Monthly Archives: July 2010

Update 3: We called the CSO

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So Dan called the CSO and explained to her the circumstances, ie: we have the contact of the person who passed her the bag, and that The Cathay has CCTV footage they can release to the police and in fact recommends that we go to the police. We said we would prefer to not involve the police and just want the phone back.

She maintains that she did not take the iPhone and that she is willing to give up a month’s salary to prove her innocence. To take it a step further, she even said she swears it upon her mother’s life (I thought that really unnecessary).

Dan asked why she lied to him about not having my bag as he even gave hand signals on the size of my bag. She said she thought he meant a brown handbag (which is exactly what my bag is) instead of a brown leather bag. As she tried to clarify her statement later, she revised her story to say she thought he said it was a brown man’s bag and then changed it again to say she thought he said a brown wallet.

Big loophole in that too cos it just means she had the bag all along. Dan forgot to ask her about the Anand whom she claimed to have returned the bag After we went asking for it.

Anyway, after hearing a few versions of why she denied having my bag when we asked for it at the counter yesterday, my very exasperated husband said “We are outside the police station.”(which we were) “You have 10secs to give us back the phone or go to jail.” (yes, my husband has a penchant for dramatising )

She tried to explain her innocence somemore and then Dan said “I’ll make the police report now”.

So we did.

Two hours later (it takes such a long time to make a police report!!), I’m home, tired and frustrated with myself for not having gotten a SIM card sent me to today.

Long day.

Lost Phone. Considering myself lucky.

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When we got home after lunch, my sister called Dan to say that my bag was lost. Huh? How’d she know when I didn’t?!

She said someone (Indian sounding) called the last dialled number on my phone, said he found my bag and would leave it at the customer service counter of The Cathay because he was rushing for a movie.

As we drove back to The Cathay, I was thanking God that a kind soul had returned the bag. I made a mental checklist of the things I would otherwise have to replace – my driving licence, I/C, credit/atm cards, S90cam(and irreplaceable memories!), iPhone, and RMK makeup…. We thought it must be the the (Indian)guy driving a Lexus who was waiting to park in the lot we were in. Besides, my bag was in Renee’s pram and it could only have fallen out without us knowing in the carpark.

When we got to The Cathay, I sat waiting in the car with Renee by the side of the street while Dan ran in to do a quick pickup. After 15mins(felt like alot longer!), he ran back with empty hands and a grim face. He has checked with the box office, with the customer service, with Cathay organisation, with everybody he could possibly check with and NOBODY HAS SEEN MY BAG!!

We drove into the carpark and saw the same Lexus in the lot and left him a note to call us back.

Then we walked around The Cathay while making calls to cancel my cards. We even got the name of the lady at the Customer Service counter just so we have a name for whatever reason. 

Anyhow, hanging around The Cathay waiting for the Lexus driver to return to his car didn’t seem like a good solution. What if he decided to dine as well? Plus we had Renee with us… So we decided to leave.

On our way out, Dan’s phone rang. The lady at the reception said SOMEONE RETURNED THE BAG! HURRAH!!

She said someone found it in the male toilet and brought it there. Everything was in there except for the cash in my wallet and my iPhone.

It’s all a little strange. The story doesn’t seem to add up. Did the guy change his mind about returning everything in the bag? Did he turn it in at the customer service counter and someone there wanted to keep it? Should we pursue it given that I’ve got most of my valuables back? (I/C and driving licence would be the most troublesome to replace). I mean, if the ‘broken link’ of the story is at the customer service counter, pursuing it will cost her job. But isn’t the customer service counter akin to a police post? A place you put things at for safekeeping?

I think playing detective isn’t gonna help me find my iPhone although I’ll admit to being awfully curious. We’re not even sure which guy picked up the bag to begin with and the Lexus driver may not return the call. 

Thing to do now, is to replace the iPhone, fret over lost GODFINGER time, and berate myself for not having backed up my stuff.

There. The long story.

 

**Update 1(9:11pm, 21 Jul)

Life is interwoven most intricately. Turns out, it IS The Lexus guy who picked up my bag!! He called Dan to confirm that he handed the bag in its entirety to the lady at the reception. So the time line is this:

220pm: Guy hands my bag to CSO
320pm: Dan goes to the counter and the CSO tells him nobody handed anything over to the counter and she is the only person on duty.
330pm: We go back to the CSO to get her name
410pm: CSO calls to say someone returned the bag

I think she didn’t expect at all that we would be able to contact the person who handed her the bag. The Cathay will be looking at the CCTV tapes tomorrow. It is looking awfully like the CSO who took the bag from the kind stranger who returned it, took my phone and cash. It is also looking awfully like there will be a job opening at The Cathay soon. Will find out tomorrow.

*fingers crossed that she didn’t reset my iPhone to factory settings. Dan will be most upset that his Angry Birds scores are deleted Renee’s audio/video/picture files are gone.

**Update 2(3:03pm, 22 Jul)

The plot thickens. Cathay says they searched the CSO and didn’t find a phone. She still maintains that she didn’t take it. They urge us to make a police report because they cannot release footage of the CCTV to us plus they’re still investigating the case. Hm… I’m loathed to make a police report cos that could potentially ruin her life. It seems too big a consequence over an iPhone. We think we’ll call her with the information we have (she doesn’t know that we have made contact with the guy who handed the bag to her) to let her know that we know. And that we want the phone back. Right thing? Wrong thing? She’s out of the office now. We’ll try her number again later.

Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

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It’s a long but easy read. Some things I agree with more than others, but in all, it has these little nuggets of wisdom I’m glad to now have in my possession. If only practising it would be as easy.

Written by Adrian Tan, author of The Teenage Textbook (1988), was the guest-of-honour at a recent NTU convocation ceremony. This was his speech to the graduating class of 2008.

I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.

My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.

On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable.

Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.

And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.

Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.

The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning.

You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process” and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.

The good news is that they’re wrong.

The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.

I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.

You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.

Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.

Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.

I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.

After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.

Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.

If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.

What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.

What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over. Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.

The most important is this: do not work.

Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.

Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.

There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan “Arbeit macht frei” was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably a sports journalist.

So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.

Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.

I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.

I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.
You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.

You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.