Thanks, Suay Han

It is a blessing and a wonderful feeling to be remembered, not forgotten.

I have known Suay Han, a co-worker at HP for almost 10 years. We worked together in the same lab, I the Engineer, she was my Tech operator.

Ever since knowing my date of birth, she has never failed to buy me a treat on this annual occasion. Even when I hardly bothered myself with it. Even when both of us had moved on to doing different jobs 8 years ago, and hardly see each other day to day.

A mango cake. A pandan mousse cake. A birthday card. I have gotten all of that.

This year, it's an assortment of kueh-kuehs from 老婶阿嬷潮洲粿. Nothing fancy. Full of heart.

What have I done to deserve this? I am really not worthy.

Worse yet, I don't even know when is her birthday, that I can reciprocate her thoughtfulness. Shame on me...

I count my blessings every year this day because of a friend like Suay Han.

And relish that wonderful feeling of being remembered, not forgotten.

PS to self: bake Suay Han a cheese cake for Christmas, this year!

Car or Cab (Part 1)?

Cost of car ownership in Lion City - the highest in the world. Right? But just how ridiculously high is it?

Discounting reasons like lifestyle and convenience, just a plain dollars and cents opinion, is there a justification to own a car here?

I have thought about this some time ago and felt that it might be interesting to compare cost of owning a car with the next best alternative - taking a cab. That means comparing the driving my own car versus costs of commuting via cabs only.

Since majority of folks who own cars are just using it to commute from home to office and around the island, I wondered if there could be a threshold distance between one's home and office, that if exceeded, would make owning a car financially more viable than taking a cab.

Such an 'academically' bo-liao (无聊) task can easily be accomplished with an Excel spreadsheet.

First I need to get my assumptions down. So here goes:

Assume a new 1.6L car that costs $50K, on a 7-year loan at 2.5%p.a.

The monthly fixed costs are estimated at $700 for installment, $80 for road tax, $123 for insurance (averaged from 5 years, without accidents), $300 for misc like parking, servicing etc.

Now for the variable, which is mainly gas expenses as a function of driving distance and engine efficiency. I started with $1.6 per liter for gas, 10km per liter for efficiency, a daily 40km (to and fro) commute between home and office. Assuming 20 work days per month and IF I don't go anywhere else (ie I got no life lah), the monthly gas comes up to about $130.

Summing all expenses gave me the figure of $1330 per month.

Now, the same total distance that I used above, if it was done completely via cab costs $496 approx. Again I assumed only peak hour surcharge and only no-life type of home-office-home commute.

With the model set up in Excel, I can iterate the distances for both car and cab costs and solve for a distance between home and office where cost of car = cost of cab.

What did I get?

Heh heh, a 1-way distance of 83km between home and office! FYI, Lion City is only like 40-something km from east to west.

Of course, nobody is that no life in Lion city, regardless how workaholic you are (cross my fingers). So this distance is definitely an unrealistic number. But it tells me that even if I factored in typical usage distances, I would still be like staying-in-PasirRis-working-in-Tuas, in order to balance car and cab costs.

Well, since I have the spreadsheet set up now, it's a matter of punching some numbers. But that's for another time...

讲华语, Cool?

This incident happened to a colleague - WK, re-told to me by another colleague TKL.

WK loves to snack in office, as a result, munchies and junk foods are always within an arm's reach from a swivel of his chair.

Today, he asked TKL to accompany him to buy some Mamee snack - that msg-loaded no-water-needed-tear-n-eat instant noodle snack - at Telok Blangah (I don't know where exactly but that's not important).

WK wanted to buy a 20 mini packs in 2 jumbo bags (10 per bag). The conversation with the store towkay went something like this:

WK: 我要大包的Mamee.
Owner: 里面是十包, 你要几包?
WK: OK, 我要两包.
Owner: 这样啊?我要去楼上拿.

WK was puzzled as to why the towkay has to go 'upstairs' for a mere 20 packs of Mamee. The answer was revealed when the towkay came down - with 2 bags - yeah, and 80 packs of Mamee!

Yup, the owner said 里面四十包.

WK heard 里面是十包.

Ironically, had the conversation been in Cantonese or Hokkien, even word for word as above, there would be no misunderstanding and WK wouldn't have to walk away with 4 times more Mamee than he intended (not that he was complaining either!)