conditioned to do as such so that we may be ready for the eventual outcome? To illustrate, the act of staring at the red lights on a traffic light is in actual effect our body priming for the eventual green light. So that we may be ready to move.

I am not saying that it is true, but I am just thinking out loud. I have wondered at times but never really thought deeply about it enough.

Another reason that I have conceived (during my usual stare at the sky/etc contemplative moments) is that we do it because we do not want to think about other commitments/responsibilities. Example, staring at the kettle for it to boil so that we may cook our cup noodles. We do not want to think/look at anything else because our mind is so preoccupied with the thought of cooking the cup noodles, eating it. In a similar vein, it may also be alternatively construed to be focusing on something when in reality we should focus on something else. Such as waiting for your mp3 files to download finish, you could go on and finish a paragraph or two (or maybe more since we are slaves to Internet Monopoly in the Golden Chersones) but instead you feel more inclined to look at the download bar. Avoiding and procrastinating in a sense. Isn’t it?

Then there is the Law of Attraction. Thinking of the green light, making effort towards achieving that green light, visualising yourself moving forward at the blink of the said light, feet already on pedal, gears in D... Does it really make the green light come quicker? Aren’t the lights already pre-programmed to come on after a certain period of time?

Having said and done all, the fact that I’m writing this is probably a means of escaping the work that I am supposed to be doing. Oh well. I better get back to it. Just think about it. Will staring at my work make it finish it a lot faster?

In a small town in India, a person decided to open up his Bar business, which was right opposite to the Temple. The Temple & its congregation started a campaign to block the Bar from opening with petitions and prayed daily against his business.

Work progressed. However, when it was almost complete and was about to open a few days later, a strong lightning struck the Bar and it was burnt to the ground.

The temple folks were rather smug in their outlook after that, till the Bar owner sued the Temple authorities on the grounds that the Temple through its congregation & prayers was ultimately responsible for the demise of his bar shop, either through direct or indirect actions or means.