3p||<

Now that I’m back at work after my short break, one of the things I will miss is my morning cycling ritual.

L-A’s school is quite near home and within range of my limited cycling abilities, so every school day morning, I would strap her into her little seat and we’ll then enjoy a short bicycle ride to her school.

Guess these moments will be one of those memories I will recall fondly later in life. Wonder if she will remember as well?

I have not visited the place probably for around 10 years, but Bukit Timah Plaza used to be one of my favourite haunts as some of us guys would go there to check out the PC games that were available in the shops. We would then lug our haul to a friend’s place and spend our time having fun!

There was one day at work when we had some visitors from other countries coming to the office. There was this particular guy from the African continent who was exceptionally tall and he towered over everyone else.

One of the girls in office may have made a Freudian slip when describing him as “tall, dark and long”. There was an awkward silence before laughter burst out as she realised her gaffe and tried to explain that she just wanted to emphasise his height.

During my time in Primary School, one of my favourite ice-creams was this cheap chocolate ice cream that came with 2 ice cream sticks and I suppose it was meant to be shared with a friend. I remember wolfing down the whole thing myself though…

There I was, deep in the jungles of Brunei on Jungle Survival Training with a bunch of other trainees. Our objective for the day was to navigate our way back to base camp from the middle of nowhere, sharing between the 7 of us one set of combat rations that was meant to feed only 1 person.

As our weary legs trudged through the various slopes and terrain that the Brunei jungle could throw at us, the guys behind me came to a sudden halt. When I looked back, I could see that a few of them were terrified and their gaze was affixed on a tree branch.

Coiled around the branch that I had just walked past was a big green snake. Not sure if it was venomous, but if one of us had just got bitten, there would have been no way to do an emergency evacuation since we did not have a way to accurately describe where we were.

I was taking my shift at one of the games stalls set up by my JC class for the funfair when I overheard a comment shared between 2 guys who were patronising the stall: “Ay, let’s spend all our coupons at this stall and try to burst the water balloon. The girl is wearing a white T-shirt!”

I turned around and saw that the next classmate who was due for a turn under the water balloon was a female classmate who had unwisely chosen to wear a white T-shirt for our water-based game…

If there’s anything I dislike, it’s being wronged for something I didn’t do, or people trying to pull a fast one on me.

When I was a prefect in Secondary School, we were not allowed to bring food and drinks back to our classrooms. I spotted this guy trying to sneak a drink and I nicely told him to consume the drink in the canteen. He went back to the canteen and I later happened to spot him attempting to leave the canteen by a different route.

Being sufficiently annoyed, I tracked him to his classroom and promptly booked him for that “offence”. He was similarly annoyed that I actually bothered to track him down. Well, I was just doing my job that day…

I had to utter that phrase countless times while I serving my duties as a prefect in Primary School. There was a system set up in the school staircases where a line was drawn down the center of each flight of steps and all students were supposed to keep to their left so they will not collide with students coming in the opposite direction.

One of my fond memories as a child was siesta time in kindergarten!

There will come a time every afternoon when the teachers turned off all the lights and all of us little kids will help them to lay out some coloured straw mats (I distinctly remember some of the mats were red and blue) on the floor where we will all lie down and take our naps.

Too bad we all have to outgrow siestas (at least here in Singapore)…

It was sometime back that I went on a tirade against a company (sounds like “aged pee”) for their abysmal quality in notebooks and you might have wondered what I have done with the notebook since then.

Well, even though they acknowledged that there were critical engineering and quality issues with that line of notebooks, they were willing to let me trade it in for about 10% of its value so I could purchase another piece of junk that they pass off for a notebook. Once bitten, twice shy. Twice bitten, go and die.

Rather than throw good money after bad (which is what I told the person), I dismantled the entire notebook in a futile attempt to see if anything else other than the RAM and HDD could be salvaged.