About coffee time, well the private firms also allowed you to enjoy coffee at 10 and 3 everyday but they have tea lady who will make rounds and deliver your favorite drink. You need a break because you're not going to sit 8 hours straight. I remember the tea lady in GAA (consultant firm in PJ) who I called Auntie, she made this delicious teh tarik. I just gave her my favorite mug and she will deliver it right to my desk. My colleagues and I will have short break and gossiping while munching on the biscuits in squared tin and sipping the hot delicious tea and start kutuk our bosses or fooling around with each other. But hey, because you're having tea in the office, your boss can summon you while the biscuit still in your mouth!
I always had to have my breakfast in the morning before I started work. I chosed the 8:30-5:30 time frame but you know since you in KL and you've got children sometimes you have ample time before the bells ring and sometimes you don't. I normally can had my breakfast before I punched my card but sometimes I was late like I only have 10 minutes before 8:30, so what I did was I punched the card first and go out having my breakfast. I know legally it's wrong and unethical but I normally will take about 20 minutes. No more tea until lunch and that's all. I will have my afternoon coffee in my office. I know that some of my bosses don't like me going out after 8:30 but I only take 20 minutes and I always in the office until lunch time. I think this is much better than going out again at 10 because that time was the peak hours. People always come at that time and the officers in charge always went out for tea.
I also don't agree with the people who came in at 7:30 and then went out for breakfast at 8:00 and came back around 8:30 or so. Next thing you know at 4:30 they're going back already. OK, I'm not a saint and just because I start working at 8:30, it's not fair for me to talk about others who start working early, right? Well, I suggest the government should revert back the working hours to be from 8:30 to 5:30 or better still from 9:00 to 6:00. Reason is people is sending the kids to school early in the morning and now that the school bus fee is very expensive, you would want to send the kids yourself. You also would like to pick them up yourself.
Traffic jams? Well, it would not sound KL and urban without traffic jams right? Perhaps we should consider provide a cable car like in San Fransisco or just improve and enhanced our public transport. The reason people don't want to take a public transport is because you have to change the train like 3 times? After that hop in to another connecting bus to get to your office and not mentioning of the sardines cramped like once you're in the train. I remember I took a Putra to go shopping at Masjid India. Yes, it was convenience because you don't have to find parking lot and pay for it. No, it was not enjoyable because you have to breathe a limited oxygen in a cramped space with lots of smell (perfume and stale sweat) on the way back. So, next time I want to shop there, I rather embrace the jams than taking the train. I could always bike here because they provide a bicycle lane and those whose not biking always give ways and yield to pedestrians and bikers. In Malaysia, I will be in the front news run by some motorist the first day I bike my way to school or to office. OK, enough of it and let's read MM's good articles on saving. Hello Pak Lah, she's right we have to change our way of living. Why don't you start by selling those luxury jets and yachts of yours and give the money to rakyat as goodwill.
Wednesday June 18, 2008
You walk the talk first
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR
The Government wants us to change our lifestyles to cope with inflation. It is easier said than done since most people were having it difficult even before the hikes. The Government must first set an example by doing things it should have done long ago.
Domino effect: The latest fuel price hike will set off a chain reaction, making almost everything more expensive.
WITH the recent hike in fuel prices and the Government’s exhortations for us to change our lifestyles in order to cope, may I provide here some suggestions for the Government and those who work for it to “share our burden”.
- Stop having meetings, especially out at resorts, far enough away to be able to claim transport allowances. Have online meetings instead or teleconferences. Use Skype or chat.
- No need to order special pens, bags, T-shirts, notepads and other goodies for those same meetings.
- No need to order kuih for mid-morning or teatime meetings in government offices, or nasi briyani lunches for those meetings that happen to end just at lunchtime.
- Cancel all trips for government servants to conferences overseas unless they return with full reports of what they did there, who they met and what they learnt and how they mean to apply what they learnt at home. Ask them to do presentations to colleagues who did not get to go, on the most interesting and important papers that they read.
- Scrutinise invoices for contracts to make sure they are truly reflective of what those projects or supplies cost.
- Stop elaborate launches for government programmes. In particular, stop the buying of souvenirs, special batik shirts, corsages, bouquets and caps.
- Make all civil servants and politicians travel economy class. That means really travelling at the back of the plane and not buying full fare economy class tickets that allow them to be upgraded to Business Class.
- Stop having the full complement of police escorts to cut down on petrol costs. If they need to be somewhere by a certain time, start earlier like the rest of us. Wouldn’t be a bad thing for them to also experience a traffic jam.
- Once a week (or more), have ministers use public transport so they know what everyone else has to suffer. This might provide them with the incentive to improve them.
- Once a week, let ministers go to a market to buy food for their families with instructions to not spend more than RM100.
- Get ministers to carpool. They might get more work done just by being able to talk to each other to see what can be coordinated between their ministries. For instance, the Ministers of Health and Women could discuss what to do about women’s health issues in the car on the way to work. Maybe have a secretary to travel in the front seat to take down notes on what was discussed. By the time they get to their offices, things can get implemented.
- Once a month, get civil servants to work with one disadvantaged group in order to be better able to appreciate their problems. It could be blind people one month, hearing disabled people the next, orang asli the following month and people living with HIV/AIDS after that.
- We could start buddy systems which pair one civil servant with one disadvantaged person and at the end of it, ask each pair to make recommendations on how to make life better for each other. This might get rid of the problem of desk jockeys, people who never stray very far from their desks yet make policies for people they know nothing about.
- Have PA systems that shout out the name of the officers who have to serve people at government offices so that people get the services they came for and don’t have to keep coming back just because the officer was out having coffee.
- No counter should be left unmanned for more than five minutes before the officer is paged to go back to their stations. This should cut down waiting time for the public and save them transport costs in having to keep returning just to get one thing done.
- Government officers who lose people’s files should be fined and have their names publicised for being careless and causing inconvenience to the public. Instead of making the public travel to their offices several times to deal with their problems, they should travel to go see their client and deal with it right there and then.
- And every officer who goes out of the office should be given a reasonable time to get his work done after which he is expected back in office so he doesn't waste time doing something else.
- And newspapers should save paper by reporting real news rather than non-news that they carry, particularly nonsensical utterances by politicians.
As they say, we need to do this all together in order to make a difference. So if the Government and politicians make these lifestyle changes, I will do my part and change mine.
Source: http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/6/18/focus/21566187&sec=focus
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