I don’t know about you guys, but I think the idea of creating that High Performance School (HPS) list by the Malaysian government sucks. Isn’t that a form of discrimination? You identify who’s awesome, and give them incentives or shit like that, while the under-performers get nothing. It sends the wrong message to the young, don’t you guys think? That it is ok to stereotype, to discriminate, to discern who’s strong and who’s weak and give them preferential treatment.

Shouldn’t our children be taught how to treat everyone equal? How to help the needy? Sure enough, many think that the list and 1 million bucks would serve as a motivating factor for schools to work harder to get into the goddamn list. No doubt that the idea could probably work on some level… but in a bigger picture, I think this could cause a negative effect in the long term. For example, when a school fails to make into the list after putting enough effort to improve, it could also seriously jeopardize the morale of everyone involved. Not to mention the possibility of making the pupils feel inferior for being in a non-listed school. Parents on the other hand, will be more inclined to send/transfer their children to a listed school (kiasu mentality). The teaching staffs will also suffer some form of demotivation.

You see, you only mend the roof if it’s leaking. You don’t mend a perfectly good and non-leaking roof. It’ll be a waste of effort. Same thing applies, if those schools in the list are already that good, why would they need the 1 million bucks to enhance themselves? Shouldn’t the money go to those that needed the money most? I remember seeing headlines in the paper about schools asking for funds to fix their cracked walls, damaged desks/chairs, etc. Even my school once had to ask for donations from the alumni to renovate its facilities because it had gone to the stage of being dangerous to the students. How about that? I’m sure there are even more schools out there (esp the rural ones) that could use a little help to upgrade something.

Instead, I think the government should create an opposite list. Top under-performing schools of the year. Make it top 10 for each state. Then inject some PhD manpower into the schools as their personal consultant (since we have so many of those ‘meritus-meritus’), to review what went wrong and change the way they do things. Enforce KPI for the teachers and review their performance. Or perhaps to make things simpler, eat the humble pie and rope in some help from other top countries like Singapore or Australia. Ask them how do they do it. Pay them 200 trucks of sand for a contract to uplift our standard or whatever (our sand is pretty much useless to us anyway if our people are stupid and incompetent).

I’m just a stinking engineer and this is what I can come up with. I’m sure there are enough genius around to be able to come up with something even better. That HPS idea? That is so amateur. It’ll get us to nowhere.

I’ve always fascinated with the idea of being an orphan. On my way home from work today, I expressed to my wife how envious I am with being an orphan – for the orphan, though lonely he might be, has all the advantages set throughout his life.

He won’t have to worry about anyone judging him on what he does. He won’t have a cousin who always does better than he can ever do, and no one’s going to compare him against anyone. He won’t have any sibling whom he’d have squabbles with, and get hurt in the process. He won’t have to see his parents be in the worst possible shape when they get sick and he definitely won’t have to see them die one day. No relatives to badger him, and no blood relation obligations.

He’s all liberated and is set to live his life the way he wants it to be. He gets the whole blank canvas for himself to paint the colors with. It’s all about being him. But the only downside about being the Orphan is probably, loneliness. Can be quite a bitch. But then, loneliness isn’t much of a big problem if you were to compare that to the stuff I mentioned above. For loneliness, we have our friends, lovers and PS3 to alleviate the pain. It’s still a better trade off than the scum and filth we humans have to contend with every second of our awakening moment. I’d trade all my troubles with loneliness, anytime.

Speaking of having babies, I don’t fucking understand why do people get the compulsion to ask if we’re going to have another child, as if having children is like a scheduled product launch from a fucking factory. If my wife and I are going to have another child, then wouldn’t they see my kid already? And why does it even matter to them? Fucking hell.

The truth is, it’s all about the budget. Life in the 21st century, does not actually warrant us to have multiple children unless one is making a lot of money. Some of you may not agree with me (and fuck you), but it’s true. At least from my perspective. Allow me to convince you :

First of all, we need to find out, how exactly much does it take to raise a child? There’s no definite answer to that but, we can work out a gross amount based on my daughter. But before that, a disclaimer – I do not intend to raise my daughter to become a lame-ass social garbage, so this calculation is based on an assumption that we’re dumping in a considerable amount of money, in our best ability, to give her a good quality of life.

Alright, first of all – the milk feed. We give her the best milk there is. Abbott’s Pediasure something something. A can costs about 105 bucks (at a discount), and would last approximately 2 weeks (she took more when she was younger). That’s about RM210 per month.

Solid food. She consumes porridge cooked with meat broth. Once a day at home. Twice in the weekends. I don’t exactly know how much it costs per meal but, let’s throw in RM100 as an optimistic figure.

Daycare. She goes to a daycare center so that my wife and I can go to work. The daycare makes sure she gets fed everyday, and also learn how to read/write there. It costs us RM450 per month, and another RM150 per semester, and once-a-year-each concert/excursion/holiday-camp events (which I’m not going to include). Roughly works to about RM475 a month.

Clothes and toys, we took a lot of used stuff from relatives and friends. Medical covered by our company (first child only). And miscellaneous. But still, we factor in about RM50 (this shall include – vitamins, pro biotics, orders at restaurants, stationery, books, foot wears, kiddy rides, birthday expenditure, etc.)

RM210 + RM100 + RM475 + RM50 = RM835. Give or take 10%. You ask any parent, this is actually not a very realistic figure because this figure does not include a lot of things like vacations, road trips, the amount of electricity it takes to keep the little human happy, conveniences to keep him/her clean, etc. The real figure could come close to RM1k (even more as the kid grows). But hell, for simplicity’s sake, let’s take the figure as it is.

We paid about RM4k for her vertical take off from her mommy’s womb (gonna be less though, if your child comes out the conventional way). So in all, that works to be like, a 10% downpayment for a Perodua Viva, and a monthly installment of about RM835. Not for 4 or 5 years, but for about 20 years (or until she finds a self sustaining job), and the amount is bound to steeply increase in the future (money to go bowling, movies, other co-curricular activities, etc).

Now, ask yourself, how many of THAT KIND OF Perodua Vivas can you afford, without the need of doing a drastic cost cutting measure at the expense of your child(s)’ well being, on top of what you’re already paying – mortgage, your real car(s), bills, fuel, food, parental support and what-nots. If your answer is more than 1, and still confident about being able to cough up that big lump sum of college fund for all of them, with your retirement fund still intact, then congratulations rich man. You rock.

(For the record: my wife and I are not having more than 1 child due to a few reasons, not only this).

My colleagues and I have been discussing about someone in Company X who climbed the corporate ladder too damn fast. Then I brought up something which I have been believing all these while – sucking up the bosses gives one an unfair advantage.

I think I’ve blogged about this before. You can read it here.

As a conclusion – a person’s prospect in a modern, decent sized corporation as it appears, does not solely depend on the person’s competency to work. It has to be more than that. Like, enhancing his/her relationship with his/her superior. The most popular method is to play golf. You play golf with your boss, he gets to know you better. You’d get all the time to be with him, alone. You get to be creative in front of him and show him what a brilliant person you are even if you’re not.

But then, today, I came upon a realization. What if a person’s short? Like, fucking short? How to play golf to suck up the boss? Now we all know golf is not a short people’s game. That’s because one has to be of a minimum height to be able to play golf because the length of a golf club is standardized and short people won’t be able to use it (well, unless the short guy saws off a portion of the club, but the club is gonna lose the kinetic required to hit a ball).

So, does that mean short people couldn’t suck it up to their bosses? And then it occurs to me that short people have their niches to fill. Just like why we have tapeworms. They’re shorter and blood travels to their brain faster – so theoretically, they’re more intelligent and reactive (thus, wilier). But for that advantage, they don’t get to do a lot of things like riding a really cool bike, playing basketball or golf.

So how do short people suck up to their bosses to climb the corporate ladder faster without playing golf? The answer’s simple. Read this old post of mine (I almost forgot about it… and how brilliant I have been…)

I’m sure a lot of Malaysian office workers know about McDonald’s McValue Lunch campaign. While it is not exactly a novel idea (to offer discounts to attract business), but it is somewhat successful in drawing more people to patronize its outlets during lunch. Not a surprise since most Malaysians would kill over a ringgit.

What peeves me most about this McValue Lunch thingy, is that it manages to emulate the ‘puasa month’ syndrome. Remember my post about seeing Muslim people hogging the tables way before they break? Well, that’s what has been happening all over Malaysia in McDonald’s outlets during lunch time. People would just hog tables to wait for the clock to strike 12 noon, and they would throng the counter to get that sweet deal. And then the staff would get all too busy and run out of all prepared food and eventually cause ‘fast food’ to become ’slow food’.

So, the business will be very good after 12pm for McDonald’s. But between 11am – 12pm, the business will be like crap. Nobody will buy anything during that dark hour, unless that person is at the brink of starving to death and there’s no other restaurant in the area of 50km radius. So, the 1 hour period will constitute only pure wastage. Wastage of electricity, water, time and space.

I wonder who was the retard who thought of this. Why can’t they start the McValue Lunch discount straight right after the breakfast at 11am? Then they will have made full use of that 1 hour to maximize their profit – which is better than nothing at all. And they also won’t get the ‘hogging tables’ problem. Why can’t they figure this out already? (but then, if they can, they wouldn’t have sued that macha for using the McCurry name… *smacks head*)