Yet another piece from the Straits Stooge Times:

Hilarious! The first thing that came to mind when I read this was almost similar to what I used as title for this blog post but hell a lot more obscene. That is, “If you aren’t gonna fxxk and have more babies then you fxxking go back to work.” It left me ROTLMAO [Meaning: Rolling on the floor laughing my ass off! And it’s got nothing to do with Mao Tsetung, ok?]

All the more ridiculous is Loo’s claim that a 5-day week and Singaporeans ‘maximise leave by taking advantage of public holidays that fall near weekends’ as his example of erosion of Singaporean work ethics. As an employee, I would like to point out the fallacy of that argument, because all too often I heard from people who went on long leave talking about their dread in coming back to work after that. Their usual reasons: the hundreds of unread emails waiting for their attention and some of the work that piles up during their absence. When my friends displays such responsibility and commitment towards their work, how can Loo even say our work ethics eroded?

May I also point out that it is not always the case that there is ‘redundancy’ for a certain position or workload sharing in a company? As a matter of fact, most employees would actually prefer not to have redundancy in place for the tasks they perform, to prevent themselves becoming redundant. On top of which, employers may not necessary want to hire more staff to ensure redundancy anyway.

Here’s even more news for you ‘Jack’ Loo. A lot of us mere mortals go on packaged tours so we don’t have to be too concerned with lodgings, directions and places to visit. Tour agencies also pack the schedule of their packages as tight as possible, and a lot of people end up very tired after their holidays. While Loo himself may be going on free and easy tours or perhaps indulge in Bourgeois €20,000 cooking lessons like a particular civil servant, going on a holiday may not actually be a really enjoyable and relaxing experience for some of us in the psychological equivalent of ‘the lower realms of Samsara‘.

Furthermore, it is likely that even though we have a 5-day work week, some people still end up pulling the same amount of hours as if they are doing a 5.5-day work week to ensure that their work is completed. A 5-day or 5.5day work week thus makes no difference at all, because Singaporeans will still be too damned tired to have sex as a study showed back in 2002. In fact, a friend of mine once complained that her boyfriend actually dozed off in the middle of it. Now talk about the greatest turn off ever… and I hope he wasn’t ‘abalone tasting’ when that happened.

I wondered, when Loo shoots off about work ethics, did he do a survey among the employees of his very own Raffles Medical Group [RMG for short] to find out whether they are already overworked? In fact, if RMG has implemented a 5-day work week, Loo might want to look at how many of RMG’s staff end up pulling even more hours than they used to after the implementation.

I hope I am not misplacing my faith in Loo to expect him to already have the figures to justify what he is saying. Clearly, when the fact an apparent 5-day work and the actual amount of hours worked is not necessarily the same thing occurred to me, a simple man without even a common degree, someone with his qualification and position would have already thought of this way ahead.

But if he hasn’t, then he must be the epitome of an Hokkien saying which goes like this: 头大无脑，脑大生草。 [Literal translation: Head big no brains, brains big grow grass.] If that is the case, then all of us common folk must duly thank you for providing us with such comic relief in the midst of a serious debate in Parliament over our extraordinary, breath-taking national budget for 2009.