Classic games

There is a reason why some books or movies are classics. They are aeons ahead of their generation, making milestones and turning points in history, and as a result, widely read and watched again and again.

But how about the classic computer game? Nowadays, it looks like the major market players in the computer gaming industry are churning out action, sports, and strategy games. Perhaps players now, when hearing the word ‘classic computer game’, would mention an oldie from one of the above genres. It’s easy to think of some titles: Street Fighter, Championship Manager and Warcraft spring to mind. However, there are very few pure adventure games in the market nowadays. The reason is quite simple. Market forces. Nowadays, as computers are getting more and more sophisticated, good graphics and music become stronger factors in attracting players to playing a game. Furthermore, as sports, action, and strategy games are virtually replayable, compared to adventure games which are unfortunately not, it is easy to see which market will tend to grow.

However, I tend to feel that the classic computer games are adventure games. Back in the early 80s and 90s where computers had far less capabilities then they do today, computer games were heavily focused on plot. Good writing and storyline were more important than graphics back then. In fact, some of these games, when played today, still have the power to captivate players (no mean feat, compared to today’s games) and immerse them into the gameworld.

Unfortunately, as most of these games run on DOS, they do not work very well on newer systems. For example, Windows Vista is not able to run a majority of games made before a certain period, and they have to be emulated with DosBox. Furthermore, when errors crop up during these games (bugs, hardware issues), the game company may not be ready to help, either not being very sure of the game, or that the company went bankrupt and was dissolved.

Yet another problem with such classic games, is the medium which they are stored on (floppy disks). The storage lifespan of such a disk is just less than 5 years, and then the data on it is gone. For game companies that went *poof* years ago, classic games can easily be lost. They are not like classic books or films in which newer copies can be made, because there is really no market for them. Even if game companies do not go bankrupt, they may decide to keep the game, and not release it to the general public because they deem it unprofitable. And because of this, another classic may be lost.

For me, there are certain games which I consider classic, and should not be forgotten. Take Colossal Cave for example. It is the first adventure game (interactive fiction), and readily avaiable for download. In fact, it is still remembered today. The magic word ‘xyzzy” in the game has reappeared in many games, usually as an ‘easter egg’ in tribute to the first adventure game ever made.

Monkey Island (I, II, and III) are classics as well. When watching Pirates of the Carribean, I usually think that Guybrush Threepwood could be the protagonist instead of Jack Sparrow. Lucas Arts also produced great games during the period of Monkey Island games, such as Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandango.

Legend Entertainment also produced great adventure games, such as Bob Bate’s Timequest, Eric the Unready, Death Gate, Superhero League of Hoboken and many more. However, it is hard to get (legal) copies of these games anymore, and classics such as these can easily be lost.

There are many other classic games out there, each with its own hallmark of distinction in the time which it was released in, and sadly, most of them will fade away after a few years, without anyone remembering them at all. In a hundred years, people will still remember most of the classic books and movies, but will remember a few, if any, of today’s classic games. And that will be a pity. 

Sleep

Three months into the school term, and I’ve finally settled into a relaxed routine – and about time too!

I snapped at nearly everything just last week. Short of going crazy and throttle somebody’s neck, I found out that a vigorous run with all caution thrown to the wind helps me to relax. While it is the kind of sadomasochism that I had wished to avoid, doing something else sounded too tame for me to even contemplate.

As one of the first years in polytechnic, I’ve come to realise that the term speeds by very quickly, so that I’m already staring at the end-of-semester examinations, just around the corner. While the rest of Singapore celebrates National Day, 9th August will be spent buried in my books. Now if that doesn’t make you marvel at how fast time goes as you get older, you’re probably too young, or had never in your life held the PETS text book back in your primary school life, or you were absent from school when your teacher taught the story of Rip Van Winkle. (If you ask me, he probably had a quality of sleep much, much better than the rest of the world!)

Now contrast this with Margaret Thatcher, along with probably the thousands of doctors-to-be going through their Housemenship living on the other end of the sleep-scale, and you would realise pretty quickly that sleep has been treated like a luxury: to be had when possible, but can be done away with if required. And these situations occur every day!

Is it then little wonder that the world is getting testier, the people feeling more stress than ever before? I believe that it is a social problem – people are unconsciously becoming a victim of a stereotype that they then perpetuate. Even in class, my classmates consider it a status symbol to go to bed after midnight (and to wake up just in time for school). With this phenomenon happening everywhere, we face the danger of harming our own bodies.

Sleeping for less time than the amount our body requires causes us to be more irritable the next day, be unable to concentrate properly, make poor decisions, cause loss of appetite, and makes us more tired easily during the day. Prolonged deprivation causes worse things to happen, like loss of sleep, headaches, and causes the body immune system to be weaker – you get sick even easily.

So, before you decide to take “just one more hour” out of your sleep time to finish that report the pointy-haired boss is waiting for tomorrow, remember the overwhelming disadvantages of that single loss versus pleasing your superior. The bodily imbalance that follows makes the trade-off unthinkable, if you value your health. As for those Margaret Thatchers out there, I implore you to let your subordinates get enough sleep! Not everyone is a superwoman like you!

Monty Hall

After surviving a harrowing week of outfield exercises (ATEC), I was looking forward to a week of relaxation (somewhat) before embarking on the next project. Unfortunately, a day after I settled back into my normal working routine, one of my friends posed this question in camp.

“You are a contestant on a game show. At the show’s conclusion you are presented with three doors, each of which conceals a prize. Behind one of the doors is a car, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The other two doors conceal goats. After you have selected one of the doors, the host will open one of the two remaining doors to reveal a goat. At this point you will have the option of opening the door you originally selected and taking the prize behind it, or switching to the remaining unopened door and going home with the prize it conceals.

Is it in your best interest to switch? Will it improve your odds? “

This of course, is the famous Monty hall paradox, in which the solution is counterintuitive. You should switch, as it improves your odds, ie, there is a 2/3 chance that you’ll get the car when you switch. However, the question is why?

At the start, it seems that as the host reveals a goat behind whatever door he opens, and that there are 2 remaning doors left, surely the chance of winning the car is 1/2. But this is not exactly so.

Look at it this way. Consider the scenario if the host immediately opens the door you have chosen, and gives you what lies behind it, without giving you the option to switch. What will your chances be to get the car? Obviously in this case, 1/3.

This means that there is a 2/3 chance that the car lies behind one of the other two doors which have not been chosen. 

Now, suppose the host opens the door and reveals a goat, and gives you the opportunity to switch doors. Remember, the host knows which door contains a goat and which door contains a car, so he will deliberately open the door containing a goat. (If he opens the door containing the car, well, he’s definitely not going to remain long as a host, when the producers of the show fire him after you claim the car as the prize..)

Although the host opens the door containing the goat, nothing has changed. There is still 2/3 chance that the car lies behind the 2 doors you haven’t chosen, although one is open. Therefore, switching doors is recommended.

To simplify and visualize, let us call the three doors A, B and C.

Assume that door A is chosen.

There is a 1/3 chance of a car behind door A, and a 2/3 chance of a car being either behind door B, or door C.

Whether or not doors B or C are opened, the chance of the car being behind either of them is the same, 2/3.

When the host opens a door, that door contains a goat. So there’s a 0/3 chance of a car being there.

So when door B (or C) is opened, the probability is still the same, that “2/3 chance of a car either behind door B, or door C”. So you should switch doors.

And that is exactly what I said, telling my friend that he should switch doors.

Apparently, the Monty Hall paradox created a stir in the 1990s when it was posed, as there was controversy over the answer given. For more details, you can always google “monty hall” and read up on it.

The Worst of Them All

It’s a known truth that, if you enlist into the army, you should get ready for small injuries now and then. Being a soldier involves a lot of rigorous trainings and physical activities and getting the occasional cut or bruise or even a painful blister is all par for the course and I’ve dismissed my fair share of them with nary a wince, as have many of my friends.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I experienced in the last few days however. By far the most debilitating ailment and experience that I’ve had since I’ve enlisted, I had/still have a (what I think it was/is) throat infection and lost my voice.

Though it might sound like some silly, small matter, having to cough incessantly and not being able to speak at all (and I mean, AT ALL) is a terrible thing to have to go through when you spend many long, waking hours training and having to work with your platoon mates.

Thanks to a combination of really bad luck, bad timing, weird weather and a series of increasingly important training sessions and tests that was both time- and energy-consuming, a little cough that I had when I booked in at the start of the week deteriorated into a full-blown cough ad nauseum (and I do mean ad nauseum. Some of the coughs induced a wave of pregnancy-like vomiting feeling) and a voice that got increasingly lower and softer.

Not only was it a terrible experience to be coughing every few seconds even late into the night (and I’m sure it wasn’t a great time for my bunkmates neither), but it was even worse when I couldn’t talk to any of my friends, couldn’t pass any announcements, couldn’t address any of my superiors, couldn’t sing along to any of the songs that accompanied our marches and had to spend excruciatingly long moments just to convey simple messages like “where did my buddy go?” or “I need to go to the toilet” or “I hate that I can’t talk at all and it’s really irritating”.

Plus, it sure made helping out as an assistant during live range sessions difficult. I don’t think the person I was helping could hear me at all.

I really hope that you guys out there reading this won’t have to go through these kinds of torturous experiences or have had to go through them before. I guess I’ll just try to rest as much as I can and down as much coolants as possible before I have to book back in. Wish me luck!

Trains

Any school-going or work-bound person is sure to find the situation a very, very common occurrence:

You are waiting at the platform screen doors, waiting patiently (or impatiently, depending on who you’re looking at). The train finally comes, after an agony that you would describe as outright “torture”. However, to your horror, the train is packed like sardines! It doesn’t matter, since the station that you’re at is a major interchange station – surely someone would alight?

Then, you sense the scent of Predators, hanging already crowding the screen doors – simply waiting for the very first opportunity to launch their bodies into the mess of bodies that is affectionately known as the rush-hour train squeeze.

Valiantly, you try to use your body to block some of these Predators so that there is at least some space for passengers to alight, only to see a few more Predators filling their bodies into the small space that you have created.

Logic is literally discarded when the train doors open. The Predators immediately rush into the train. Inside the confined space are passengers whom are trying to alight from the train. Feet are trampled on, hostile looks are exchanged, and aunties cluck their teeth, annoyed that the young ones do not know how to give way to boarding passengers.

You plug in your MP3 player (you’ll soon learn to start drowning yourself in music even before you reach the train station) and turn on the most hardcore heavy metal that you have in your playlist, and imagine yourself kicking everyone’s backsides. You’ll need the distraction, because having people breathing down your hands and neck literally drives you up the wall

The irony slams you below the belt when the train reaches the next station. Remember the Predators at the previous station? Now they’re the prey.

You’re afforded a preview of the sign of things to come through the water-stained windows. The hungry longing to be a train – you would have thought that the world was meant to live on a train.
I still remember something that my General Paper tutor said to my graduating class: “After you’ve read so much about the state of the world, I won’t be surprised if you all turn into the same cynical adults that you all hated as a child. I sincerely hope you won’t [turn cynical]. Our world needs people like you to make a difference.”

Somehow, somewhere, is a vicious cycle that causes people to hurt and harm each other. We, as the next generation, need to do something differently to break this cycle. Despite the problems of our society, our world still can be saved. The organisers of the “Save Our Earth” concert held recently know that, and hold strongly onto this conviction. It is like a ship cutting through the ice-berg to reach the North Pole: it will take a lot of willpower to stay the course, and not lose heart of the indifference that is clouding the world.

I caught myself: and just in time! Being cynical is easy. You start to think the worse of the world, and that is when indifference starts to creep in. Let that fester, and soon you would find yourself among the ranks of the Predators. (Not that they would welcome you or anything; they just don’t care.)

I smiled at one of the Predators, a newly-joined 20 year old member, to his puzzlement. He looked at me in bewilderment, and then jostled with the other Predators into the open train. I sure hope that I’ve started him thinking.

Order Of The Phoenix

With all the hype surrounding the Harry Potter releases in July, I got invited along to watch the Harry Potter movie Order Of the Phoenix on Friday. After watching the movie though, I was rather disappointed.

Basically, the movie does not follow the details in the book at all, and glosses over many important points and changes part of the storyline. Perhaps people who have not read the book may find the movie more appealing, but even then, parts of the movie will not make sense to those who have not read the book.

Here are the main gripes I have about the movie. For one, it focused too much on unimportant scenes such as flying from Privet Drive to Grimmauld Place, the revealing of aforesaid place and the Room of Requirements, and even the landscape when Harry first writes his letter to Sirius. While perhaps movie directors like to play about with special effects, are they really important for this movie, and do they actually contribute to the plot line? Take the flying sequence for example, where Harry and gang flies above the water, and Harry swerves past a ship. Sure, it looks cool. But then, questions will no doubt be raised such as:

“How come the muggles didn’t notice him flying, and why would Harry even take such a risk, knowing that muggles should not notice magic, given that the Ministry had sent him the letter detailing his expulsion?”

For two, I’ve thought that the movie cut and pasted scenes from the book such that they fit into the movie. Take the scene with the Black Family tree, which was shown during Christmas break in the movie. However, it was when Harry first arrived in Grimmauld Place when the Tree was mentioned in the book.

Next, the movie incorporates elements in the book which does not make sense in the movie at all. For example, when the movie introduces Luna Lovegood. She is seen reading an upside down magazine of the Quibbler. But the movie does not follow up on the Quibbler; Rita Skeeter isn’t even in the movie at all. The Quibbler angle in the movie is not followed up at all, and shouldn’t even be in there. Another scene that doesn’t make sense is when Sirius asks Kreacher to “get out” when he interrupts Harry and him in a conversation. From the book, this is a pivotal point because Sirius’s order for Kreacher to get out eventually leads him to his death, as Kreacher betrays him to the Death Eaters. Nowhere in the movie however, mentions this, and therefore again, that part is redundant. Again, in the book, Lupin and Mrs Weasley come to realize that Sirius looks as Harry as a revived James Potter, rather than a godchild, but the movie poorly raises this point up. Even just before Sirius dies in the movie when Bellatrix shoots the killing curse at him, which conveniently knocks him into the veil (he refers to Harry as James), it is very loosely connected, and people who have not read the book will be even more confused to the misnaming. Side note: In the book, when Sirius falls into the veil, it reads “The second jet of light hit him squarely on the chest” (The first jet was a red light) and “Harry saw the look of mingled fear and surprise on his godfather’s wasted, once-handsome face as he fell through....” This clearly implies that the light that hit Sirius was not the killing curse, as his expression would not have changed to one of fear and surprise (Sirius was laughing before he was hit by the light, and wouldn’t have such an expression on his face.)

It seems to me that the movie just tries to make it seem as dramatic as possible, revamping many scenes from the book. Fred and George’s disruption of the Owls and subsequent escape, Umbridge’s many decrees and Filch’s overexaggeration, as well as them trying to break into the Room of Requirement, the duel with Dumbledore and Voldemort comes to mind, and that it glosses over what actually happened.

What I feel could have been done better was the portrayal of the characters, the film could have showed a bit more of Harry’s angst, rather than bits and pieces of anger. Furthermore, Harry showed little emotion at the end of the movie when Sirius died, which is rather surprising, considering that he lost someone considered as family. The more important parts of the books, at least, those that would have an impact on future films could have been included in this film. The locket in Grimmauld Place and the mirror would have been good for a start.

While no doubt that the actors were quite good in this film, particularly Snape and Umbridge, this movie has far too many flaws for it to be a good one.

As such, I am rather disappointed by the movie and hope that Book 7 : Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows would be much better than the movie Order of the Phoenix.

Lessons from PTP

On Thursday, my Physical Training Phase (PTP) officially came to an end and I graduated on to my 9 week Basic Military Training (BMT) phase. So, after spending a full four weeks at Pulau Tekong, there’s some little truths of life that I’ve come to understand:

-That there really are all sorts of people out there. Of course, we’ve known since young that there are many different types of people but, at least for me, growing up I’ve been mostly exposed to only certain types of people. Sure, everyone had their differences but, at the end of the day, I understood these types of people. In the last few weeks, I’ve met people who I not only couldn’t get a handle on, but just when I thought I figured them out, would act or speak in a certain way that would totally throw me off track. Culture shock indeed.

-That I’m actually capable of waking up at unearthly hours and still find energy to do back-to-back activities all the way till the night. And I thought waking up at 6am to head to secondary school was tough, in those days.

-That, physically and mentally, a person’s limits are actually far beyond what they actually feel is possible.

-That, despite ridiculous amounts of stress and dirt, drinking gallons of water every day and getting a minimal amount of sleep is good enough to keep the skin relatively pimple-free. Unless you wear helmets (with straps that push perspiration onto your face) for continuous periods of time.

-That my feet are capable of getting multiple blisters on the same spot. And that I can actually continue running and marching despite their presence.

-That powder and baby wipes are my best friends.

-That there is such a thing as too much chicken. I think I’ve devoured a whole farm’s worth of drumlets and wings during the last few weeks.

A National Service Hero?

We’ve got a NS hero. You would’ve heard of the fiasco via an email.

What can we learn from the action of such a guy who is seeking justice? How can we apply it on our lives?

It’s a matter of acknowleding choices, making them and having the courage to act them out. Do you have what it takes? 

Well, I’m late for this I know, now that this piece of news has already been blown all over blogosphere, and practically all Netizens would have either read of it, or have participated in the publicity through various forms of distribution.

I’m referring to the complaint email sent by PM Lee’s son 2LT Li which resulted in him receiving punishment for his act of justice.

Some may comment he dared to do what he did because of his special family background. But really, let’s put that aside and treat him as just another individual.

What do we see from this action? That a guy has found some injustice in his workplace, and he deemed the responsibility to be on himself to see that the case gets resolved and the party-in-crime gets his due penalty.

In life, there are many times when we have to do what we need to do. But sadly, not all of us do it. Many reasons and many people will come and prevent you from doing what you should.

“Don’t be the hero!” your friend will tell you.

“It won’t help. You are fighting against a whole troop/company/gang” another friend will also tell you.

You look at the facts on hand, and realised that it could be a hard battle you might be facing, and suddenly, you get cold feet.

That is just one of the possible scenarios. Others could be where you are at risk of losing that person’s friendship by revealing the “crime” he did.

Morally, you should uncover the unjust deed. Then, personally, do you have to be the one to do it?

I was meaning to write an article about this, when I read a fellow blogger Narev’s post on his dilemma of whether he should do what he feels right to do, yet is caught in between due to other factors. But I wasn’t able to pen my thoughts as they were clustered.

Now, this event came in time for me to crystallise them and to have this post written.

So my friends, the fact that you are caught in dilemmas only mean that you are faced with choices. Every one of us does have a choice to make. So what we need to do is to weigh out the consequences of making one, and having the courage to go ahead and act upon the choice.

Of course, lots of care and sensitivity has to be taken into consideration if the matter is touchy so that you get the differences ironed out while minimising resulting conflicts or unhappiness.

Even when you have decided to choose one of the alternatives, that itself opens up to few more choices of how you can handle the situation. Communication comes in various forms. Conflicts can be managed in several ways.

Making the first choice tells you what you want to achieve.

Making the second choice tells you how to achieve it.

I hope you are making the right choice, one that is to the best of what you discern to be at the time. And dare to act, and dare to be responsible. 

Hanabi Resturant

If you read my review of Ajisen Ramen a few weeks back, you would know that I’m a huge fan of Japanese cuisine, a veritable Jap food fanboy who chomps down on sashimi and sushi any chance he can. So, for my very first bookout weekend, I decided to commemorate the moment by heading down to a slightly pricier Japanese restaurant with my friends to indulge my taste buds. For the occasion, we chose Hanabi Japanese Restaurant.

Located in a very ulu corner of King’s Arcade on Bukit Timah Road, Hanabi is a quaint (if hard to find) little restaurant whose delicate Japanese-styled décor and extensive ala carte buffet menu seem to promise a bang for the buck (or the almost forty bucks I spent, to be exact).

From the moment we sat down, the service was excellent. The waitresses who served us were friendly and effusive (if slightly disorienting since they were mainland Chinese and rattled off Japanese dish names with distinct Chinese accents), showering us with suggestions for choice delights as well as serving sizes. While some dishes took a while to arrive, most of the food reached our table pretty fast, most of the time still piping hot (and in the case of the sashimi platters, appropriately cold).

The food itself was vastly polarizing, with every dish either a hit-or-miss affair.

The chawanmushi (steamed egg) bowls were delicious starters, soft, steaming hot and intensely tasty but not jelak. The garlic rice, while looking suspiciously like Chinese fried rice, was amazing and provided a staple so strong it could have been a dish all by itself. The agedashi tofu, too, was a sumptuous treat, crispy on the outside but delicately soft on the inside and served with gravy that is just the right amount of salty.

Of course, the perennial favourite of Singaporean Japanese food fans is sashimi and here, Hanabi performs admirably. The sashimi mixed platter (containing such faves as salmon, tuna and cuttlefish slices) was phenomenal, served in generous amounts and all lip-smackingly fresh. Every slice of every sashimi on the plate was disalarmingly live-tasting and each had its own distinct taste, with the sotong slices providing a good, tangy chew to end off the dish with a bang. In fact, the platter was so good we actually ordered it several times throughout the meal, so much so that we were all stuffed with raw food by the time we settled our bill.

For every great dish we had, though, we met with an equally un-great one. The tempura prawns, another favourite locally, was disappointing. Although the batter was crispy, it was tasteless and bland, the prawns limp and soft. Even after dipping them in copious amounts of gravy, the dish was still decidedly underwhelming. The zaru soba, one of my most oft-eaten dishes, was equally bland, the gravy tasting oddly like turpentine or something similarly artificial. The shitake mushrooms, too, were disappointing, shriveled little blotches which tasted nothing of the type that I’ve eaten (or, actually, nothing much at all).
All in all, the dining experience here was decent, with some outstanding dishes (the sashimi platter is a must try) and good ambience and service. Some of the other dishes were disappointing, though, and I’m not sure the rather hefty price tag is fully justified. Good for a weekday lunch, maybe, if someone is treating.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Hanabi Japanese Restaurant is located at 559 Bukit Timah Road #01-03 King’s Arcade

1st In-Camp Training - Day 1: The Parade

1st In-Camp Training Day 1
The Parade

11 June 2007

[This is Part 2 of a series of posts on my first In-Camp Training]
(Previously, Day 1: The In-Processing)

If you have been to Taiwan for overseas training before, you would have seen Singapore’s 1970 architecture. Short and long blocks, with a typical staircase right at the centre of the building.

The stair-case is totally sheltered, with multiple holes built into the rear for ventilation; stories had it that these buildings were specially designed and constructed by Singaporeans – probably to help the staff there cope with the homesickness.

At any rate, if you’ve missed the chance to savour one of Singapore’s architecture legacies, you have one last chance – at Tanjong Gul camp.

I don’t know about the history of this camp, but it seems and feels quaint (big word to mean that the building was pre-my-birth; also known as ANCIENT). In fact, with the entire length of the building being windows, and the breadth containing the doors, it was really breezy. I love breezy places, and Tanjong Gul is set just right next to the sea, so we get quite a stiff wind each evening, which can lull you to sleep within minutes.

After I dumped my green ali-baba bag (I was among the last few batches to use the similarly quaint (see previous paragraph for definition) method of transporting my equipment into the cupboard, I tried to attach the provided rifle sling to the Ultimax 100. The strange thing was, I couldn’t get the holes to line up at the rear of the strap. I took out the strap, tried to do it the other way round. No dice either.

Finally, I took the strap and gave it a good strangling. Then one of my platoon mates, who is a military enthusiast, saw me in the act of murder and asked, “What are you doing, trying to put a M16 sling onto the SAW?” (Note: SAW in Singapore’s context means the Ultimax) That was when I re-examined the strap and then went all sheepish.

It was that lame, and so was I for falling for it; though it turned out fine after all once everybody discovered that it wasn’t a mistake.

Around half-an-hour later, after the initial happiness and confusion, we had to hurry down to the parade square below the main building for a CO’s parade.

There wasn’t much time to stand around, so my company’s nice CSM rounded up everyone else up, and shepherded us to the parade square, where a very blacked-faced instructor RSM faced the world.

It turned out that he wasn’t happy with the long and colourful hair many people had, so we spent a good 10 minutes listening to his lecture about how a person’s hair is an indicator of a person’s discipline.

While the rest of us ardently disagreed with cramping our hairstyles for the one week in-camp training, nobody spoke a word. It was his parade square, and a sacred ground where warrant officers rule supreme. No man, or officer for that matter would even barely dare breathe.

The parade itself was routine matter, but I nearly got cramp after having not done it for more than a year. We had flag-raising, the CO gave his speech, and we all took the SAF pledge together.

Next, we had a cohesion route march around the entire perimeter of the campus: 2.5 km of tarmac that stretched past the scrap metal recycling yards, shipping containers, and the very busy Tuas industrial estate. It was a weird feeling, being so close to a built-up area, yet far away from the usual urban bustle. If you can imagine a metal city, this was it. The only buildings that resemble residential estates would be the accommodation blocks right inside the camp.

I winced at the second round; You see, I have unusually large and fat thighs, which make a very bad combination with sweat-soaked pants. If you didn’t know bad news when you see one, I had a reeled in shock when I suddenly remembered that I was prone to groin abrasions. Well, to be exact, it was the abrasion that reminded me of that.

Too late!

[This is Part 2 of a series of posts on my first In-Camp Training]
(Previously, Day 1: The In-Processing)

Helpdesks

Sometimes, I wonder whether helpdesks are misnamed, and should be called helldesks instead. It’s very annoying when you call up the helpdesk, certain that something is wrong, and ascertained it to be due to a particular cause, and then face the helpdesk’s reply “No, sometimes it is due to .....”, and refuse to believe you.

Well, ok, refuse is a rather strong word. But they tend to exhaust all other (to your mind at least, improbable) alternatives, before agreeing with you. While most people at this point, myself included, would like to rant at them ("I isolated the cause of the problem in the first place, and you preferred to conduct all sorts of tests first instead of trusting me"), what good would it do so when they are the only people who can help you?

And if they are the only people who can help us, why are we so peeved with them? I’m very sure helpdesk personnel have to go through a set of questions to ask people, even if it seems that the problem is obvious. Besides, they have to ensure that nothing else is wrong. On the user’s side though, s/he may feel it particularly time-wasting, especially if there is an urgent project going on, and desperately needs the problem to be solved. Clearly, with such a problem, it is in the best interests to be polite and courteous to the helpdesk personnel, and wait for them (sometimes unbearably long) to come to the correct conclusion and help you.

Although of course, I sometimes feel that the helpdesk personnel should take some initiative and disregard protocol if the problem is obvious. In this case, acknowledge that the user calling for help is not a newbie, and there is something seriously wrong, thus warranting a call to the helpdesk which s/he would not normally make.

The second thing that really peeves me off with helpdesks is that some personnel only bother to give answers to those who are senior in rank. For example, in the SAF, an enlistee calling a certain helpdesk may receive cold replies and not much help, while an officer doing so may receive prompt and useful help for the same situation. Is this really the same in the working world? Because well, in the SAF, given that there are NSF officers, I can persuade some of them to call on my behalf, but when working as an employee, can I get my boss to do so?

In the service side, as a clerk, I deal with many people over the telephone, and in all my conversations, whether being scolded at by irate people or not, I’ve always maintained a calm, courteous composure. Surely then, for people being employed at helpdesks to answer calls, the need to be courteous, polite, as well as being understanding be even greater as that is their primary responsibility.