I know who could’ve started the SingTel fire

I met Arnold Gay once a long time ago.

I was still working at MediaCorp and he was the hunky Channel NewsAsia news reader.

It was Lisa Ang who introduced me to Gay, though I can’t remember who introduced me to Lisa Ang.

Ang was a Channel NewsAsia host at the time but had previously hosted the Channel 5 infotainment series Hey Singapore and played VR Man’s tomboy girlfriend.



Anyway, back to Gay.

What struck me about him was that he seemed like a remarkably well-adjusted guy for someone whose surname is the equivalent to being born with a “Kick me” sign permanently pasted on his back.

So he’s the last person I expect to be in the centre of a controversy.

Before this month, possibly the most controversial thing he did was burn his bridges at MediaCorp by jumping ship to join the newly formed (and now defunct) SPH MediaWorks in 2000 (which I did too).



Then two Saturdays ago, he burned something else.

On Oct 5, Gay, now a Kiss92 radio DJ, reenacted his own mini Singaporean version of Fahrenheit 451 by gathering his 12-year-old son, his son’s friends and his friends’ children to throw their schoolwork into a bonfire to celebrate the end of the reviled Primary School Leaving Exams (PSLE).

I’ve never read the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451 about book-burning or seen the movie.



But I have seen the movie Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore and that’s close enough.

After Kiss92 posted a picture of Gay’s flaming stunt on its Facebook page, Gay got flamed himself for such inflammatory behaviour.



One commenter wrote: “Hey Arnold, are you really that dumb to inculcate your kid and his dumber friends into doing something that silly? Come on, PSLE is just a freaking small stepping stone of a kid’s life! Gonna burned down the whole of National Library when your kid grad from his PhD?”

Uh… if Gay manages to raise a kid who can get a PhD, then I think it’s fair to say Gay is not “really that dumb”.

And the National Library was already destroyed to make way for a road. The new one is the “National Library” only in name, not in my heart.

Although I'm against polluting our continually haze-threatened skies with more ash, I have come to accept that burning stuff in public is a Singaporean Chinese way of life.

Since we are already burning fake money, paper iPads and paper houses for the dead, we might as well burn some assessment books to help the dead score in their PSLE so that they can get into the secondary school of their choice in hell.

Heaven forbid they end up in a neighbourhood hell school. That would be hell indeed.

I just hope this post-PSLE burning thing won't become an annual islandwide ritual. My family suffer enough breathing problems during the Hungry Ghost month.

Still, as a parent, I empathise with Gay for wanting to provide a catharsis for his son and maybe himself after the stress of the PSLE.

As one Facebook user commented: “It’s also a great opportunity for parents to bond with the kids.”

Being a father of two teenagers, I am constantly on the lookout for opportunities to bond with my kids. When they come home from school, the first thing they do is interact with their mobile devices rather than another member of the family.

So a blessing in disguise of sorts was the disruption in Internet services caused by a fire at a SingTel facility in Bukit Panjang last Wednesday.

Deprived of a broadband connection for two days at our Choa Chu Kang home, instead of staring at the computer monitors or our smartphones, my kids, my wife and I were forced to stare at each other.

That was as close as we got to bonding in my family. We didn’t have anything to burn. My son's O-level exams only start later this month.

My daughter, 14, said: “This is what happens when we don’t have Wi-Fi. We spend more time together.”

I’m not sure whether she meant that as a good thing or a bad thing.

I suspect mine was not the only family forced to bond because of the Internet disruption.

Wait a minute. I just realised something.

A mysterious fire caused last week’s Internet disruption which might have led to a sudden surge in family bonding in Singapore.

Hmmm… who do we know has recently started a fire to bond with a family member?

I wonder, were any charred remains of past years’ PSLE papers found at the burnt SingTel facility?

I think it’s about time Gay come out – with the truth.

I bet Lisa Ang can make him talk.



- Published in The New Paper, 13 October 2013

UPDATE: Hacked? I'd be more worried about a blowtorch

No cable TV? How about a Samurai burger? Fine

As those not-so-novel-anymore novelty T-shirts for tourists say, Singapore is a “fine” city.

Last week, it was reported that SMRT will be fined $860,000 by the Land Transport Authority for four separate incidents since last year. SBS Transit will also be fined $250,000 for a service disruption on the North-East Line in June.

Before you start collecting donations for them, let me point out that SMRT reported a net profit of $119.9 million for the financial year of 2012 while SBS Transit earned $18.6 million.

But it’s not only the public transport companies cramming us into their sardine trains and buses that are getting fined.

Last week, M1 was fined $1.5 million by the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) for a three-day service disruption in January. It was reportedly the most a telco has been fined.

Before you start organising a flag day for M1, let me point out that the company made a profit of $146.5 million last year, which is more than what SMRT and SBS Transit made combined.

And then there’s SingTel.

This year alone, Singapore’s largest telco was fined $50,000 in August for a two-and-a-half hour fixed-line outage that occurred last November, and $180,000 in February for a mio TV glitch that disrupted the live telecasts of the English Premier League (EPL) matches the previous May.

(UPDATE: SingTel fire: Telco may face fines.)

Before you start calling celebrities to appear in a charity show for SingTel, the company earned $1.01 billion in just three months from April to June, which is even more than what our ministers make.

Who weeps for the multi-million-or-billion-dollar corporations?

The thing is, the fines just go to the Government. What about the consumers who were affected by the services disruptions that the companies were fined for?

Shouldn’t we get a piece of the action since we were the ones who were actually inconvenienced?

For example, IDA found that some 250,000 M1 users were affected by the January disruption. What if that record $1.5 million fine was distributed among those 250,000 people?

Let’s see, $1.5 million divided by 250,000… that means each one of us would get... only $6?!

That’s just enough to buy a McDonald’s Samurai Burger with single beef patty, which is $5.65 on the delivery menu. The double patty is $7.45. You can forget about adding the Seaweed Shaker Fries and the medium jasmine green tea.

(BTW, I don't recommend the new chicken Samurai burger. Stick with the beef.)



Record fine or not, $1.5 million is clearly inadequate. The fine should be at least enough for each of the affected 250,000 M1 users to get a Samurai meal.

Will StarHub be fined too?

Two Wednesdays ago, the telco apologised to customers who could not log on to the Internet that morning. Three days later, StarHub’s cable TV service was disrupted for four and a half hours.

To make up for the cable TV outage, StarHub announced last week that as “a gesture of goodwill”, it’s offering a free preview of more than 170 channels for a week starting this weekend.

Which is all well and good – except I cancelled my StarHub TV subscription last Tuesday.

And it wasn’t because of the service disruption. No one in my household even noticed the service disruption because we hardly watch TV anymore.

Don’t get me wrong. We still watch plenty of TV programmes – but on the computer via the Internet. No, I don’t download. I stream. Let’s say I want to watch the Channel 5 show Mata Mata (which I don’t), I’d just go to xinmsn.

I had been wanting to cancel my cable TV subscription for some time but was still on contract.

My daughter also protested, which is a little surprising. Being the youngest in the family, she was the last person I expected to hang on to the old medium. For some reason, she still occasionally enjoyed watching Glee on our dusty non-HD Sony Trinitron.



Then on Monday, I received a call from someone representing StarHub who offered to give me a $10 discount off my $30 monthly cable TV subscription fee.

I said I thought I was already getting the discount. The woman explained that my contract had just ended, which was why she was offering me a discount for another 12-month commitment.

That was when I realised I could finally cancel my subscription without incurring early termination charges. (Thank you, StarHub, for alerting me.)

I just had to do it without telling my 14-year-old daughter. Yes, I like to live dangerously.



So the next day, while my daughter was at school, I disconnected the cable TV set-top box and returned it to the StarHub customer service centre at Causeway Point.

And thus my decades-long relationship with cable TV was officially over.

When I got home, my daughter demanded to know what happened to the cable box.

Acting blur, I said, “What cable box?”

She angrily pointed to the empty space above the TV.

I said I was saving us $20 or $30 a month and offered to buy her a Samurai Burger.

But my daughter still hasn’t forgiven me. “It’s like losing a loved one,” she said.

I hope she’ll say the same thing about me when I die.

I would’ve bought her a Samurai meal, but IDA didn’t fine M1 enough.

- Published in The New Paper, 6 October 2013

Crazy Hair is back (with crazy eye)

Shot at a retro cafe called Sinpopo at Joo Chiat Road last week for The New Paper revamp.





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