Moonshine

Singapore is rapidly losing its shine for me.

Oh, yeah, you can probably ignore the last post; it was probably just caused by a sugar down, after pigging out on ice cream for two days. Well, I bought two brands of chocolate sundae and had to compare them.

I want to pay my broadband bill. When I bought it I was promised that I could pay the whole year in advance. The shop I bought it at won't accept payment for my SingTel bill, no, you have to go to a 711 or a SingPost office. I go there. They will both only accept cash or NETS, neither will take credit card. I go online, surely you can pay your SingTel bill online as you can with every other telecom in the world, yes? No! No, there is no bill ID that you can enter and just pay, in fact even finding any sort of online payment method takes a while if you follow the links given to you on the bill itself as they only go to places that tell you about paying bills, not to anywhere that either tells you where to pay or lets you pay. No, in Singapore you have to register online first, and then they will post out a verification code. Get that? Post a code to you!

Sometimes this place is so 19th century!

But beyond that; why does SingTel make it so hard for me to do business with them?
Maybe it is just that it is not easy doing business with Chinese people? They think so totally differently. Most Whites that I have met here seem to shrug it off and accept that you cannot get a Chinese person to understand what you, as a European, think is a very basic concept. I wonder if I learn Chinese will I begin to understand it? As I began to understand so much about Russians (and Ukrainians) when I started learning Russian. (God! Russian is such a beautiful language!)


Was job hunting online this morning, I had spent three hours of searching and had something like 27 IE pages open. Then I tried searching on the Robert Walters SG site -- it crashed every instance of IE open. Hours of work lost.

Sure, you can say that I should have copied the links to a Word.doc. Or, I can say, well now I know not to use Robert Walters. Seems the easiest solution to me.

And yeah, I don't know how to get an em dash to work in HTML. It is so easy to do in Word. Have you ever noticed how much of our written language we have (essentially) lost since the invention of the typewriter? At its most basic you probably think that there are 26 letters in the English alphabet, don't you? After all, most people are satisfied with that answer. The truth is that there are lots of letters and grammatical signs that were once common but have now fallen into disuse because they are not on the keyboard. I used to know the ATSI codes for most of them, 'cos you could hold down the ALT key and then type the four digit ATSI code in to get a real apostrophe or smart quotes (open and close, single and double) or i dash, en dash, or em dash. Word handles the smart quotes automatically now, and can even sort out i dash and en dash correctly most of the time (but not em dash), and even turns three periods (full stops in English) into an ellipse. But still, so many letters are lost to us.


Today has been a waste.
Time spent job hunting was wasted. Time spent trying to pay my SingTel bill was wasted. Time spent trying to get an ID card (as distinct from my employment pass) was wasted. I don't think that anything has been successfully accomplished today.

Except maybe for my early morning walk along the beach.
I did successfully walk along the beach.