RACONTEUR-ESQUE SCRIBBLINGS

When I was a school-going teenager, there was a man who used to walk along the streets of the neighbourhood. He looked dishevelled at most times, and walked aimlessly day after day. People said he was *crazy. I always hoped that I'd never have to cross paths with him as I made my way back home from the bus stop after school activities. So, why was there this strangely deep fear of someone who was  rumoured to be crazy?  When I was even younger (7 or 8, maybe), I sat with my family one night and watched this film called The Lunatics . Despite only getting by with subtitles, the film was visual enough (as kids, my parents never really shielded us from violence on TV, and back then neither did the Malaysian censorship board - if there was one back then) to scare me into believing that while they were not fully in control of their condition, they were capable of violence. It's impact was so immense that one of the final scenes keeps playing in my head as I'm typing this po...

We have a lot of team based long term projects where I work. It's like being in school, except for the part where we actually get paid, unlike real school kids who end up getting involved in projects for the sake of getting good grades. Ahem. So, one of these projects involves about four of us, where all of us are between 32 to 34 years old. I don't know if it's the age or our personalities, but we seem to get along pretty famously (despite being from 3 different departments) But then again, we have been in a team together since July of 2009 in a different project which ended last year and we were automatically chosen to get involved in this new project because our bosses too could see that we worked well as a team.  Something very odd happened towards the end of last week's meeting, though. Only three of us were left behind to remove the laptop from the projector, turn off the air conditioning, and rearrange our chairs and ensure everything is locked before we...

An innocent paper clip, an old hair pin and a cable tie It was a *secret that hung over me like a dark cloud. Knowledge of a missing key and locked drawer **haunted my obligatory 8.75+x hours at work almost every single working day. A few months back, I blogged about how some personal things were disappearing from my desk drawers , and how I thought I'd misplaced them, etc, but the inner Sherlock Holmes in me asked a very important question: "How (or why) would I misplace a Hard Rock Cafe coaster and not the bag it came in? (No, I have never had the need to use coasters on my desk, and even if I did, I'd probably not use one I received as a gift) All problems need some form of preventive counter measure. In this case, I started carrying the drawer key with me wherever I went (before this, I'd just leave it in the office itself, hidden under an unused in/out tray) Now, as a person who misplaces stuff on a rather regular basis (I've been known to have lost thi...

I've noticed that weddings in general have provided great blog fodder throughout the years, from the time a friend and I misread the date of a friend's wedding , and consequently missed it, to the time where friends and I have observed favourite uncles (probably after a drink too many) who are known to have sung karaoke style at weddings, and even where unsuspecting friends (that's us) who wanted to have a nice Chinese dinner have accidentally crashed a stranger's wedding dinner (although they paid for their own food, the unexpected entertainment was free!)  A few years ago, a friend casually remarked (coincidentally this was at another friend's wedding) that Malaysians had the tendency to even invite someone they had only met the day before to their weddings. That, and the fact that certain communities choose to have their weddings at home instead of a hall was probably the reason why the very first wedding thief thought that this would be a pretty good modus...

In LM Montgomery's book, Anne of Green Gables , Anne dyed her hair green by accident because she hated her red hair and was promised by a travelling salesman that the hair dye she purchased from him would turn her hair black. Vanity? Maybe. Last weekend, this blog looked like a mutant for a few good hours because the vain owner was bored of her white and black theme and didn't really like the idea of using any of the different combinations of templates and backgrounds provided by blogger itself. No, she just had to do it the old fashioned way by downloading third party templates and trying them on the blog one by one like one would try dresses in a shop. Vanity? Definitely. After all, shouldn't a blog be more about the content and not how it looks?  (But then, blogs that have been black and white for way too long can be depressing) Sadly, all of them were major failures on the blog, whereby the blog title multiplied, gadgets from the sidebar moved to some strange locati...

How often do you accidentally spill some coffee on a copy of a minutes of meeting regarding spillage?

There was once a girl who thought she was turning reclusive So she went ahead and did something quite impulsive She signed up for a run Because she figured it would be fun But now she thinks she may be becoming obsessive!