Away

I like writing on airports. It's the combination of traveling to write about, idle time and occasional free wireless internet access I believe.

I'll get a few chances the next two weeks.

I'm going on a two week holiday, first to Zhangjiang and then to Finland. My co-authors on this site have established a tradition of not writing in or of Finland but it remains to be seen if I gather any insights. I know last time in Finland I didn't write much.

No promises, but I'll get back on the saddle after I return.
OP Out.

Deadline

Oh boy. I'm sure people have talked about deadlines since someone invented them. I hate deadlines, and Dilbert and Garfield and etc. hate deadlines too. And mondays. Luckily it's tuesday, and unluckily I have a pressuring deadline.

My boss just told me yesterday that I have to move during this week, 'cause my old apartment is "due". I know the nice areas in Kuala Lumpur where to look at, and believe me, I've been looking at them. It is just that with my budget it isn't the easiest task to find a good value for the money - especially as a white boy, where every agent sees a potential for exploit. Well fuck that.

Regardless, I gotta move to a new home this week *snap* just like that. While it may sound hasty, hassleish, stressing or pressuring, it is all of those three lumped together and tripled. Vitutuksen multihuipennus, as we say in Finland.

I'll get back to you next week once this is sorted out.

On Wings

So what’s the deal with the airline food? You remember how that stand-up routine goes, right? I’ll talk of food in a moment.

The Guangzhou Baiyun Airport is definitely nice. It has large open spaces, clear directions and space to sit. As far as services, you have several little carts cruising around, ready to take you to the gate or check-in counter. There are restaurants, which, while expensive are clean and nice. Even the public toilets are clean. Or as close to clean as I’ve seen a mainland toilet. But this is all because you are specifically paying for these services - you get what you pay for.

The flights themselves are occasionally on time. I think I haven’t seen a flight which wasn’t 30 minutes late in the air this year. Not a big deal, but I’m glad I speak enough Chinese to understand when they announce plane is going to sit two hours before taxiing to the runway. Oh, they do have an English announcement too. I welcome anyone to come and try make sense of it.

But once you are up in the air, the airline is fulfilling its obligation to you. They have to take you where the ticket says. But they do not need to serve you nice food. They feel compelled to serve some food, true, but it’s just so say they did it.

If you’re lucky you get a choice of rice or noodles over sauce. It’s not great but it works. The sad case is when they don’t serve the hot food at all. You get a little box, which includes a bread, a few cherry tomatoes, a piece of something sweet and a wet towel. The towel is the tastiest item in the box. I wish there were food options aside from flying in business class.

I’ll be flying to Finland in a couple of weeks. I hope our grand national airline has stopped flying the MD-11. Calling it a venerable aircraft is a courtesy.

OP out.

Compound Suspicions

I'll write based on the pictures above.

The first one, dubbed "Sanitation" is a view 5 minutes walk away from my house. It's actually the street immediately outside my neighborhood. There are two points of interest. The first is the local funky Chinaman, proudly displaying his stomach. The local men like to show their bellies on a hot day. Sometimes they opt to take off their shirts, but either opening a button-up shirt or rolling up a T-shirt is the norm. It's a common enough occurrence. And it makes the people look like yokels. But hey, they act like it too.

The reason I took the picture, however, is the well. It's the local way of drawing daily water from a well in middle of the street. I do not know if it's straight up sewage, or is it the same water as the river sitting just behind the camera. The water in the river might actually be worse than sewage, but if you are the type to have a well on the sidewalk, you probably don't care.

I really don't trust these people when it comes to pretty much anything. And I have a baby on it's way.

At least the baby shops are for the wealthy, and as such are nice and clean. The items are mostly sensical and useful. Or I imagine they are. I'm still at the stage where I'm googling "goat milk as breast milk supplement" and seeing what comes up. They sell a lot of enriched goat milk here as supplement, by the way. According to my brief research, it's mostly a viable course of action too.

And then the shops strike out. They sell Eel-Calcium pills. I'm not going to apologize for the instant when my trust for the clean, nice, well-meaning baby flies out of the window the second I see a smiling Eel on a pill box. My thoughts immediately return to the street wells and rolled up T-shirts. Buying a product in China is a veritable minefield of broken, sub-par, coped, imitated and outright dangerous goods. But yes, if I manage to raise a healthy kid staring in Taizhou, China, I can do anything. Catching flies with chopsticks should be trivial in comparison.

My suspicions aside, my girlfriend and the now approximately 5 month baby are both healthy. No thanks to Eel-pills.
OP out.

Mess

Today I'm going to whine about dress code. My company has one, and I'm quite sure a great number of companies in Malaysia do also. Dress code custom is ridiculous, it's just like the old rule of taking one's hat off when eating. On a practical level you DON'T need to wear a suit when typing and making phone calls nor you need to take your hat off while eating, because there is no practical reason behind either of those.

Does everything need to be practical? Well certainly not, but how about letting me mind about my hat and my dressing and my practicalities? Dress code has been invented by someone sometime and the reason is "because". For example, last week I poured coffee on my pair of trousers which I've just picked from a dry clean service. Today, I poured melting butter from my toast on my other trousers (also dry cleaned last week). If I had jeans, I couldn't care less - wipe n wash. But now, I have to went again through all the trouble to bring both of my trousers to dry clean service, open my wallet, hand them money, wait one (1) day, and then I can mess my trousers with some other funky stuff again (;)). Just because my boss wants me to look professional. People who have no real problems have great talent of making their life harder in some other ways.

Hopefully it's something really permanent next time when I mess my trousers again, like epoxy paint or superglue, so I need to spend more fucking money to buy more fucking ridiculous suits and trousers to be allowed to work in this company 'cause I fucking need to look fucking professional. I mean, in army I understand the dress code because they actually DO have some practicalities behind it, but on a real life. What the FUCK?! Maybe you, dear reader, think that I'm whining about the slightest things - sod off to you too.

Thank you Mr. Dress Code Inventer. You ruined my day today again, as you have done for oh so many days before.

Everybody Poops

In Malaysia there are two types of toilets; the NORMAL one (yes, the porcelain seat is for normal people) and the-hole-in-the-ground-surrounded-by-a-porcelain-frame. The latter one is supposedly more common in India and China than in Malaysia, but it sucks nevertheless. If your knees aren't made of steel, that is.

Regardless of the toilet format however, Malaysians have a tendency to wet the WHOLE BLOODY TOILET when they take a poop. This is very annoying. When I have to go for the big second one, I don't like to do it in a fucking swimming pool. The thing why the toilet is wet, is because some people wash their assess instead of/in addition to wiping them. Maybe this sounds very nice to someone who likes to be a goddamn hippie, but on the other hand, excessive amounts of clean water is wasted in the process. I'm not an expert enough to tell which solution is more tolling for the environment, but both of them are that for sure. The fact is that there are too many poopers in the world, rather than people are pooping in a wrong way.

Imagine yourself having a stressful day, stressful meetings, tons of coffee, some quick lunching etc. This all means that a grand grand snake is building up during the day. Then after your work, when the mental pressure is relieved, the physical one in your intestines begin - and it usually comes fast as hell, so you gotta find the closest toilet 'cause normally you haven't reached home yet. You can probably imagine how FUCKING NICE it is to go to take a poop in a tiny all wet cabinet with the pissy shopping mall piano tunes mixed with farts , everyone else doing the same pooping thing next to you inside other cabinets, and the whole place stinking like there's no tomorrow.

This post is a direct traveler and expat tip; don't use public toilets, observe your snake build up, and time the sinking operation. Starhill Gallery in Bukit Bintang has excellent and clean toilets by the way. They're dark, silent and peaceful , and although a little bit costly, its definately worth to pay RM 1 for a good ol' stress relieving peaceful shit.

Mining

There hasn't been news of a major mining accident from China in a week. Maybe it's a good week for Chinese miners, as the last accident was an explosion on the 1st of August killing 14 and injuring 11. Last month saw about a hundred miners dead, mostly from collapses and some from broken elevators.

However, China is no longer among the poorest countries in the world, and is doing well in comparison. Sure, news trickle in, but it's a big industry and is manned mostly by willing adults. Other places are worse.

I've got a long article from AP through Yahoo! news for you:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080810/ap_on_re_af/toiling_for_gold

It's about children aged 5 to 10 in African gold mines digging up ore and extracting the valuables by rinsing it with mercury. It's a long read, and written a little dramatically at points, but I don't think it's an outright lie. Grim nonetheless.

OP out.

Welcome to the Games!

The opening ceremony at the full stadium was magnificent. And now the games have begun.

With 48kg Women's weightlifting. Now there's a sport. The girls do their best to lift less weight than the bigger girls who come after them. And those girls do their best to lift less than the men who come after. It's the Olympic ideal of achieving the best weight lifted per gender per body mass. It doesn't sound too grand, and seeing a girl fail at 90kg lift on TV, it doesn't look too grand either.

But the conditions look nice, the equipment is solid and the arenas are all sold out. Still, when you fail at lifting 13kg less than the Chinese athlete coming after you, the arena is still dead quiet. So far the Chinese audience has only cheered for their own.

I wonder how they react if their athletes fail.
OP out.

Super Duper Management

I don't even know what a good management means nowadays, but I'm pretty damn sure what super duper management means. Super duper management = make your sub-ordinates bust their assess off from every penny you pay them, and then.. Don't pay them! The plan is perfect until you realize that all of the subordinates have resigned and there is no-one to actually do the work anymore.

Two statements;
-Paying minimal or no salary is a great way to save money and use it on something less useful instead.
-Finding employees with good spirit is easy, but after 2 months the spirits can be brought down irreversibly.

I don't know yet how costly it is to a company to lose an employee, but I'm sure the idea of "lets make him work his ass off until he quits" may become cheaper than the normal way of paying decent wage to an efficient employee. However, this requires a steady supply of blue-eyed employee's to be taken in and tossed out of the company.

Human Resource Management has billions of aspects, and I believe that normal levels, principals and customs of salary is just a small thing needed to be done right. Doing the salary dance in a proper way results in less de-motivation, as stated by Frederick Herzberg in his theory of job motivation. Everywhere. People care about the money, and its a bit sad to all the noble employers in the world who just would like things to be free and everyone be happy for free.

I'm not saying this is the style of management in some particular area of the world, but you can draw your own conclusions from this Blog's area of focus.

Security Through Superior Firepower

So I flew from Guangzhou to Taizhou on Monday and the airport had much more security than before. Specifically, it had more armed security. In a country where civilians are not allowed to carry arms, the decision makers believe more guns will help the Olympic games.

Walking through the doors, a squad of three, all in different uniforms was standing at the gate. Obviously on display. The security and their armament. No, you don't need submachine guns at the door to the airport, but the Olympics bring out this side in their Chinese. They want to show off. There were patrolling guards as well, equipped with pistols. And bear in mind, this was in a country where even the regular Police do not carry arms, on the other side from the Olympics.

Now imagine how many more security guards there are in Beijing. Imagine how the situation turns out if something happens. I won't paint a bleak picture here, but remember China's track record in dealing with disturbances. At least they are trying, very hard, as even the protests at the torch relay were met with non-lethal force. The Chinese do not wish to crack down on foreigners, but if someone was to try causing damage at the Olympics there exists a very real chance of the security escalating the situation.

OP Out.