The return.

Yes yes, at long last. After what seemed like years, I'm finally back home again. Not that I missed home that much, I just can't stand staying there any longer.

Good news, I was excused. Bad news, I had to stay under house arrest. Here's the week's activities.
Monday: Wake up, eat, sleep, eat, sleep, eat, sleep.
Tuesday: Wake up, eat, sleep, eat, sleep, eat, sleep.
Wednesday: Wake up, eat, sleep, eat, sleep, eat, sleep.
Thursday: Wake up, eat, sleep, eat, sleep, eat, sleep.
Friday: Wake up, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, go home.

You see, this is how we serve our nation. This is how we use our taxpayers' money. (Oh wait, I forgot to mention that 'eat' as mentioned above refers to the reluctant consumption of what one may deem as food only when placed under extreme levels of food deprivation.) And at the end of it all, all you get is news that you have to re-attend the next course due to your absence in the field.

Simply put, I cannot find a reason why I was 'requested' to live in a 'well maintained room' for five days. Not to mention, the television was supposed to be 'left untouched' because they felt that while the rest were suffering outfield, people with an excuse (I should clarify, a Medical Excuse) should be left to suffer in camp without any form of entertainment, except for counting lampposts around the block, or the number of tiles in the toilet, or the number of fishes the old man sitting on the other side of the fence manage to catch during his short (five-hour) fishing trip by the river (canal). And as you watch the old man reel in the fishes, you wish he would give you a helping hand at an attempt to climb that dumb fence that seperates you from freedom. Of course, fat hope.

Five days of rotting is no joke. I have a phobia of beds, horrible-tasting food, sleeping, and stoning. It's a mental torture. You fight to keep yourself from going insane. You tell yourself, "Come on! Get a grip on yourself!" You stare out at the river (canal) and try to calm your mind. But alas, all that surfaces in your mind's like whatever floats on the dirty river (canal, dammit). You stop yourself from jumping into the path of the occasional vehicle that drives past, thinking that you're better of dead, or that even a trip to the nearby hospital would be some form of an escape, even if it meant going there in a stretcher or an ambulance.

Enough about the boredom.

I was once again exposed to the oh-so-common inefficiencies of the organisation. Try having to wait for 3 hours for someone whom you've never met in your life, and will most probably never, to 'grace' some occasion. The person walks in saying "I'm really sorry, I was held up in a meeting." And you wonder to yourself, "If you have so many meetings everyday, why does it seem that nothing ever gets done?" It is as if meetings have become a very convenient, but hardly convincing, excuse for these people.

Today, a friend of mine told me about some problem he had while having to get chairs. Yes, chairs, the ones you sit on at home, which the organisation is unable to provide for despite spending a sizeable percentage of the nation's GDP.
My friend, together with his team, went over to location A to borrow chairs. They could not supply enough due to some ongoing event that used up most of the chairs. Apparently, three groups of people in three locations in Singapore have to share one (I repeat, one,) set of chairs. No, it's not anything expensive, it's just plastic.
So they headed off to the neighbouring B to ask for help, where they claimed that they did not have enough to lend us, and we had to go to B-2 to get more, which was hardly of any help. Finally, they went to the cookhouse in a desperate attempt to get more chairs to meet the requirements. It may sound like we needed a couple of hundreds, but in actual fact, all we needed was fifty chairs. Yes, only fifty. Fifty only. Fifty. Only.

And everyone wondered why we could not borrow it from the people where we were holding the course, till someone voiced out that the reason we had to trouble so many other people and travel all over the island was because one of the personnel in the conducting team offended a logistics officer in the camp. As a result, the logistics officer did not want to support us with the chairs we need.

Professionalism: Not helping members of your own organisation because someone steps on your tail.

I cannot think of any organisation that screws up in such a manner.
I cannot think of another similar organisation that can screw up so badly.
I cannot comprehend why this organisation is unable to prevent such screw ups.
I can only concluded that this organisation is the mother of all screw ups.