Was brought up in an extended family where the eldest and 2nd
eldest paternal uncles were both taxi drivers. Sincerely, taxi
driving is a good profession, a good vocation imho. Especially in
the old days if we compare it versus market stall holders, back
then if somebody owns a chicken stall they do the actual culling in
the wet market. It was a very bloody business i.e. poultry business
- not hawking - poultry business. In comparison, taxi driving was
very 'sing-nang', decades ago they installed the mini fans in each
taxi, and since back then there was minimal pollution outside of
the industrial estates, e.g. in 1993 when I sat in my eldest
uncle's taxi as he ferried me from my maternal grandmother's new
HDB at Woodlands to Ang Mo Kio, the taxi went past Thompson and
Sembawang and on both sides of the road were practically trees and
more trees. In other words, taxi driving back then was cool because
first of all there was car ownership, secondly since housing was
that standard the only thing worth worrying about perhaps is if my
uncle sent me to Woodlands from Ang Mo Kio the chances are he has
to come back central area without a passenger. This is the sort of
dilemma that I still see in other countries' rural countrysides
such as recently when I went Ping-tung in Taiwan, the
taxi driver was willing to fetch people back to Kaohsiung for free
because there was little hope of him going home to Kaohsiung at 4pm
with any confirmed paying passenger.
If it's about foreigners, actually this one is very malu.
Because both Taiwan and Singapore complain about foreigners, and
the foreigners that upset us usually the most are also Chinese,
just a different country. It is difficult to define what
'foreigner' is, because since I graduated all my employers were
foreigners. I recall working under the Japanese, there was once I
was doing a proof-of-concept till the late hours with my
stewardess-turned-consultant director and two seniors that included
a Vietnam-war-refugee-turned-American, then the Japanese boss iirc
the name Kajiyama dropped by and chatted with us at 12am. It was a
fantastic experience, because these foreigners came in with their
own lifestyles and stories, I still recall the Vietnamese senior
had a scar on his face because he fell down and hit some part of
the boat while fleeing Vietnam, honestly, I learn more training
with expats like him than working in civil service because this
Vietnam guy saw war himself, yet today even the highest-flying MP
a General Ng Chee Meng has seen anything but war himself.
Without these foreigners and their stories of war and disasters, if
something happens and you want me to trust a war-less General to
lead us Singaporeans through World War 3, I really may rather
just bail out of town.
A bank insurance manager is only a title that sounds nice and
sounds good. Sure many want this job, and the criterion is also
usually pitched quite high, yet we ARE heading into the n-th
recession since national independence. Becoming an
insurance manager is one thing, it's almost also
self-employable these days like cabbies, yet those bank insurance
managers that saw the 1985 recession, the 1991-ish Iraq War
recession, the 1997 dot-com bubble burst recession, in fact there
are more it's just that the one I recall more frequently is the
2008-09 Lehmann Brothers recession; banking industries are the
least reliable of all vocations as long as there are countries in
the world that are helmed by Communist or Workers' Parties, because
as long as there is socialism, comminternism or even fascism,
banking success career stories are at best imaginery i.e. either
self-imagined or collectively-imagined.
