Man. It's harder to get my hands on a 1 terrabyte harddisk than i thought. Went to funan today hoping to get it for around $480 but the places i went to were out of stock. And woe be to me, about a third of the shops, including about half the tech stores and ALL the other stores that might have stocked that Seagate 1000gb harddisk...had closed by then. And it was only
8 bloody pm!!
I was quite astonished. Like it's a saturday during the Christmas eve period for crying out loud! :| There's gotta be something wrong with that place. Either that, or tech stores in funan have had very little business. To the point that the people working there are so pessimistic that they're
convinced they won't get any customers of note after 8pm.
How crappy. At this rate, i'll have to go to Sim Lim. Doesn't feel as homely over there but at least stock and early closing times are never a problem.
I was already rather peeved today, but the worst was yet to come. On the MRT ride back, i encountered the Merry Band of Korean Men.
In the multitude of korean dramas you see these days, i find that a lot of these korean men are portrayed as quite the bunch of chauvanistic rascals. And these are supposed to be the good guys, heroes of the show even. Maybe my moral compass just isn't aligned very well with those korean scriptwriters.
But you know what, i always secretly felt that korean men weren't really like that...that they weren't really such "rascals". Maybe the average korean guy's quite timid and reserved, so scriptwriters try to make the male leads more bold and brash and end up going overboard. However, today's incident has caused me to doubt my previous convictions.
First, the MRT was packed and closing when the Merry Band rushed in. Nothing wrong with that. We all want to Save Time.
Then, this fat korean guy with an LV luggage bag lost his footing when the MRT started to move, and crashed into my back, pushing me into a pair of women. Nothing wrong again; that was an Accident.
Later on, that korean guy stepped quite painfully on my slippered foot. But there was no problem. Because he Apologised. And i smiled.
So far, it was going rather well. They were conversing and laughing very loudly (as in VERY) but that could be attributed to Cultural Differences.
But then the Incident happened.
As the MRT emptied out a little, this scrawny little 30-ish korean guy approached the rest of his buddies,
pushed into my arm, the arm that was holding on to one of the vertical metal bars scattered around the train (you know, the metal poles that split into 3 that help us keep our balance) and proceeded to claim the whole bloody bar as his own.
I believe that there was no way he didn't know about my arm because he was practically walking into it and
leaning against it, like he wanted to ask me to buzz off but didn't know how to say it in english. I think the fat guy noticed what had happened but decided not to do anything about it...which is fine actually - maybe he's just timid, deep down. But the scrawny guy and the rest simply ignored me and acted as if nothing untoward had happened.
The scrawny guy felt rather icky to me, and being my usual non-confrontational self, i simply withdrew my hand from the pole instead of keeping firm or doing the "excuse me". The train was still quite crowded, so there were no other poles or handgrips for me to hold onto, nor were there any free spaces for me to lean on.
I've had lots of training as a kindergarten boy, so i stood there, keeping my balance in the moving train with my hands to myself, with the scrawny korean guy standing right in front of me with his entire body wrapped around the whole metal structure, all the while feeling rather irritated. Rather.
I think i've got to be either a saint or a wimp for not doing anything about it. But in any case...that was
rather rude of him. I suppose it's wrong to generalise a whole country's worth of men based on this small incident, but you can't blame me if my own opinion has started to change because of this. Just a little bit.
