The Bangla That Got Away

Something happened today which caught me and my wife by surprise.

Our maid had been with us for quite some time and so far we've been quite happy with her services.. She had been a great help to our family and my in-laws too.

Until today... because of her silly act which tilted our judgement of her and also caused her deportation back to her homeland tomorrow..

Today is Iffah's Sunday Gymboree class and we left for Camden Medical Centre at around 10 am. We also told her to clean up our place and do the ironings. Due to the fasting month, instead of having lunch outside as what we normally do on non-fasting months period, we went back home immediately after that. As we got back to our doorstep, and opened the door, I was taken aback to see a Bangladeshi coming out hastily out of Iffah's room!!!! It took me around 5 seconds to register to my mind that something fishy is going on down there!! Then our maid also came out of Iffah's room looking panicky and started to adjust her clothes a bit... hmmm what goes on before we came in I don't want to know. I asked the Bangla who was he and the maid told us that he's just a 'friend'... come on lah... don't lie to us...

Immediately I asked my wife to call Atuk to come down to our place asap... Atuk scolded her for a while and decision was made to have her deported tomorrow. We're going to send her back to the agency and say sayonara ....

What was she doing all these while at our place alone when no one's around?? Using our flat as a temporary romping place?? This is something which I really cannot take it.. If our maid was found to be doing things like breaking glasses, spoiling our clothes, tasteless cooking or even minor theft, I can still forgive.. but using our place to bring in your Bangla beau for sneaky breaks... then sorry... out you go... no more second chance!!!

Didn't manage to take a pic of that Bangla... but he left his footwear at our place and ran out in a hurry... so here's the pic of his footwear


Those are not Cinderella's slippers.... they're CinderBangla's!!!

Some signs to show that I'm adapting into my new job

Here's some signs to show that I'm adapting to my new job

1) More acronyms to learn and know!! (much more than my previous job scope!)

2) My body clock is tuned to US and London local times... Sometimes I cannot sleep at night (local Singapore time)

3) I'm beginning to know more about financial markets terminology (forex, instrument codes, equities, spot, futures, options, yadayada...)

4) I need to know other countries' public holidays.

Corporate events

We had a couple of corporate events for the past 2 weeks with the first one being a team-building with members of the MTC department at Sentosa island on 31st August. It was facilitated by staff from Focus Adventures (www.focusadventure.com) but instead of rigourous outdoor activities we had some silly games and a team-based cooking competition instead. My team was last in the cooking competition though, don't know why...

Just today we had another corporate event. This time round it's a charity based event organised by both the MTC and Data Ops department. Location is at the Singapore National Museum and task is to accompany some old folks from the Kwong Wai Shiu Hospital (on wheelchairs!) to have a tour of the musuem. Come to think of it, I've not been to the National Museum for more than 20 years! And now, with the new renovations and exhibitions, going to the museum has become a really cool place to go (especially with family). You can spend more than 4 hours and yet you may not be able to cover every square inch of the exhibits... Definitely a must for me to visit the place again!

I'm beginning to feel more belonging to a bigger corporate organization since joining Reuters. Perhaps better than Thales.