Dance like no one's watching

Was working late yesterday evening and saw HR online just before I left for the night.  Feeling bitchy, I told her about the run-in I had with village idiot equivalent in my office.  Now, this “village idiot” is from our IT dept.  Let’s call her ITM (IT Moron) for short. 

I saw the ITM sitting at Booze Queen’s desk so I asked BQ what happened.  BQ’s grouse was that her keyboard was not displaying symbols correctly.  For e.g., the # symbol became £ and so on. 

I told BQ that’s due to the Keyboard Input setting and could be changed from the Control Panel or the Language Bar at the systray.  But too late.  ITM was already hard at work on BQ’s pc.

She was working on her “solution” for some time and it obviously wasn’t successful.  I was wondering what on earth was taking her so long to fix something that could be done in like 4 steps.  Curious, I went over to BQ’s desk and to my horror, the ITM was deleting and reinstalling BQ’s entire user profile.  *Faints*.

I told BQ that wasn’t likely to work ‘cos your Windows setting is still defaulted to Keyboard Input – English UK.  But BQ was kind.  She said, “Never mind lah.  She already halfway through.  Just let her try lah”.

I was like er, ok.  But the ITM’s method didn’t work obviously so I got even more impatient (I mean how can someone who works in IT be sooooo stupid?) so I told ITM, “Actually you can just go to Control Panel & change the Regional & Language setting you know”.  (I didn’t bother to ask her to try the Language shortcut bar ‘cos I figured someone so stupid wouldn’t know it existed).

ITM was not happy.  Showing a black face, she said, “No.  I must do testing first”.  ITM then proceeded to delete the Keyboard from Device Manager and added it back.  Still didn’t work.  Good grief.  Test simi test?  Here I am offering her a solution and she says she still must test?  Duh.  Fed up, I walked away and said, “Wu liao”.

In the end, ITM gave up and said she had to escalate the problem to the bitchy IT girl.  *Rolls eyes*.  I can’t believe how stupid some people are.  A non-IT issue that can be solved in 5min, she had to do 45min of testing and still not solve it.  Duh.  After she left, BQ managed to resolve the problem herself. 

So last night, I offered to strike a deal with HR.  Fire the ITM and I’ll do her job, for 90% of her pay!  In these tough times, I think we need to chop off people who are obviously ill-equipped to do their job.  After all, if I take 5min to solve something she spends 45min on, assuming she works 9hr a day, I’ll only have to OT an additional hour to be able to do her jobscope.  Plus I’ll save the company 10% of the money paid to her.  Isn’t that a win-win situation for those of us who can work and the company?

Iceman and I completed my church’s Wedding Preparation Course (WPC) over the weekend.  Before we started the course, a friend who attended another WPC with Touch Community said that her bf and her found out a lot of things about each other that they didn’t realise before.  She encouraged me to attend a similar course ‘cos she felt it would be useful for all couples considering marriage.

Well, I don’t think I found out anything new about Iceman that I didn’t know already.  But I guess that’s a good thing.  Haha.  What I did take away from the 6 sessions were 3 things.

First, it’s important for a married couple to always present a united front – whether in front of parents / in-laws / children.  The couple should always discuss things with each other first, before broaching the issue with others.  It’s important not to let other people (kids / parents) play off 1 spouse against the other.

Second, bringing the emphasis on unity a step further, one of things that may be a potential cause of division is money.  How does a married couple handle their finances?  Before attending the WPC, Iceman and I thought that the best way would be for the couple to contribute a pre-agreed sum to a joint account, while individual expenditure will continue to come from the individual accounts. 

But now I see the potential pitfalls of this.  What happens if 1 party earns considerably more?  Will there be feelings of unhappiness if both parties still contribute the same amount to the joint account?  Also, for the non-big ticket items (assuming big ticket will be paid from the joint account) items like daily meals, shopping for necessities, etc, who pays for these?  After all, every time 1 party forks out money from his/her individual account, there may be a potential issue of "if I pay for these items meant for common use, then I’ll have less money to spend on myself".  Or it’s like how some parents will tell their kid, "Go ask your mommy/daddy to buy the toy.  She/He’s richer".  That doesn’t sound very nice does it?  Money should not be something kids use to manipulate their parents… and we all know how manipulative kids can be (hey, we were like that too ok!)

Most importantly, the joint account should not be seen as an obligation to be fulfilled.  Just ‘cos I contributed my "quota" for the month, the rest of my pay should be used on myself only.  This creates feelings of selfishness and individualism which I guess just isn’t very helpful if you’re taking the pro-unity stand.

Third, I think the loving environment which our course moderators created for their family, esp. their 4 daughters in their growing up years is something worth emulating.  It’s hard to put in words but when you see it for yourself, you will realise that this is Christian love indeed.

Not that my parents were bad in any way.  But I suppose we always want to do better for our own families (with kids or otherwise) and that loving environment is something special.  With all the divorces going around these days, it’s comforting and reassuring to know that if you work at your marriage and guard it, married life can be good.

Anyway, it was an extremely enjoyable 6 sessions.  Thought it was best for me to jot this down so I won’t forget the 3 things that struck me the most.  Heh.  And if anyone who reads this is thinking of attending a WPC too, I would encourage you to go for it.  🙂

I haven’t done a thorough check recently but I think Maybank is still offering one of the best (if not the best) interest rates around town.  Haven’t been using the iSavvy account much ‘cos I forgot my userid and password the past few months.  Only got down to sorting that out recently and what good news I saw when I logged into Iceman and my joint account – the interest rate will be revised upwards from 1 Dec 2008.  Woohoo!

These are the revised rates if you’re interested…

iSAVvy Savings Account

Daily balance below S$5,000

0.25% p.a.

Daily balance of S$5,000 to below S$50,000

1.08% p.a.

Daily balance of S$50,000 and above
1.38% p.a.

Interest-on-interest every 6 months*
6.00%

Effective from: 1 December 2008

* For average monthly balances of at least S$5,000

I was exploring the functions/features of Maybank’s online banking site and guess what I found?  There’s this iCheque service that allows you to send a local currency cheque to a local adddress, via their website, FREE!  Does that rock or what!

This means.. no more queuing at AXS to pay credit card bills (HSBC is one of the online payees for Maybank.  For other banks that are not direct payees, you can just send an iCheque!!).  The fine print to that is that you must allow Maybank 2 business days to process the cheque before having it mailed to the local address.  Well, I can live with that couple of days of delay as long as I get to avoid queuing up at AXS machines with their often dreadfully long queues! 

In addition, you don’t have to worry about running out of cheques when your cheque book finishes.  (Stupid DBS didn’t send Iceman a new cheque book till he called them up for one… and as with almost all current account T&Cs, he was charged $10 for it!).

For foreign currency cheques deliverable to an overseas address, there’s a charge of 0.125% if I don’t recall wrongly.  But that’s still convenient right?  Heh.

Anyway, I thought this was useful information for folks wanting to maximise their bank interest earnings.  Hope you find this useful.  🙂

Argh.  Been so busy the past week I’ve sooo many backlogged posts… things I wanted to write about but didn’t have time to get down to it.

Anyway, for starters, please support the House Rabbit Society of Singapore‘s great work in providing foster homes for abused / abandoned bunnies by buying the merchandise they have online, or by making a donation to them.  I just put in an order for the 2009 calendar.  :)  Can’t wait to see the bunnies on my desk all year round!  Yay!

Horlicks gave me a fright 2 nights ago.  I opened the sliding door at the side of my house to take a peek at the bunnies.  I saw Horlicks dashing in from the car porch, and there was blood on her front left paw.  I quickly went to check on her and saw that the line of blood on her front left paw was about an inch long.  The cut on her hind left paw was worse, it went almost 3/4 way around her ankle.  Thankfully, she could run and there didn’t seem to be any problems with her movements. 

I went to look for Pinky next.  Was worried that some cat could’ve gotten in and attacked them or something.  Panicked for a moment ‘cos I couldn’t find Pinky anywhere in the car porch!!  Luckily, the little boy was lying down safely in the backyard, next to the washing machine, oblivious as usual to Horlicks’ antics.

I tried to use wet cotton wool to wipe the blood from Horlicks’ paws but she wouldn’t keep still.  In the end, I took a cup and poured water over the paws to try to “clean” the wound. 

Later on that night, when I went to check on the bunnies, Horlicks’ had licked off all the blood stains.  That’s a good thing I suppose ‘cos saliva has anti-septic properties.  She seemed all right when I peeped at her last night (got home pretty late) and this morning.  Will continue to observe her the next few days… will need to check for signs of infection too.  Sigh.

I have no idea how Horlicks got injured.  She might’ve tried jumping onto the rectangular flower stand that extends along the side walls of the car porch, or slipped and caught her paws in the drain cover.  She’s just too daring and you can’t restrict her movements either ‘cos the pent up energy will just explode and she’ll start picking fights with other bunnies.

*Shakes head*.  I do hope she learns from this and takes more care in her explorations from now on!

Saw in the news today that PM Lee said: "In a big economy, you can boost consumption. The government gives money, people spend it and it’s spent within the economy. Most of it stays in, a little bit of it leaks out. You get a multiplier and the economic activity goes up.

In Singapore if people spend money, most of the money goes overseas because we are so open and most of the demand is abroad. Most of the money we spend is spent on things which come from abroad so it’s not possible for us to pump- prime the economy in the same way that other governments do. But there are other things we can do (such as) reducing costs and helping citizens directly.”

Hmm… is the government tracking my Coach and Kate Spade purchases?

I think Pinky needs to lose weight urgently.  He’s getting fatter and fatter.  I told my mom this morning that my dad is essentially killing Pinky by overfeeding.  As it is, Pinky’s tummy, instead of being curved in like normal rabbits, is bulging out.  When he lies stretched out, his body is way bigger than his shoulders and hind legs.  Pinky’s father, Muah Chee, died at a very young age – about 3 years old – 99% ‘cos of overweight, which can lead to heart disease, diabetes, intestinal congestion, etc.

I’m going to measure out the amount of pellets Pinky is allowed to eat per day.  (That’s what my dad overfeeds – pellets and grains).  I think I shall buy some toys to motivate him to play more – run around, hop, whatever.  Sigh.

We need to save our favourite bunny!!  🙁

This is the stuff that gives me high blood pressure at work.  Not that I’m particularly mad about this or something but sometimes the stupidity just gets to me.

I sent this to the underwriter (u/wer) and asked him to confirm that my computation is correct.

The u/wer replied saying that I undercharged the premium ‘cos my table shows that the exposure ends on 1 Oct 2010 when in actual fact it ends on 31 Dec 2010.

I’m like duh?!  Sorry if I left out some details but there’s no change in the amount what!!  So I’m amending my table to this and resending it to him.

DUH!?!

dear fans of the most desirable Pinky,

it has been some time since i wrote to everyone.  i have been doing fine.  life was good and there was little to complain about… till my chef cum chauffeur decided to go to Germany.  he handed over the duty of serving my gourmet meals to my maid but she’s such a lazy worker.  instead of serving my dinner daily at 7pm, she has been serving it to me at 9pm.  "working late" was her excuse.  gosh.  what work could be more important that ensuring that my needs & wants are met?

my mom & i nearly died of starvation tonight when our dinner arrived at 9:10pm.  don’t these minions know that we bunnies need to eat constantly to ensure that our digestive system doesn’t shut down for good?  skipping a meal could be fatal you know. 

in addition, instead of giving my mother and me yummy pellets every night, she has been skimping on it and substituting half the serving with hay.  putting me on a diet for health reasons, she claims.  oh the torture my poor little soul has to suffer.  thank goodness my breakfast is taken care of by my maid’s mom.

even the long suffering auntie Peanut was miserable.  sigh.  this global downturn is hitting us bunnies badly too.  everybunny’s feeling the gloom & doom.  i sure hope my chauffeur comes home soon.

hungrily yours,

Pinky