My first week experiencing the Australian real estate market

Today is my 11^th day in Sydney, and a day before I officially commence work. It has been a hectic period, scrambling to sort out all the administrative and living stuff.

The Sydney (and Australian, in general) property market is harsh. Real estate prices are so expensive – I would venture to say that square-foot for square-foot, the prices here outclass Singapore’s by several leaps.

To put things in perspective: A one-bedroom apartment in Chatswood (a suburb about 20 minutes from Sydney city centre) commands a rent anything between AUD$350-400 per week - not even furnished except for basic built-in's and a stove (required by law). The same unit could probably sell for roughly AUD$400-500 thousand. Even without currency conversion, I cannot think of a single equivalent one-bedroom apartment in Kuala Lumpur (is there even such a thing?) that could command MYR$1,500 per month – you could practically rent an entire terrace house in Petaling Jaya with that amount.

And the worst part is, it is not as is people are being scared away from the high rental rates. For every apartment advertised for lease that I inspected, an average of 3-4 others were also inspecting the same place, with the hopes of securing a lease. It's a landlord's market here, and it scares the shits out of me.

To my friends and relatives back in Malaysia: Do not rant about expensive real estate. I can assure you, the Australians’ problems with ballooning real estate prices are far greater…

 

偽君子 Hypocrites

成語所謂 “疑人不用，用人不疑。” 吾曰 “欲嫌勿做，欲做勿嫌。” 此乃偽君子所為，吾上恨也。

There is a Chinese saying, “If you are suspicious of someone, do not employ him; but if you choose to employ him, then do not be suspicious of him.” Well, here’s my thought for today: If you are going to complain, then don’t do it; but if you do it on your own volition, then don’t complain. To do so is hypocrisy – and I hate hypocrites.

溝通不佳 Poor communication

我認為大致上馬來西亞華人 (尤其年輕代) 關鍵缺點之一，係溝通不佳。何如? 例: 辭彙不純淨，文法不正確，說話不準確，描述含糊，疑問答覆不具體，欲一需十問，不伸其眞意。

結果，誤會多甚，欲東得西，浪費珍貴時間資源，效率降落。

諸讀者: 君等同意上述否? 若然，君等認為此乃文化之問題，抑或教育之問題? 有一位從前同事回答說, “環境造成文化與教育問題”。 我對曰, “環境又何原乎? 乃政治造成也。”

I believe our current generation of Malaysians are plagued by poor communication skills as a result of a bad language culture – adulterated vocabulary ("code-switching"), atrocious grammar, vagueness and inaccuracy, and lack of detail. So much time is wasted clarifying and rectifying Q&A's that could have been done correctly right off the bat, if only we have the discipline to.

Simple example: When I call a person whom I know is on his/her way to see me, and I ask him/her “Where are you?” (which, in full-style, obviously means “Where along the way from your point of origin to my current location are you?”), the response “I am coming” does not tell me Jack Sh*t.

My valedictory address to Murphy Labuan

Today was my last working day at Murphy. It has been three long and rather exhausting years. I was given a nice little farewell at the KL office. That said, I have to admit that I am somewhat relieved that it is all over, and that I can finally return to doing what I do and like best.

I received a word of commendation from the Shore Base Manager for the Valedictory Address that I e-mailed to my team in Labuan. So, I thought I would post it here for posterity, and perhaps as a measure of inspiration for the future.

* * * * * * * * * *

To:
My esteemed Labuan team

Firstly, I apologise for failing to make the trip to Labuan for last Friday's Monthly Shore Base HSE Meeting, as an unfortunate series of hiccups with the flight plan changes resulted in my not being able to secure a seat on the plane. I hope you will kindly accept this written valediction in lieu of my presence in the flesh to deliver it in Labuan to all of you. Besides, being intrinsically shy and having mild speech impedimus, I am of the opinion that I tend to write a lot better than I speak (in just about any language I am familiar with, other than swear).

A three-year journey - one that began on 1 November 2007 - has finally come to an end. I walked in through the portals of Murphy, not knowing much about the Oil & Gas industry (other than that oil rigs look like miniature Eiffel Towers spitting flames), even less about boats (other than that they have sails, anchors and a feisty-and-bearded skipper) and nothing about drilling equipment (I thought a pup joint was a place where hounds congregate). The learning curve was steep, to say the least, but I have come out of it hopefully with a decent appreciation of how the industry operates. I will not claim to be an expert by any measure, but I believe I should be able to carry out a decent conversation on the industry at a cocktail party, without running the risk of having a casual eavesdropper who happens to hail from the oil patch harangue me for talking through my backside.

I sincerely thank all of you for the support that you have given me. In particular, I thank you for your patience, and bearing with my occasional ignorance about things in the oil patch, even as I fumbled about trying to provide all of you with some sense of direction. You will notice that often-times, and contrary to what I gather is the norm in the oil patch, my leadership style has been one of participation  rather than autocracy. This is partly due to the fact that you all probably know a lot more about the operations than I do. 

But more importantly, it also stemmed from a leadership style that I learnt from my mentor at Hewlett-Packard many years ago, and one that I successfully applied myself later on: It is the belief that all employees inherently want to do a good job - provided they are given the necessary tools, support and encouragement to carry out their duties with enthusiasm, and recognition where it is due (by the way, the afore-mentioned statement encapsulates what has been fondly called the "HP Way"). To that, I would add the words "respect" and "empowerment" - I do not subscribe to the management style of hounding over my staff (read: "management by fear"), and believe that all of you are capable and mature enough to be empowered to make decisions and take action where appropriate. What works in military does not necessarily (and oftentimes does not) work in the workplace. Employees need a certain degree of freedom (through responsibility, of course) and empowerment to grow, and an autocratic and micro-management style does little to promote such growth.

My job as a leader, as I envisaged it, has therefore been to clear the path, and eliminate the distracting and detracting bureaucracies and manholes, such that you are free to execute your tasks and lead your own teams without frustration or trepidation. In addition to that, and contrary to Sun Tzu's "Art of War" which proscribes the policy of "keeping the troops in the dark", I try to provide you with what necessary background information is available from the KL ivory towers (as and when it is apt to do so), so that you know the reasons (good or bad) behind the instructions I pass on to you, and more importantly, so that you are well-informed of the overall picture and therefore in a clear state of mind to, in turn, provide me with feedback, should such oftentimes high-handed decisions made upon this lofty perch called "the KL office" run totally against the grain of good operational sense (this I learnt from a 1980's BBC-produced documentary on good leadership). It is too easy to make decisions on paper in a nice swanky air-conditioned boardroom (the Chinese have a saying for it: 紙上談兵 "discussing warfare on a sheet of paper"), but the fact is, the real business takes place at the docks, in the yards and on a rig 120km out at sea. Being the boys in the front-line of the battlefield, you would know aeons better than us chaps in cushy offices, what works at base and what does not. To cite just one example, I once took away a valuable lesson from Rob that a "500m² clear deck area" quoted on a vessel specification sheet very quickly translates into 300-odd m² in reality, once you take into consideration fouling of pipe inlets and other deck appendages conveniently omitted from the literature - there is no substitute for standing on the vessel's deck and running through the drill-pipe load-out patterns in person with the skipper.  

I leave all of you with just one request, i.e. that you continue to provide that same level of support to whoever my successor shall be. 

I bid all of you adieu, and in an ever-connected, ever-shrinking world and ever-diminishing borders, I am sure our paths shall cross again in most unexpected ways.

Yours sincerely,
Mark Yong

Lest we forget the Classical languages

Being a linguistic enthusiast, I am always fascinated by how much the Classical languages have contributed to our modern vernacular languages. Even more so, I lament that despite how much we owe to these languages of antiquity for enriching the vocabulary of the very languages we use everyday and take so much for granted, we choose to cast aside these forefathers of our modern tongues, denouncing them as dated.

Did anyone who watched "The Kingdom" (starring Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner) notice when Col. Faris Al Ghazi (played by Ashraf Barhom) said the line "... jawab soalan" (in reference to an interrogated suspect having already answered a question being posed)? If so, and assuming you, my reader, know Malay, did you instinctively note the obvious relationship between Malay and Modern Standard Arabic, both of whom have some roots in Classical Arabic?

For those of you who have visited Japan, and made a fleeting glance at the street signs, posters and restaurant menus written in kanji, has it occurred to you that almost 90% of kanji employed in the Japanese language is congruent with Chinese? For that matter, have any of you browsed through a Korean dictionary and noticed that many words and phrases are actually very similar to Chinese? That is because these two languages, despite being genetically-different from Chinese, borrowed an extensive part of their vocabulary from Classical Chinese - the only form of the Chinese language that can really claim to be common to the East Asian nations (China, Japan and Korea).

For those of you who are fortunate enough to own a copy of the Latin Vulgate Bible, have you attempted to place it alongside an English translation of the Bible, and compared a passage? If you have, you would inevitably have noted Latin words that have been inherited by English (though, not necessarily used in the equivalent verse of the Bible), e.g. principio (from which we get the English principle) means beginning (or first), verbum (from which we get the English verbose, verbatim) which means word, caelis (from which we get the English ceiling) means heaven.... etc.

Sadly, our lingustic education today makes little (if any) references to their Classical ancestors, thus depriving the students of the appreciation of their etymology. For understanding the etymology of the word affords the student more dynamism and flexibility in the use of the word, and a greater appreciation of any other related languages that share a common ancestor.

I got this quote from Wikipedia, by Edward Sapir in Languages (1921):

When we realize that an educated Japanese can hardly frame a single literary sentence without the use of Chinese resources, that to this day Siamese and Burmese and Cambodgian bear the unmistakable imprint of the Sanskrit and Pali that came in with Hindu Buddhism centuries ago, or that whether we argue for or against the teaching of Latin and Greek [in schools] our arguments are sure to be studded with words that have come to us from Rome and Athens, we get some indication of what early Chinese culture, Buddhism, and classical mediterranean civilization have meant in the world's history. There are just five languages that have had overwhelming significance as carriers of culture. These are classical Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Greek, and Latin. In comparison with these, even such culturally important languages such as Hebrew and French sink into a secondary position.

Malaysia could do with a good railway system

I truly marvel at the railway systems in European countries. Having visited Denmark, Sweden and Norway in late-2005 on business trips, and spending the leisure time in between travelling around the countries by train, the extensiveness of the railway network (meaning that even if any particular line is down, you still have options to travel via another route), the punctuality of the trains (down to the minute!), and that there are always enough seats on-board for everyone, never fails to impress me. This is the kind of matured public transport system that the public has come to know and rely on.

Contrast that with Malaysia's LRT（Light Rail Transit) system - and this I can attest to, being a daily commuter. There really are only two main lines serving Kuala Lumpur's city centre, and they are both independently-operated. If ever any line is down, you are stuck. And yes, I have been stuck at the KLCC station after work no less than five times last year. The ticket vending machines reject my money once every four times on average (and, let it be added, I use new banknotes).

And this is the part that really grinds my teeth: The LRT system was really supposed to be the answer to Kuala Lumpur's traffic and public transport woes. Why, then, Mr. Ex-Transport Minister, did you guys build a light system of only two carriages, instead of going the whole hog with a proper 4-5 carriage train system? Did you not envisage the volume of people who would use this as their daily means of transportation in and out of the city? Have you actually tried boarding the LRT at 7:45am on a weekday- where there are, on average, ten persons queuing up at each of the four entrances to the train, and when the train finally arrives, it is so jam-packed that only one person can squeeze his way in?

Instead of spending millions of our taxpayers' hard-earned money on one return trip into space, I suggest you spend it on expanding the railway and public bus networks.

And, if I may add: Mr. Prime Minister, please do not chastise us by doing a dog-and-pony-show trip on board our trains, lamenting on the headlines that the train system is pathetic and that you promise to do something about it... and then retire in March this year. In the first instance, why do you hire a Transport Minister, and then have yourself - instead of him - to ride the trains and experience the Hell we go through everyday?