turnaround effect

Today was one hell of a day for me. So bad that it left me with a spinning head for a good three quarter of the day.

It started off as a pretty good day at work not until I made a few errors. Errors that were down right silly and should not have been made to begin with. Like any other errors related to work and official documents, there are bound to be a repercussion. I got apprehended by my boss. Big boss to be precise. I am fine with the apprehension since a mistake will be a mistake - especially MY mistake.

More often than not, silly errors are the ones that leave you feeling really sore about yourself. Especially the ones you don't expect to make. It is embarrassing to say the least and it paints a really bad image about me.

As much as a small error can leave me feeling crappy about myself, similarly a small good deed left me feeling good at the end of the day.

Before going back everyday, I need to line up in front of an auto pay machine to settle my parking bill for the day. An expensive RM9 for your information! Anyway.... forget the price but there was this middle age man trying to pay via the machine and judging from the frown he wore on his face, clearly it was his first time trying to pay his parking on the machine.

As he spent time figuring out how to pay on the machine, a line was forming behind him. I heard him mumbling something about not having small change to pay. He didn't realise the machine accepted notes.

The ironic part is, as he stood there for almost 2 minutes figuring things out, no one took the trouble to tell him the machine took notes. A girl on the machine beside his just giggled. I didn't think it was funny. The girl behind him just stood there like a log. Probably hoping he'd figure it out faster. Guess, she never thought if she bothered to assist him she would be already be on her way home!

So, I just walked up to the man and directed him how to work that machine. He paid his parking without any trouble and thank me. By the time it reached my turn to pay, I did the necessary and walked myself to my car. As I was opening my car door, I hear a car stop in front of my car and the car gives me a quick beep. It was man I helped at the machine. He said thanks again and gave me thumb's up. It made me feel warm in my heart............ I felt good.

What a wonderful turnaround effect!

ugly truth~

Friends will always be friends, or so that's what most people tell me. What about times when friends just can't be friends anymore? Ever come across such a pinch?

You probably wouldn't be surprised that there are many things in life that can make friends and quite easily break friendships. You and I would have made and lost many friends along the way of growing up. That's part of growing up and maybe, maybe it's part of learning to differentiate who's your friend and who's not.

A lot of things can happen in between friendships - work, money, love, etc.

Money........ ahhhhhhhhh, the ultimate evil of all things if I must say so myself. People all around the world of different races, skin colour, nationality. Anyone can fall prey to the temptation money has to offer. I too fall prey to the temptation of money sometimes..... The flesh is weak after all.

Let me just take it one step further. When I think about money, I think career as well. Career is the driving force that brings money. Good career = good money (that's what we like to think).

Mix those two elements up, and you get a pretty good concoction that can really blow friendships to kingdom come especially when your friend is a colleague. They are some who would do anything to get up the corporate mountain peak inclusive of sacrificing friendship.

Trust me, someday you'll probably face it or probably already faced it. What would you do? It's walking the tightrope because career progression always sparks envy and it is bound to create some friction between friends whether any of us like it or not.

It's sad to a certain extent because it just affirms the fact that even humans like you and I who are considered to be the top of the food chain will still succumb to the ugly truth of the vicious life cycle - when one rises, another shall fall............

the invisible thread that binds us

In an old Chinese folk tale, it is said that when one is brought to this world, we have the love of our life waiting for us in this world at a time and date set by God. In fact, our destinies lies in a red thread tied to our pinkie finger. That red thread is then tied to another person's pinkie finger.

It is said that you and that person will be an item in your lifetime. That's the story at least.......

Many a times I have seen couples asking one another, "do you love me?" and, "why do you love me?". There will always be answers to those questions like "you are nice, pretty, blah blah blah, etc........." you know the usual mushy answers you'd expect to hear.

But do we really need a reason to love someone? Seriously?

I saw The Ugly Truth last night. It's a romantic comedy movie that really gets you laughing from start to finish. I am not going to write a review of the movie but I'd rather focus on one line from the movie that I found very profound. At the end, the main actress finally asked this guy, "Why do you love me?". The guy looks at her with the most clueless look and just go, "I don't know!!!" and they finally kiss each other.

Maybe that's what love is all about. Don't need to over analyse anything, no need to think about what sort of a person you wish to have as a life's mate, no need to think about one's personality or background. Just go with the flow of what your heart thinks.

I was silly enough to follow my curious instincts to ask couple friends of mine to me what is it that binds them together. In the mix of these friends were married, new couples or about to get married. I am blessed this time that my honest curiosity did not get me killed.

What I found out from my conversations with them is surprising to say the least. They couldn't really pin down how they became attached to each other.

"When it happens, it just happens. You can't really control it or predict it," said one of my friends. His spouse agreed with him. "Maybe we were already predestined to be with one another according to a time God thinks is right for us and then it just happens," said another friend.

One thing's for sure - you can't really explain the complexities of the human emotions and this feeling of love and affection. Or it is probably a concoction of certain chemicals in our body that creates this feeling of love.

Some of us grow old never finding the right one, some find the right one at an early age, some find the right one when it's a tad too late. Maybe all this have been predestined by the red thread tied to our pinkie finger when we are born to this world.

people

We are in the 21st century and the progress of technology brings us smaller, better, more sophisticated and even smarter robots and nanomachines. Only five years ago I was using a Pentium 3 desktop, now we have moved into the quad core Intel processors that make Pentium 3 look like it is sleeping on the job.

Technology is a wonderful thing. There is absolutely no doubt about that obvious fact staring at all of us in the face. Just a week ago, I saw a tv programme on the National Geographic channel that featured a group of really smart professors in the US trying to design and create a robot that can do house chores - autonomous robots.

Wonderful as technology may seem to be and how much research is going into trying to make artificial intelligence, what most of us call AI, you'd realise that achieving AI is going to one hell of a task. At this point in time, the possibility of a full blown AI robot with its own intelligence and a mind of its own seems remote. Remote but the possibility is still there.

Through the path of time, humans have proven to be very agile at evading disaster and surviving millions of years since the dawn of time. Great dinosaurs perished in a cataclysmic mysterious manner, great beasts like the mammoth perished along with time, yet humans have evolved from ape-like beings to beings like you and I.

I can't help but think there must be a reason so many living creatures have succumbed to the ravages of time yet we, humans have survived for so long and at the same time brought about revolutionary ideas and solutions - Benjamin Franklin discovering electricity, Alexander Graham Bell who brought us the telephone, Henry Ford who brought us the car, German Karl Ferdinand Braun invented the cathode ray tube oscilloscope and a whole plethora of other inventions by extraordinary people out there.............

Ever wondered what the world will be like with AIs around? I think it'd be scary. A world filled with emotionless metal bonded robots running around doing stuff we do. Makes you think about those movies where robots take over the world and turn humans into slaves right?

As much as I appreciate what technology has done for me, I do not wish for the world to have sophisticated human-like AIs. In my opinion, technology will never be able to replace the causal ambiguity and ingenuity humans have - emotions, feelings, compassion, empathy.

I am not surprised that famous businessmen in the past as early as the 19th century foresaw the dawn of technology and coming of the era of mechanisation. But machines can never replace the human emotions and mind.... too unique to be replicated.

Andrew Carnegie, the founder of Carnegie Steel understood all too well and once said:

'"Take away my people, but leave my factories, and soon grass will grow on the factory floors. Take away my factories, but leave my people, and soon we will have a new and better factory."

Amazing words of wisdom that tell me people are the essential element of this world we live in. You can have all the riches in the world but without the people to share your happiness with, it is of no use. Have the most sophisticated piece of machinery but no one to man it, you have pile of scrap metal. You may create AIs but you can never create the human emotions.........