Well, first of all, my birthday. It coming in a few days time. :-)
Next, it will be the end of 2011 and coming of 2012.
On the impersonal side, the most major incident will be the breakdown of our "World Class Transport System", the MRT. Oops, it is not only 1 incidents, there are many incidents happening within weeks. I am not very affected because I took the bus to work, and my workplace is out of town area. However, a lot of my friends were affected and the inconveniences were really frustrated, on top of having no idea what is happening while they are trapped (whether on trains or in the stations).
LTA, SMRT, the Transport Minister, even the Prime Minister wanted an inquiry of what happened, how did it happen and why it happened? Fine, go ahead and engage some experts in this area to diagnose and rectify the problems, I have no issue, but please do not use the tax payers money on these investigation. It should be borned by the relevant company, authorities who did not do their jobs properly in the first place. The Board of Directors in SMRT even gave a press statement and wanted their CEO (which was being criticised for doing a bad job) to be accountable. Well, I am all for making the CEO accountable but I felt that the Board of Directors should also be responsible, you are the ones who employed her and approved her salary, bonuses and increments.
The other major happening is that our taxi companies had decided to increase their fares. However, they termed it as a fare restructuring. The surcharge hours had now increase to 16 hours a day, which means, either you pay for the peak hours or the midnight hours surcharge. If peak hours is going to last 10 hours, I would suggest the taxi companies stop using the term "peak", because it is meaningless. I seldom take taxi, if I take it, I am able to afford it. But what about those who need it but cannot afford it, like the disabled, the old people who have no families to take care of them?
Well, things in December don't look good to ordinary citizens. Let's hope the new year will bring some reliefs to people on the ground.
P/S: I read with interest that the SMRT is engaging an independent director, who is also the Assistant Secretary-General of NTUC (our national trade union) to lead the investigation. Hmm ... he is listed as director on the SMRT website, don't know why for this investigation, he became an independent director. Isn't there a conflict of interest on his positions? So who will he side during negotiation with unions, the company or the unions? Maybe someone or something will enlightened me...
