A friend on facebook posted a message about "income opportunity" and I asked her if she was short of cash and she told me the background to it. I didn't realize it was a joke. She explained to me and I saw where she came from. Report shows that following the huge 5 hours long disruptions, SMRT in the midst of clearing off huge passengers backlog, tried to mobilise its taxi drivers to help with transportation and inappropriately termed this as "income opportunity". It is always interesting to observe happenings in Singapore and see how people react. The reactions, in my opinions, would be what shaped up Singapore's thinking in the future. This should evolve over time and become part of our values. Interesting also is the integration of social media in the process moving people in the right and wrong directions.
To me, any "mistakes" made by the public services in Singapore is a "shock" because these were meant to be "perfect" and people have "high expectations", remembering and reasonable enough, Singapore also live by it's international rating of its quality and standard. I think sooner or later, we will all have to come to term with this and appropriately face it. Unfortunately, this made a lot of people not able to and not know how to "let go" and kept being hung up or angry over it all because we want it to be perfect. Honestly, this is just public transports, there has got to be more important things in life other than this, can we not just put it aside. I am sure the media will report lots of this and people will be reminded again and again.
By international standard, the "mistake" is quite normal. Over here, people face disruptions in transport very often, things do happen, and people also unhappy but accepting to it. Disruption due to weather, strikes, technical, etc, you can name it. The quality of underground also not as good as in Singapore MRT. Singapore may be one of the world's fastest growth economy, but there is no "short cut" coming to public transports, it is still a very steep learning curve. So, we ought to be patient and even to forgive those who claim about "income opportunity", inappropriate as it may seem, SMRT also not experience handling "shock". I am sure as time passed, people are also likely to face such things again, not to say we compromise on the standard, as things do happen and this is a fact. It is better we get ready to revise expectation and face this realistically.
Can we not be a bit "international" when facing this? Why not adopt a sense of humour, take it easy, take it in our stride and let your fiery reaction find a place to be put at rest. Stop reading how people wrote or react to this online or Twitter as this only makes you more angry and this is bad for your soul. Still, social media is good in shaming the bad behaviour (though in my view is forgivable) of SMRT. Having said that, we have to be very careful about how we are affected by social media. If there were things that made you unhappy already, why add on to the list. Perhaps we should just take things one at a time and face everyday as if a new beginning.
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