Though was able to connect to the Internet off and on, but the speed is so turtle, it’s a waste of time trying to get online. The customer service person asked me to test the speed. Yeah, when I can load the pages then I will test it! Have you ever experienced this: you open up the browser, went to take a nap, came back two hours later, the page has not been loaded yet!!

Though the technicians are quite efficient, they almost always show up the next day when we called on a weekday, the same old problem kept coming back after a storm. We were told they have to replace the faulty ports. How to work with Internet that has more downs than ups in a week, some more have to change pots and pans six times in three weeks!

Not that we have a choice, this lousy service provider is the ONLY provider in this boondocks. We need another competitor who is more competent!!

There are a few people I would like to ask this question last week, but I didn’t ! Incidentally, they all work for the bank! Which make me wonder what kind people they hired to work in the bank nowadays?

The first incident, I walked into the bank, requested a “reduce of mortgage interest rate”, two customer officers told me there is no such thing. When I insisted there is, they asked me to write a letter.(And you thought that’s a special talent of government bureaucrats to stop people from bothering them!) I live 45 minutes away from the bank, I was not going to drive home, type out a letter and drive back there, so I requested a piece of paper and drafted a letter on the spot and asked them to fax the request to the HQ. I got a call from the HQ the next day, offered me a 2% reduction in interest rate!!

The second incident is an old issue that had not been solved for four years. I have a margin trading account with this bank and have an online account for stocks trading. Four years ago, I forgot the username and password, my account was suspended after three unsuccessful attempts. I was told to go to the branch to restore the account and the fellow at the branch asked me to call the customer careline. The customer careline people asked me to see the fellow at the branch to get the access code, after being kicked around like a ball for a few times, I just gave up. Recently, as I am trying to take care of the banking and financial matters before leaving for IL, and I wanted to sell the remaining stocks, I went back to the branch to enquire about how to restore the password (Amazingly, the same guy I talked to four years ago still works there and deals with this kind of problem) But, looks like he has not been equipped with the right product knowledge in this four years! Guy A at the branch asked me to call the customer careline, guy B at the customer caerline asked me to see A, so I told A and B, why don’t you figure out what to do and call me! That was a week ago, I am still waiting for their calls!

The third incident happened at the same bank of the first incident, I handed in a few security documents for verification and certification to a woman officer, was told it would take 2 weeks to get back to me. As I didn’t want to go down again to pick up the documents, I requested for the documents to courier to me. After two weeks, no news, but I was too busy accompanying my mom on a hospital tour and didn’t drop or call to check on the status of the documents. Four weeks later, I called the branch and enquired about the status of the documents, the woman who picked up the phone told me she couldn’t tell me anything wouldn’t check anything for me on the phone, I have to go to the branch personally. I got really annoyed with her, I asked for her name but she refused to give me. I then called the customer careline, made a complaint about it and asked to trace the whereabouts of the documents. The man on the customer careline was helpful, he was surprised that I was even told it would take two weeks to verify the documents, he said the branch could usually do the verification on the spot! Anyway, he verified with his superior, called the branch and managed to get them to trace the documents. He then called me back a few hours later, told me I could go to the branch to pick up the documents the next day, they would be verified. I was not free the next day, so I went in the following business day. Guess what ? I drove 45 minutes down there, was told they need to send the documents to HQ for verification and the woman who was in charged of this matter was on leave and I have to come back the next day. My face must have changed color, I tell you. I sat there, insisted that I would not leave without the documents. The woman who served me didn’t know what to do, she went inside and came back with another woman who looked like she is the supervisor or manager. (What’s wrong with this people who never identify themselves? Isn’t that a common courtesy to let your customers know who they are dealing with? ) She apologized for the “miscommunication” and offered to courier the documents to me the next day, so I don’t have to drive one and half hours to and fro just to pick up the documents.

The ridiculous thing is: after all the hassles and five weeks of waiting for the documents, was told they are no longer needed by another institution who required it, just because they never update their website!!!

Malaysia boleh!

I am jumping up and down here and he could take months to file the papers. Just touched base with him this morning, he hasn’t sent out the papers yet. Of course he needs a suitable envelope to put this papers together before he mails them! But, does he need a few weeks to get a suitable envelope? So he can cut a tree to make the paper for the envelope? There is really such a thing as “qi shi ren”, isn’t it a miracle I am still alive to tell you how ridiculous it can be. It’s so tiring to pull a cow up the tree!

Just done my fair share of yelling on the phone, to the slow in action forty-something who wants to stay as a seven years old spoilt brat. What kind of dumb cow takes two weeks to come up with a personal budget that doesn’t balance ?! I gave up, never try to pull a cow up the tree!

I waited till 2.30p.m to go to the government office so that they got ample time to idle after lunch. But still was told by the receptionists that the said officer has gone for prayer. I waited for about half an hour and saw her came in with a plastic shopping bag! She actually went for shopping during office hours!!

The new officer is one big fat lazy ass, she didn’t even take out our file when she dissed out that stupid “buat surat” instruction. Another woman who was ear dropping our conversations chipped in and gave some more pointed instructions. I am pretty sure they created them themselves because they are the typical brainless to create more paperwork instructions.

Can we blame this people? What do you expect from an education system that required children to fill up pages of paper work (sometime as young as 4-5 years old)? They grow up good in creating paperwork!

Apparently, the security documents are kept at their headquarter, not at the branch. That means it takes weeks to request a simple document like a certified copy of the deed.

We didn’t know better at that time and it’s too late when we discovered what their advertisements were mostly gimmicks. The company do not practice honesty, the have very deceiving rules that make sure you pay the most interest.

We did some prepayments, the first time we found out to our horror that they did not apply the extra payments to the principal straight away, but used it to pay the installments in advance (which partly goes to pay interest). We learned to tell them specifically the second time we did a prepayment that we wanted it applied to the principal. That’s unscrupulous way of doing business!

After we did a few prepayments, they lower our repayment amount without any notice. Since our purpose is to finish up the mortgage as soon as possible, we asked them to revert to the old amount. We were told to write in officially to request the change. Do they inform us in writing when they changed the amount to make us pay more interest? I guess many people who did not pay attention to what they pay would have fell right into their traps.

We have thought of refinancing and stopped dealing with this bank entirely, but we were kind of stuck because we were locked in for 4 years. Now that the locked in period is over and we have paid down the loan substantially, it is not worth the hassle to refinance as the saving doesn’t justify all the moving cost. So we are stuck with this bank for another 3 years, hopefully shorter.

How do this people got their hollier than thou attitude? Excuse me, if you choose not to blog for money, it doesn’t make you hollier than us! It may mean you are luckier than us as you do not need the money, or you are more stupid than us as you don’t grab the opportunity like some of us do.

Writing paid posts is hard work! You work in a dungeon, lie through your teeth to help your clients beautifying their balance sheets, and we work at home punching the keyboards rushing out posts that help our advertisers to rank well in the search engines. What makes think you are somehow more noble and contributing more to the society by blogging about your life in slavery and rants about the useless government ?(like all of us don’t know?)

Though we don’t really believe in karma, we can’t help thinking, may be she is getting the bad karma now in her current life. Her husband died of a heart attack at a young age, her only son is invalid and her daughter is mentally challenged. She may have a hard life, but does that give her a license to be a bitch?

More gossips about the bitch  at my other blog.

Today, it took me more than 90 minutes to drive to this place that usually took me less than 30 minutes to arrive! On the way home, it took another 90 minutes, so I have spent a total of 3 hours on the road today!

Still trying to get over the hurtful words repeated so many times, I am just sick of it being thrown at me over the years. Do I plan my mistakes and failures? I don’t. Though I don’t dream of moral support anymore. How I wished they see the courage of me picking up the pieces and moving on, instead of harping on my inability and past failures.

When I was at this house warming party of a relative last night, met my ex-teacher who also happened to be the daughter-in-law of my relative. Technically, she is my cousin-in-law, which make her children my second cousins.

I think it’s pretty rude for my teacher’s adult daughters to treat us as invisible at their grandmother’s house. It’s true that we have not seen each other for years and they may not recognize us. But, the way they pretend they didn’t hear my mother, (and the look on their face that clearly say, I don’t even know you, why should I answer you?)., it’s totally stuck-up and lack of basic courtesy and manners, IMHO.

I also think it was their mother partly to be blamed for not introducing us or clearly show these young adults the acceptable social behavior since they were young. My mother always taught us to greet people at a family gathering like that, even if you don’t know who they are, you just greet them or ask how you should address them if you are not sure.

The morning started with me rushing down to the service provider’s office to cancel the old land line and Internet line, there were so many people there, I waited for more than an hour. Actually I can’t blame Monday for this, it was my own fault for procrastinating. I should have done this cancellation thing last Friday, when there are usually less people.

Anyway, managed to get the job done and then head back to the center as I have a class at 11.00 a.m. About 5 minutes away from the center, I hit this HUGE pothole, I almost crashed into the rear of two other cars that went into the pothole before me. I stopped by the roadside to examine our cars. The tyre has gone flat!

But fortunate thing about this unfortunate event was, this all happened right in front of a tyre shop. I walked over and got the guy to change the tire for me. 20 bucks lesser and 15 minutes later, I was back at the center, 3 minutes late for my class.

In fact, he hasn’t been talking about getting a replacement cell phone long time ago. If he had no time to go to a store to buy it, he could have just asked me to order online for him. He also has a brand new laptop that still sit in the box after arriving four weeks ago. Though he said he would get out the Bluetooth headset to do PC-to-PC calls tomorrow, four weeks ago! Aargh, I really think this procrastination is getting out of hand!

Yesterday, when he called, I was in the midst talking to the physician and I have turned the phone into silence mode. When he called again later and I picked up the phone, he was asking for an explanation. Well, it’s really not my business to entertain rude people who do not take “no” as no. Excuse me, I am also not running a job agency.

The next is to get connected to the world.:-) It’s funny that both the phone and Internet services are offered by the same service provider, but we can’t apply for the internet service until the land line is fixed and activated. Doesn’t it make more sense to apply for both at the same time and they go figure out the installation dates instead of making their clients go to the sales office umpteen times. Don’t you think this people can use some tips and advices from the business coaches instead of going around pissing their clients off.

I stopped by the sales office of the service provider, signed the one-year service agreement yesterday. The sales clerk said the installation crew will come to install the phone within 3 days. I am keeping my fingers cross about that.

As for the kitchen remodeling, the guy who is supposed to come back to me with the cost estimation hasn’t called me. I have called him twice in the last 10 days, he gave some excuses that he hasn’t got the list of my tiles selection. (How come?) I didn’t want to have to complain to my uncle whom he works for. But, he is a little inefficient to take more than a week to come out with a cost estimation, don’t you think so?

With such a bad start, I doubt he is going to stay on schedule for the work, and I really don’t know when his workers can “start work”. I prefer the other older man who works for my uncle, he is much more efficient. When we did the tiling for the tutoring center, he was able to give us a cost estimation on the spot, the workers and tiles also arrived the next day after we picked the tiles and everything was done within a week. Now, after two weeks, nothing has been done!

I have since called them twice and dropped by the sales office once, all I got in reply was to wait for them to call me when they are ready to fix the line. @##$%%^ suckers, if only I have another service provider in my area, I would have ditched you long ago.

Good thing I waited and did not just transferred the old line. I plan to cancel the old line once the new one is installed and working. Though new installation costs more than merely transfer an old line to a new location, I didn’t want to be disconnected while they take their own sweet time to do the transfer. Due to the Internet access, I am still staying at the old place, but most of my stuffs are moved back to our house, you can imagine the inconvenience and the mess.

Well, there is really nothing new with this service provider, we all know their service sucks. What to do? They are the monopoly in this place right now! The gomen should just give out more licenses to more companies to provide similar service, competition and market force will have them clean up their acts.

Well, they are nice people, just not very professional, they forgot the appointment with me and thought it’s Sunday. Whatever dinner they were going, they should have finished their work first to redeem the mistake of forgetting and being late for work! What can I do? I am left with half of the stuffs at both places now.

I didn’t realize how slow my internet connection until the other day when I was at the Mamak restaurant with WIFI service, I jumped on the boss’s laptop real quick and WHAT A DIFFERENCE ! Maybe I should get a laptop and park myself at the restaurant permanently!:-)

The part time helper cannot come this two weeks as she has returned to her hometown for a break. Don’t know whether she will be available next week or not. I get a headache thinking about all this work that I got to do it myself.

Hopefully the helper will come back next week, and she can help to do some major cleaning. It’s no joke trying to clean two buildings with one life without losing it. ;-)

I saw there were about 15 people at the check deposit machine, 20-30 people lining up for counter service, and 10-15 people were in front of the cash deposit machine. Seeing how slow the lines are moving and knowing how inefficient the workers at this particular branch are, it’s going to be at least 45-60 minutes wait if I would to go for the counter service. To stay or to come back? I decided to wait in front of the check deposit machine.

A few guys in front who looked like they were office boys depositing whole pile of checks and were taking quite some time. It took 35 minutes to reach my turn. While I was waiting, I realized that my parking coupon was going to expire in 5 minutes. Since it was almost my turn, I didn’t want to go put another coupon, to lost my turn or have to line up again. By the time I finished my business and went back to get the car, saw a ticket on the windscreen. This city council people REALLY efficient, it’s only 5 minutes late, and got the “dried beef”already. 20 bucks flew away!

I bought 6 CDs for teaching SWR and shipped them to hubby. He supposed to help me to rip the CDs and upload the files to the online storage, so that I could download them. He got the CDs last week, I told him I need him to rip them urgently. He said he would do it a.s.a.p. (Ok, understand,  it’s a relative term to some people)

But I didn’t hear from him for three days. While I am busy with writing paid posts, I didn’t call since he usually calls me at least once a week. On the forth day I called his cellphone, for two days I got the voice messages. So I sent a few text messages, still no reply. At the end, I called his cousin, he was there and I finally got to talk to him. You know what? He said he couldn’t find (lost?)  his cellphone!

Shouldn’t he at least inform me of his lost phone or let me know that the phone is not with him, so that I don’t stupidly dial the same numbers for 7 times 7 times and wondering what happened at the other end? That’s not all, a week after he received the CDs, no ripping yet, needless to say, he hasn’t upload the MP3s too! I know all this do not justify me getting mad, but I am not a saint, ok? I have been very upset and wondering which cave is he from.

While you are here reading about the domestic woos of an angry wife, can you tell me what would you respond or react?

The thing I dislike the most is: she put words in the quote, as though I said them. The most embarrassing part was: she asked me what was my qualifications (she had my business card, she could have just take a glance). I told her I have a Bachelor degree in Maths and Physics, a masters degree in Mathematical Physics. Since we were talking about educational issue, I told her that I was once enrolled in a doctorate program which I did some educational research but I didn’t complete the doctorate program, and am currently doing a diploma in Montessori Education. She wrote that I have a PhD in Child Development, casted me as a liar to people who know me. Pengsan

It seems to me it didn’t matter what you said in an interview, this reporter came with a set mind and wrote what she thought I said. She didn’t tape record our conversation and took down minimal notes. Which reminded me of what my youngest brother experienced many years ago, he was the top scorer in his school, and the newspaper “interviewed” him and published that he wanted to do medicine or pharmacy after 6th form, and my brother was “When did they interview me?” Terror? The reporter could even wrote up a story without interviewing the person involved.

It’s pain in the butts, but gotta learn the lesson! Which reminds me, have the journalist send you the write up before they publish it! Actually, I would just volunteer to write the article if I knew she is so unprofessional. :-)