Yours Toothfully by Dr Chan Joon Yee

“All our customer service officers are engaged at the moment. Please hold the line. We will attend to you shortly.”

Sounds familiar? Last week, I just hung up on one of these calls. After waiting for 10 minutes. Fortunately, I had an alternative with that particular service. Not with the MRT, SP services and other one and onlys in Singapore. And the problem of crowded trains has been around since I started this blog 5 years ago. Only last Sunday night did we hear that something will be done about it and the new system will be in place in 8 years. 8 years plus that 5 years before this?

yao mo gao chor ah?

Does this sound like something that has been planned 10 years in advance to accommodate a population increase to 5.08 million today from 4.28 million in 2008? It certainly looks as if no major plans were made to overhaul the public transport system to accommodate this sudden swell in population. It can’t be that the talented people at the helm can’t predict this problem of serious congestion. Maybe it’s thought that no one will mind or complain. Or perhaps it’s taken for granted that the peaceful powerless people here (like me) will only make noise in blogosphere at first and relent when ignored. But then, elections are coming.

Having said all that, we are pretty impatient people – sometimes. We can’t stand being made to hold the line for 10 minutes. We can’t stand waiting for our food for 10 minutes. We can’t stand waiting for 10 seconds for a webpage to load. But considering the kind of waiting that we sometimes need to do at the polyclinics and concerts, we are also a pretty patient people. Folks in another country might have thrown molotov cocktails already.

But the same kind of patience does not seem to show at the other end of the hierarchy. Brain drain? Let them go. Import foreign talent. But is it that simple? Why would a talented, intelligent foreigner want to settle here (albeit temporarily) if not because he/she can take from us more than he/she is obliged to give back to us? If the equation does not work overwhelmingly in his/she favour, why bother to come at all? I personally wouldn’t go work in a foreign country unless there are huge perks, huge profits and no obligations. Did we expect to receive a flood of altruistic contributors when we opened our flood gates?

Again, there are exceptions. Not every foreigner is a freeloader. Not every foreigner is here to suck us dry and get their last laugh at the end of the day. They fill every niche in our socciety. There are some who would really work for free. There are some who really care. There are some who are even exploited by some organisations to do work that Singaporeans shun. Just last week, when I was at Toa Payoh Library, reading up on my TCM, I was waylaid by a new breed of “crusaders”.

” 您好。我是基督徒，很诚恳的请您到我们的教堂观赏演出。”

“什么演出?是钢管舞吗?”

Not enough babies? Ignore their problems. Import foreigners. It’s all about numbers. As long as there are so many telephone lines, so many utitlity accounts, so many passengers on our buses and trains, our economy will go boomz (apologies to Ris Low) and everything will be fine. Would I not love to be paid a million bucks a year to come up with such “solutions”?

In the meantime, life goes on. I guess I can have my poetic revenge by imagining some of these foreigners pole dancing on the crowded, stuffy MRT trains.