claw trimmings

a few days ago as e cat was knocking off, it walked behind a colleague of a certain nationality *clik clik clik* cutting his fingernails with nail clippers & leaving in his wake a trail of keratin bits leading from e 2nd floor staircase down to e 1st floor stairwell & along e 1st floor lift lobby out to e main entrance....

interesting to note e reaction of some cleaners in e cat's workplace when they find out that it is a local longkang ngeow who can understand Singlish + Mandarin + Hokkien + Teochew. many are elderly/middle-aged Chinese/Malay locals, some either retrenched or have a middle-aged spouse or children who have been retrenched. & when they discover that e cat (& a fellow grad student) is local, e floodgate swing open & they UNLOAD....

it is not easy when e daily news screams about e thousands of new jobs that have been created (but not e net figure, less e total no. that have been lost over e same time period? can someone enlighten e cat?), how e majority of e new jobs go to locals (but no mention of e percentage of higher-pay ones going to locals?), & ministers keep harping on how locals shouldn't be fussy about e kind of jobs they want, when you have to spend your retirement years earning normal non-gold-plated peanuts cleaning up litter, cigarette butts, sputum, 'toothpaste foam' on mirrors, footprints on toilet seats & unmentionable stuff left behind by (mostly non-local) staff?

in places e cat has worked in, people of that certain nationality discard white, yellow & blue tips & used eppendorf tubes on e lab floor & kick them under e lab bench if they get in e way (反正有清洁工人帮我们扫掉 - 'there are cleaners to sweep it up for us anyway' - they say), clear their throat & spit on e floor in e labs, corridors & stairwells even during e SARS scare, smoke in stairwells, use ethidium bromide-contaminated gloves on door handles & phone receivers, etc. in a former building all local + ang moh female staff on e cat's floor once banded together to hunt down & shame e culprit who was constantly leaving dirty footprints on e toilet seat in e sole cubicle on that floor. brings to mind e time when e hall master of e cat's hostel refused to replace any of e damaged toilet seats after virtually every single one in e entire hostel was cracked repeatedly by hostellites of that certain nationality who squatted on them.

e cat has wondered if people of that certain nationality have been targeted simply because of their sheer overwhelming numbers, & anti-'foreign tyrant' sentiment. e cat has seen many locals spit & litter in public, even in Japan - every society has its share of e less-than-civilised, & e social/political upheavals that certain generations of people of that certain nationality have gone through have also impeded progress on this front? but over its ~8 years of working in 5+++ labs, e cat has not come across any people of other nationalities spitting in labs & smoking in air-conditioned corridors....

perhaps e 'shock factor' comes from e fact that e cat works in a place where a Bachelor's degree is e lowest educational qualification that people of that certain nationality have, with a high percentage of them holding doctorates? interesting to note that e cat has met quite a few colleagues of that certain nationality (particularly former medical doctors, as well as those who have spent many years working/living in North America/Europe) who single out & condemn their own compatriots for such behaviour, branding them as a disgrace to their motherland. & there are those who after spending some years in Singapore & adapting to a different set of norms, find it hard to accept such behaviour from their countrymen when they return home for holidays.

basic respect for fellow humans (& non-humans too)....so simple yet so hard =|

meanwhile, e cat shall continue to lend its two pointy listening ears to e cleaners....

[ filed under: 9_lives_2006 + thewonderingstraycat ]