Quality of life

Home sweet home

Traffic jam is caused by more cars on the road. Fact. Cars are affordable in Malaysia. Fact. Public transport in Malaysia has space for improvement. Fact. When you combine all this, the conclusion is traffic jam in KL during normal working days and certain peak periods assuming most folks clock in the same time and clock out the same time. Which leaves you with the option of leaving early at the risk of not being productive and arriving back in good time. This option won't sit well if you have an conscience and your boss won't be happy if he or she were to privy to this information. Another option would be to leave later, avoiding the usual crowd. Which means you will be forced to spend more time at work. You may be more productive if you choose to use this time to finish up paperwork and all loose ends for the day can be tied up quite nicely. the last option is to leave on time and brace yourself for the traffic arriving home tired and less productive and earlier than if you were to leave much later.

I've tried all there. There is no easy option. A good way to solve this problem is to be productive in the car. So getting a driver is good. It would allow you to send and read emails. Make calls and receive calls without risking being caught by the police talking whilst holding a phone. And you can sleep should you choose to and arrive fairly rejuvenated.

Back to work

I was caught in a 4 hour jam yesterday afternoon. This saw me arriving back in KL slightly after 8pm. Now the slow crawl was expected but the sudden heavy rain on the outskirts of KL just before the toll was not. What started as a dry and warm drive suddenly became a tough drive with minimal visibility. The reflector i.e. divider was one of the two markers I used to drive, the other being the lights of the car ahead. Everyone oddly enough wasn't going very slowly despite there being water leveling up to about 2-3 inches at most. It was a scary drive. Am glad to be back safely. And now, back to work. But first, morning mass because this is Lent.

Traffic stinks

Picture from Istock photo

The traffic jam this week and the week before has been horrendous. On average I spend 1 hour 15 min to 1 hour 30 minutes traversing through town with a distance of roughly 12 km....a journey which can take as fast as 15 minutes on a good day.Sitting in an almost stationary vehicle with the foot periodically on the brake alternating with the accelerator is tiring. My patience is tried with the naughty drivers who drive ahead only to cut in sometimes rather viciously. It would take a very special person indeed to deny them.

It was the fault of my leaky nose

I suffer from allergic rhinitis and I live in a condominium which lies beside one of the longest roads in Kuala Lumpur. As a direct result of this, you can imagine the amount of dust which settles around me and when the fan goes a-buzzing, these minute nasty particles play havoc on the nose. Most days the nose behaves through the night and the non-stop obligatory 8-9 sneezes come on waking up in the morning. Of late, the nose has started this a good few hours earlier disrupting my REM sleep and making my head feel like cotton wool during the first 10 minutes of waking time. This is exactly what happened on Friday night....making me miss the alarum clock buzz ( I must have hit the off button and cheerfully continued dreaming ). I woke up with natural sunlight streaming into the bedroom. Not a good sign. Plans for leaving at 6:00am for home went right out the window. After a bit of breakfast and some last minute packing and re-packing and re-arranging so I could make just the ONE trip to the car....I made it onto the main road at *ahem* half eight. I was greeted with a whole line of cars at Batu Caves therein started the long crawl back home. I arrived at twelve noon hungry and with a very slight numb feeling in my right foot.