Embarrassing Moments

19th October 2005, Wednesday

I'm sure everyone has their skeletons hidden within their closets, including a whole truck full of embarrassing moments in which they had to endure in their lifetime, I had my fair share of those which I shared with my colleagues during lunch today, more on that in a while...

Feeling really drowsy the entire day, perhaps the usual midweek lerthagy, of course the cool weather this week from the torrential rain did not help the cause at all...

Lance is back to work today, as he felt a tinge of injustice with the fact that he was obliged to come to work for 5 days a week as part of his final year project when he doesn't get paid a single cent (Note: Alisha gets paid for even her one month of service) while his course mates who are doing their final year project back in their poly just need to report to work only like 3 days a week; of course it does not go down well with him.
In addition, the work here is disturbingly routine and one can get more easily before he/she knows it.. Lance knows, Alisha too, but it's too late for them to regret about their fate....

JxMMy is back too but felt out of place having been missing for the past 1 and a half days. I feel he should really take the entire week off, to tend to the needs of his ill-stricken spouse but JxMMy is staunch about making his presence felt around here or else his horde of fans would be utterly disappointed...
Anyway before we knew it, he is back on leave in the afternoon...well he have still like 50 odd days of leave to clear?
Even if he ran out, our supervisor would gladly offer him many unaccounted off-in-lieu...

During lunch today, everyone "ta-pao" (pack lunch) back to eat at the lounge area, including BY; and we had a hearty chat including me feeling disgusted for Lance who wretchedly spent $4.50 for a pathetically small "kosong" prata and a paper-thin egg prata but came with a pack of rendang curry... Unanimously, we both felt it definitely does not justify that cost...

We chat about some embarrassing moments we had experience and here are the 2 accounts which always dazzled the girls especially on how I respond to that ultra-awkward situation:

1) Back in my JC days, we have the useless GP (General Paper) lectures. Seriously everyone knew the lectures had simply no aid to our GP results and a blatant waste of 2 hours of our normal cirriculum weekly. Many tried to "ponten"*(skip) the lectures which force the HOD to enforce the attendance sheet for each lecture. Anyway there I was attending a lecture by this pig-head GP teacher (she was really quite a nice teacher, by my JC's standards, but just had that bloated pig head, I think even she knows it). It was Monday evening then, and I had a long day including a pretty tiring physical training session in the morning.The lecture hall was cozy (most probably because of the absence of air conditioning which was always the case back then) and her rumblings gradually became a remedy to cure even the most serious case of insomnia and eventually my eyelids got heavy and I dozed off...

Then I felt a nudge from the person sitting beside me and when I opened my eyes, I could see the pig -head teacher pointing my direction, broadcasting to the entire lecture hall containing at least half the population of students in my level, "that boy over there, please go and wash up your face..." She did not lambast me or anything, nothing malicious and stern about her approach but enough to be make me the joke within a very mundane 2 session-long lecture...

I did not particularly felt the brunt of the whole embarrassment, just rubbing my bleary eyes and indeed went to wash up before trying to keep myself awake for the remaining of the lecture.

However a good thing was there no one remembers about that incident after the lecture because no one remembers my presence back in JC anyway....

2) Back when our workplace was situated behind NUS and NUH, I will always source for free transport from Bouna Vista MRT station and often resorted to taking free rides on NUH shuttle buss or the staff feeder bus. Everything was smooth for a while when I hitch a ride on the latter till the authorities got complains from the staff themselves that the bus was always full and they suspect a lot of "illegal" hitch-hikers were the cause of that.

Thus the bus driver then had to ask for identification of the people hopping on board of the bus...However I didn't know of the new ruling so with my headphones on, I cooly slither up to the bus only to be halted by the driver, exclaiming with a sound of irritation and impatience, "Aye..pass..pass".. Looking bewildered but fully understand my predicament, I acted as if I started to look for my pass but was irk by the fact that I may had forgotten to bring it along with me or misplaced it while I slowly alight the bus and made my way to take the normal public transport

The girls were amazed by how cool and unaffected I was when dealing with such incidents that put one such awkward spotlight, but seriously the best way to handle it was to treat it in such muted way rather than what they say to "dig a hole in the ground and hide within the abyss and never see the daylight again" as they would die of embarrassment...

Japanese word of the day:恥かしい ~ha-zu-ka-shi-i~ (Embarrassing) There are more embarrassing stuffs I had experienced in my last 26 years of existenece but I would have to kill you if I tell you.