My Dearest Father

11:27am 23 April 2007 I lost my father. I thought I could make it and met him while he was still breathing. It was not meant to be. I was on the plane somewhere above the sub-continent when he left me. I only got to know about it upon touching down in KLIA at 2:40pm as I turn on my handphone and the a short sms from my wife; Innalillah, your dad passed away at half past 11 in HTAR.

I sat down on my 23K seat oblivious to the people around me but the whole thing didn't downed on me yet. I only made it out of KLIA after 3:45pm (the usual delay in the luggage carousel). I raced to make the journey back directly to my parent's house (hitting 140kmh!) in order not to miss the burial.

I only began to cry quietly as I made the last turn into the road leading to the house. As I stopped the car and made the way through the onlooking crowds gathering by the house compound (I could made out some familiar faces among them), my sister waited for me by the entrance. I think I heard her saying something but my eyes were only fixed beyond the wide door while trying my level best to calm her down.

There he was, laying in the middle of the house, the place he used to take his nap in the evening breeze, but this time around fully wrapped in white cotton pieces except for the face. I saw my mum sitting a few feet away, being consoled by the ladies. She was surprisingly quite.

I sat by my father's side, looking at his unshaven face (I can't hardly recall him having so much beard or moustache) and fulfill my promise of whispering to his ears for the last time.

Fast Forward

I am on my way home at this moment. Just received the news on the condition of my dearest father. He has slipped into deep coma after second stroke attack this morning. He was recuperating from his first mild stroke attack on 10th April.

As my family members gather around him in the hospital bed, I am struggling to find the earliest possible flight to KLIA. Hang on dear dad. Let you hear me whisper in your ears again.

Blacksburg vs Ijok

During my elapsed work time this last few days, I can't help but search for the latest news coming from between these two places. One made world headlines and the other, well sort of deserves another headline category. Tragic news from Blacksburg a plenty! So does Ijok (tragic?). I am not going to add more to any of those news nor comment, but merely my reminiscent of that word Ijok.

His name is Ashadi (I think that's what I could recall, its been nearly 27 years). We called him Ijok, simply because he is from that town. We were in boarding hostel operated by Yayasan Selangor. A very affable fellow with wide grin. Although he has a slight gait to his steps (I was told he has polio when he was small toddler), he beats me in pingpong, times and times. Not just pingpong, he also beats me in carrom. Luckily I can match him at badminton - well obviously thats not a fair game to him! Oh by the way he is a Javanese descent (can't doubt that!)
Each time the name Ijok crops up, he is the first thing that came to my mind. Funny how we tend to associate names to places. Sometimes I wonder if I had to acquire another acquiantance from Ijok later on would Ashadi's face be replaced from my subconscious memory pages?
To Ashadi from Ijok, if you still live there, wherever you are, don't forget to vote.
ps.
BTW, I almost forgot, Badrulhisham from Batang Berjuntai - well this one deserve another story. And also Annuar from Sg Choh, who introduced me to Rubik Cubes solutions.

Condolences to the Hokies

Somehow, upon hearing this tragic news yesterday, I was truly disturbed. Apparently the troubled signs were there. A few noticed him and his anti-social personality disorder tendencies but as usual, people hope that the problem would just go away or someone else would take on the responsibility later.

I hope his 'disturbing' scripting class assignment below wouldn't be made into movies by some demented, cash hungry and selfish Hollywood directors/producers.

Richard McBeef
Mr Brownstone

Univ Texas 1996, Columbine in 1999, Beltway Sniper 2002, Amish School 2006, Vtech 2007 - its a sign a society gone wrong.

I Got Smacked!!!

Poor design and shoddy work blamed

Maybe I spoke too soon or maybe it's 'karma'. Whichever it is, remember my previous posting regarding my Malaysian experience comment? Well, this morning I have to do some retreating after reading this latest Putrajaya incident. Yeah, people here do read 'bad' news about Malaysian especially those that closely related to the industry. I think I have to give my colleague few nods of acknowledgement and the latest signed picture autograph of Catherine Zeta Jones (with her hubby at the side of course!!!)

Oh, have I mentioned that this colleague of mine has been 'promoted' - well sort of.

Sketchy

I haven't lost my sketching skills.

When I thought I might have gotten myself lost into technical writings, ISO procedures, QAQC thingy, contractual letters and number crunching rituals, once in a while I just threw away my CAD and get more creative with the natural way. Instead of typing away technical jargons spiced with 'lawyerspeak' and dimensioned diagrams, I went NTS (not to scale) and let my fingers do the talks. Pictures paint thousands words - they say.

I remember my quote given during the interview for an article in a regional IT magazine in 1992 when the CAD explosion began to hit Malaysian shores. Suffice to say , I was quite unforgiving with AutoCad (given that it was R10-R11 on Intel386DX PC) despite advocating the use of CAD in consultancy back then.

Sometime's people wouldn't just mind imperfections in this imperfect world.

I was cleaning my office drawer the other day. Actually I only wanted to rearrange my pen box then one thing led to another and I ended up rearranging the whole 3 drawers (well, since some of the pens and pencils and markers found themselves their own little corners spread out among the three drawers over the past months). I found my airplane ticket stub dated 12 Nov 2006, the last time I was in Malaysian soil. It has been almost 6 months since I last pay the ELITE toll and now the rate has risen up.

Funny thing happened on that flight after taking-off at 4pm because the plane had to return to KLIA almost 1 hour into the journey as it flew over the tip of Sumatra. We touched-down back at 7pm and had to stay for another 3 hours before the 'Carrier Man' replaced the cabin air-conditioner.

As the result, I missed my connecting flight at Manama, which meant I have to stay put in Muscat for a night (more like 4 hours only from 3am to 7am!) before finally being reloaded onto the 10am flight out to Dubai.

One Upmanship Game

I was having woefully days since the site 'closed-down' order by the consultant. I am not going to get into the itsy-bitsy details of it but personally I would think my consultant bungle-up big-time and is trying to make-up their initial deficiencies at the onset of this project.

On lighter note, this whole episode has made some of my fellow colleagues realised how inter-departmental dependencies was there for a reason. The sentence that I was used to hear - "no one can tell me what I can or cannot do" and "don't be more Christian than the Pope" or "in house acting consultant" when trying to point out my concern on some questionable practices now rang hollow. Added to the most ubiquitous mantra "This is how things get done, here!"

However, this incident took the whole cake.

We were having a walk-around of the site to identify the safety and quality issues that are impeding the works progress. As we were nearing the end of the walk-around with the consultants and the PMCs, someone queried in a light-hearted manner that being a Malaysian entity, were these the normal standard of quality to be expected in Malaysia generally? As the question was posed to the highest rank managers which happened to be non-Malaysian and have never worked there, they redirected the task of answering it to me. In my most diplomatic smile I retorted that these kind of quality was also not acceptable and should not have gone past first floor level of construction. However I could sensed that my honest assessment was not taken too likely by my non-Malaysian superiors and other multinational (from a specific country).

After the walk-around ended, one of the multinationals (whom I would love to have a banter with) came to me to show his displeasure of my 'low blows'.

"If Malaysian constructions were of high quality like you said, how was it possible that in the movie Entrapment starred by Sir Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones, there was a scene when the a lady pulled down a ceiling panel and the entire floor ceiling fell down with the wires and ducts dangling down?" in his most animated manner.

Suffice to say, I proved my point!

Reunion thingy

There was an informal reunion gathering at my old high school last week (31st March).

Some of my batchmates made it and send group pics to those who didn't made it (yours truly included of course) In my jovial mood (and mostly nostalgic) I just replied with a single comment - "WIDER SHAPED" - to the pics.
Yeah, most of us now looked wider on the waistlines. But somehow, when looking at the pics I could only see them still in their school uniforms; young and ambitiuos and 22 more years of life to be filled. Forget the waistline and the sleuth of modern sickness to follow. To me, whenever we meet, they will still be that 18 years old buddies whom we had shared time, space, moments and adolesences together. For a while, the memories flooded in and temporarily brought us to that moments, away from the current mid-life tribulations.