cookie-cutter comments

My father shouts “Kill! Kill lah!” with as much passion as he can muster, and I know he must be watching badminton or some such. Not a strange sentiment given how passionate he is about games. I remember a course in Anthropology I did back in the day during which we examined how games were like life, wars and such: conflict being the basis of our analysis. If a game is anything like war, my father presumably applies the same brutal passion to life, or so the pseudo-theory goes, which in this case can only be true.

Besides a robust disdain for politics in general, a disdain which ironically translates to maintaining an obsessive interest in the same, my father has a range of opinions about almost everything. Opinions, that is, that boil down to a simple fact: life is hard, ugly and people are the shites (sic); in his most florid declamations, he truly sounds as if he believes that “Hell is other people”.

Which I have been discovering. Not to sound uncommonly jaded for one so young (a questionable opinion of my own age, yes) but I’ve just about run the gammut of people who, in trying to make ends meet, are not afraid to cheat, lie, beg, steal, bitch, whine — not necessarily in that order — for what they want.

However, being in the “real world” populated by the people who believe that “life is hard, ugly and people are the shites” has left me, many times, to question the motivations behind people who are so willing to sell their integrity so cheaply.

This recent Thursday night out was a sort of example for me, a test case (?), an eye-opener. Not two feet away from where we (my friends and I) sat were a bunch of people in plainsclothes, who my friend identified as being “law-enforcers”. I won’t say the Police or Traffic police, but those details are sometimes unnecessary.

This same friend spent the first half of the night sneering at them, and the other half dancing on the seats and tables with them, the alcohol once again proving that social cohesion works best when you don’t know what you’re doing (or have no control over your basic motor skills; pick either).

What he said earlier in the night, however, made sense: these “law enforcement officers” were tossing back whiskeys and coke like there was no tomorrow, with no care in the world, while we plebes pick fights in the mud over scraps.

They probably didn’t bother who speculated about the money they were flinging about, which is probably worse. In training schools, apparently, these would-be officers are forced to accept bribes to make them jointly culpable with their senior officers… this, of course, is a rumour.

After a while, you get used to it: this is Malaysia, after all, the land of the helpless and the Internal Security Act.

But what happens if you know a decent fellow who begins walking the crooked path and worse, things you do, too?

This happened this evening as I finished dinner with him. He put his arm around my shoulders and promised me a ’share’ of the takings, after he cashes out his check, since I was instrumental in getting him the assignment for last night’s catastrophe. I protested, shocked and hurt, and he said he understood, that everybody wants to make money, got bills to pay, everyone needs a little something.

I said not me. I cannot and will not be bought. Not patting my own back, here: my colleagues and I have to do this on a regular basis, and we’re the good guys in a relatively ugly industry (I’m immensely proud to say), believe it or not. We can be shitty assholes, too. And, more importantly, we’re all realists and we know this sorta shit happens all the time.

What hurts is hearing this from someone you respect, someone who you might look up to. Firstly, you lose that respect you had, you lose it and you start getting resentful, angry, hurt..

And secondly, you begin to wonder if the other party respects you so little that he has no qualms about offering to buy off your dignity.

I hear my dad again, screaming “Kill lah! Kill!” and whooping with each stroke of the racket, and wonder again how life became “hard and ugly”, and populated by turds.

I suppose if you’re like me, you aren’t surprised anymore by how unbelievably amoral some corporations are or can become.

In a bitterly funny turn of events, Cisco gets slammed by its owned shareholders for apparently allowing the Chinese government the use of tools to restrict internet access to sites deemed not in their “national interests”, whatever that means.

Check out the following funnies:

“Cisco does not participate in any way in any censorship activities in the People’s Republic of China,” Alberstein says. “We have never custom-tailored our products for the China market, and the products that we sell in China are the same products we sell everywhere else.”

Which, of course, is the same as saying “we don’t do the censorship, nevermind if we make it easier for them to do it”. Double you just love neutered double-speak? Another one:

Export constraints passed in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre block U.S. companies from selling “any crime control or detection instruments or equipment” to China. Cisco says networking equipment is not covered by the prohibition. “We do sell our products to law enforcement agencies around the world, including China,” says Alberstein. “And we do that in full compliance with Department of Commerce export regulations.”

I find it sometimes amusing how following the letter of the law is used as permission to flout ethics, don’t you?

It wasn’t a big bank by any means; not a multi-storeyed affair with lots of bells and whistles, marbled walkways or lush furnishing, but it was impressive enough. More impressive still was the amount of water I found myself wading in, just minutes upon my arrival.

I didn’t know bank tellers were this cute, though. I found myself making excuses to stick around for just a bit longer, but water-logged shoes don’t make good footwear. That and the fact that I had to dream up something pretty quickly to get things in order.

Which meant climbing rickety ladders and peeping through small portholes to take badly aimed pictures. Once that was done, I found myself gesticulating at pipes and such, trying to make sense to the client all the while wondering what in the world I was saying, which, in this line of work, happens quite often.

From that particular bit of madness I stumbled home to find the family unit preparing to go out: it was mum’s birthday, and while I remembered it, I didn’t expect an elaborate celebration. Between enduring expensive wine and my brother’s incessant demand that I find other means of paying the bills, I recall staring blankly at billboards in the distance wondering when everyone would shut the hell up: thinking with food and family around is just not done, I realize now.

Half-awake, I play ball and make my way back to site. I feel a twinge of guilt when I learn that one of the contractors had not taken their dinners; a twinge and quickly gone, when I remembered just what sort of asshole this fella really was.

I slap my sizable belly and offer my commiseration, smiling.

And that was the highlight of the night, honestly.

The rest fades in a blurry haze: back home; bath; forgetable small talk and then, thankfully, sleep.

Bad days should be this good, considering how my client might be facing a multi-million dollar suit.