Skip to main content

Bad Traffic

Today I have a meeting in KL. I dreaded the jam and sure enough, there was an unusual traffic just right after the toll at the Mont Kiara end of NKVE. It's quite bad and I cursed at the traffic and the bad quality of life in Malaysia.

Then, I remembered my positive spin... how can I see a positive side to traffic jams? The reason we have such bad jams is because of the progress the country have made. We may cursed at the corruption of our political leaders but it is also them that put Malaysia in the world map and the progress that we have today - everyone have the ability and wealth to own a car.

If it is not because of progress, I would still be a clerk. Considering my background where my father is a auto spare parts supervisor. But today, my life is vastly different from how I grew up. In my other posts, I said that I grew up in KL but my baby sitter home did not have water pipe and we have to pump water out of a well. Well! That's ancient.. and it was just maybe 35 years ago! So we did make progress. Despite the flaws of our current leaders, Malaysia has prospered.

We should be thankful :)

After my meeting in the heart of KL, as I leave the city at 1pm, I also met with an unusual jam. This one is a standstill. After suffering for 30 minutes, I found out that it was due to a truck stalling right at the mouth of a tunnel in Jalan Tun Razak. Stupid truck! I wish the authorities actually checked the condition of truck instead of approving after taking bribes. If they had done their job, we wouldn't be stuck in a jam. What's the positive spin to this?

My positive take is that while we are all stuck, the traffic right after the stalled truck was smooth. Super smooth all the way to PJ. I bet you that someone who came out of KLCC would be surprised at how smooth the traffic was. And they would be wondering if it was a public holiday somewhere (don't we sometimes have this though?) And I bet you that someone who was rushing for a meeting appointment would be thankful for the smooth traffic and will be able to meet their customers on time.

You can't win all the time. At times, you lose and somebody else gains :D

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

One million daimoku

In April 2008, Anne and I started our resolution to chant 1 million daimoku in one year. It's already Jan - and I am only one-third of the way. I really need to WORK HARDER - coz I made another 1 million resolution from Jan - Dec 2009. The chart you see on the right of this post is a chart that we put beside our butsudan. It tracked our chanting progress. Every 20 minute, we coloured one box. Mine is the one on top, Anne's at the bottom - you can see that she made much better progress than me! Hmmm.. come to think of it, I am not even at one third!! --- Edit 22 March 2009: Thanks to Google, a couple of friends in faith found this post and they want to know how many hours of chanting is required to achieve one million diamoku. Here it is. Based on our publication in Malaysia, 20 minutes of chanting is equivalent to 1,000 daimoku. So, one hour is 3,000 daimoku. 1 million would take about 333 hours. --- Edit 8 April 2018: Checking my blogger stats, this post is pretty hi

Amazon Alexa in Malaysia - does it work well? A review...

Feels like Christmas in September. Thanks to Doktor Cinta, my friend who live in Australia. Back in July, Amazon Australia had a Prime Day. I joined the trial using my usual Amazon account and ordered an Echo Dot, Echo Plus (the taller one with a built-in hub) and a Kindle Paperwhite, shipping them to a dear friend in Australia. My friend visited Malaysia and brought the Echos with him two weeks ago. You can imagine my thrill to get my hands on Alexa and start using it... in Malaysia. As a side story, sometimes, you can't believe how events are aligned properly to prepare my place to be a connected home - I bought a superb new mesh network router, eero (by the way, I'd say it's one of my best electronic purchases after an iPhone! It is that good), which acts as a strong WiFi backbone as it blanket my double storey house with a reliable and fast WiFi. Then, maxis launched Fibernation program which let me to upgrade my internet from 6 Mbps (pathetic) to 100 Mbps wit

Who is the official service center for Seiko watches?

The Great Blue; Kinetic Auto Relay 100M I have a 15 year old Seiko watch which I love very much. It's a Great Blue series and kinda one-of-its-kind, because Seiko discontinued it as soon as it was launch. So, there are very limited number of units. The watch I own is a Kinetic Auto Relay which means it is powered by my arm movement. And the nice thing about it is that if I don't use my watch, it hands will not move but the Kinetic capacitor which stores energy (up to 4 years of inactivity) will continue to keep track of the time. When I picked up the watch and shake it a bit, it will wake up and auto adjust to the correct time whether it is AM or PM. But my watch is 15 year old. At that age, the capacitor cannot hold a lot of charges. These days if I left my watch unused for 2 days, the watch stopped keeping time. I need to get the capacitor replaced. But who is the official service center for Seiko? The thing about luxury watches is that if you don't send it to