..........

The demise of a friend. The return of a father. The empty bank account. The sudden windfall. The leaving. The coming into.

The past few months have been a rollercoaster ride to say the least. Work has brought me running up and down the NSE, Johor one day, KL the next. September was a shorter month though, had a week off due to Raya holidays - a welcomed break.

I can't wait for that trip back home in December. An actual holiday!

Yes! Finally! The New Apartment!

Not exactly how I envisioned spending my weekend. I would have rather slept in late and laze around the whole day but we had to move everything to our new apartment in one day. Now we're at the 11th floor with a marvelous view of the city and the hillside forest (there's a huge graveyard there too).

We were previously staying on the 1st floor and we had to pack and lug everything up to the 11th floor. Thank God for lifts. Speaking of lifts, when we were staying on the first floor (we never had to use the lifts) everyone were practically strangers and we would rarely bump into any of the other residents. Needless to say, chatting with neighbours was non-existent. But interestingly enough, while we were moving, we came into contact with a whole lot of the other residents and talked as if we were old buddies. One even had a dog named 'Rufus', a huge 11-month old puppy that was very friendly and tried to hump my leg. Needless to say, the owner was embarrassed but we had a good laugh about it. All that contact from using the lift. It was as if there was an unsaid 'the fellowship of the lifts' thingee going on.

It has been awhile since my last update. I have been busy with organizing and going for surveys. Met this interesting agent, Stephen. Accompanied me for one of the surveys, a biomedicine graduate. Used to work in the hospital, ran his own business and now he's a full-time general and life insurance agent.

Time was also spent with my dad as well. He's now back in Nigeria though. He said he would be returning for good in December.

Had an amazing week at church too. David Oh preached. Pastor Kevin was away. I was really ministered by his sermon. It really brought me back to the basics. If it's one thing I will remember it would be 'you cannot continue giving unless you're being filled, unable to love without receiving the love of Christ'. That opened my eyes to the reason behind all my frustrations up to this point. I have not been receiving. I was a lump of a cynical mass that refused to accept that God, and his people can love because they simply want to and not because they're hungering for your offering or want to indoctrinate you with their teachings so as to manipulate you. Is this the beginning of the uprooting of that bitter root? I sure hope so.

My limbs feel like they're going to fall apart anytime soon. It's back to work.

p/s: Should I get a brand new desktop or that flashy new acoustic guitar? hmmm

The Date Test

The Slow Dancer
Deliberate Gentle Love Dreamer (DGLD)

Steady, reliable, and cradling her tenderly. Take a deep breath, and let it out real easy...you are The Slow Dancer

Your focus is love, not sex, and for your age, you have average experience. But you're a great, thoughtful guy, and your love life improves every year. There's also a powerful elimination process working in your favor: most Playboy types get stuck raising unwanted kids before you even begin settling down. The women left over will be hot and yours. Your ideal woman is someone intimate, intelligent, and very supportive.

While you're not exactly the life of the party, you do thrive in small groups of smart people. Your circle of friends is extra tight and it's HIGHLY likely they're just like you. You appreciate symmetry in relationships.

Always avoid: The Battleaxe (DBLM)
Consider: The Maid of Honor (DGLM), The Sonnet (DGLD)

Your exact male opposite: The Hornivore (Random Brutal Sex Master)

Without motivation and in great desire of slumber

That summarizes my Monday so far. 5.30 seems ages away.

Tardiness Begone!

The company that I work for is pretty anal about being on time. Last month I had to send out an email to explain why I was late on those days. Goes without saying that I was pretty tardy. I did not come in that late, just about a few minutes or so but its still late nonetheless. We run a tag system at entrances so everything is pretty much recorded. After giving my reasons I had to send out another email to tell about my remedial actions.

I could go on ranting about them being anal about the 'small stuff' and all but late is still late regardless of whether it be minutes or hours. The solution was simple, just come in earlier. The marginal utility of coming in early far outweighed risking being late by coming in 'on the dot'. So here I am, sitting in the 15 minutes earlier than usual (pats self on the back).

Work has started to roll in and I have 5 reports now. From what I can see, pretty soon I'd be having the usual trend of 15 backlogged reports. I hope I'd be able to ease the burden on the department. That's why they took me in anyway, more surveyors to distribute surveys to.

*transforms to a hardworking ant*

Announcing the Risk Surveyor

Quite a number of people have been wondering about what I do, so I thought entries about what I do on the job could be somewhat educational. I like what I'm doing so far, the pay is not that great but I'm thankful for where I am and the events that led me here. Guess it goes without saying that there'll be exciting days up ahead.

Taken from www.prospects.ac.uk,

Job Description

Insurance risk surveyors, also known as risk consultants, risk control surveyors and risk control advisers, work for general insurance companies, brokers, or firms of specialist surveyors. Their main role is to advise about risk, based on technical knowledge and good practice.

Surveyors undertake detailed risk surveys of the property/site to be insured and advise clients and insurance underwriters about appropriate improvements to reduce the risk. This involves visiting a wide variety of locations and businesses from retail outlets to large-scale petrochemical plants and producing detailed reports, which help inform underwriters about the acceptability and quality of a particular risk.

(I was told that risk surveying started in the UK and that a document detailing the job description was kept at one of the museums in the UK)

So what do we actually do?

Surveyors spend about half of their time visiting clients and conducting detailed surveys of the sites to be insured(which means I get to travel often, yay!). They often specialize in specific areas, such as:

• property;
• business interruption;
• crime;
• liability;
• fire protection systems.

Surveyors specializing in property assess the risks associated with fire, explosion, storms, flooding and malicious damage to a building and/or contents based on the processes and activities that take place and other features specific to the location. Surveyors specializing in liability assess the risks to which employers or other individuals are exposed based on the processes and activities that take place (I get to a certified busybody, poking my nose into other people's businesses, literally)

All surveyors are expected to be competent in the main areas listed above, but may take on the support of specialists for complex cases, for example those that showed a heavy liability risk.

Typical work activities involve:

• collating and assessing risk information on site;
• using templates to record assessments and collecting photographic evidence;
• preparing and proofreading detailed reports, either on site, at home or in the office (reports include recommendations to the underwriter, e.g. additional fire exits, installation or replacement of sprinkler systems or burglar alarms, health and safety improvements, installation of CCTV cameras, etc) (knowing how preventative systems work ain't such a bad thing)
  
• advising clients on site and discussing with them opportunities and requirements to improve the level of risk, or persuading them of the need for risk improvement programmes;
• allocating quality grades to the client once improvements have been completed;
• accompanying underwriters on site visits to help with their training and development;
• liaising with other professionals, e.g. underwriters, brokers, client representatives, inspectors of health and safety and fire officers;
• keeping up to date with technical aspects affecting risks, e.g. trade processes, legislation, hazardous materials (that means lots of reading)
  

As of April I'll be 'graduating' from just tagging along with my seniors for surveys and I'll be granted permission to conduct surveys on my own. Excited and nervous at the same time, I'm still doubting my capabilities. I'll be making my first outstation trip this week too! All the way up north to Sungai Petani, Kedah. I'd most probably make like a tourist and be snap-happy with my camera.

I've completed and submitted a report I was doing for WWF - the Wildlife Fund, not the wrestling one!. I reckon I'd still have to do some amendments when the feedbacks come in but at least the bulk of it is done and I'm just plain glad. It was tiring but it was well worth it. It was very eye opening and educational to say the least. To celebrate I had a blast over the weekend. I finally had free time to go paint the town red. I was hoping to go for a swim but the weather kept me from doing so. It has been raining every evening for the past week or so.

Looking forward to an exciting month!

The Recycling Subconsience

I went around asking some of the people around me about what would they do if they had to play a part in conserving the environment. Almost everyone answered that they would recycle. While one of them answered that she’d be willing to adopt a turtle or plant a tree at least. My brief discussions with your average everyday people made me wonder about how much do our people know about the environment and conservation. Do they even care? Or maybe they have not had the opportunity to decide whether to care or not?

There must be at least gazillions of other ways to play our part rather than just recycle. There’s carpooling, composting, growing your own veggies, discovering your carbon footprint to name a few. Upon further contemplation of the subject matter, I’ve come to conclude that the people I’ve talked to must have had almost the same exposure to conservation given the almost perfect uniformity in answers given. However, before I go on, please note that my thoughts here are hardly representative of the general populace and are purely speculative. There was also no proper methodology, just random chats with the people that I’ve come in contact with.

The first thing that came to mind about what could have a been a common denominator in all those that I’ve talked to was of course, the television or the idiot box as some might call it.

Thinking back to earlier days, I could remember watching infomercials and government-sponsored ads over the telly about recycling to save our environment. I could still remember the tune in which the ad played to. A mother correcting her child for making a wrong match as to which waste material goes to which designated bin. I still can’t remember what goes where too. If you’re as old as I am, and watched the same channels as I did, you would have most probably seen those same ads. There was no Astro back then, it was just good ol’ TV1, TV2 and TV3. After a while then came MegaTV and that soon gave way to Astro. I reckon with the availability of channels like Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, people would have a greater chance of being exposed to nuances in conservation.

I wonder if the government had not pushed the recycling agenda but instead opted for adopt-a-turtle, would our answers today be any different? Instead of recycling, adopting-a-turtle would be a norm to conservation. That would be a dream come true for environmentalists. .

I cannot help but feel now that governing bodies play an enormous role in instilling a sense of awareness to environmental issues that plague our everyday lives although we might not feel the brunt of it. Sure it takes a lot of self-effort as well, but it is undeniable that the stand in which governing bodies take and the priorities they set in concerns to development and conservation can very well influence the behaviour of the masses. A governing body that takes high priority in conservation would most probably have a constituency that holds the same values as well providing that socio-economic structure is not undermined and there is incentive in doing so. There’s subsidies and tax waivers when people are compliant to environmental standards to name a few examples.

However, in the case when there are people who are more ‘enlightened’ than their governing bodies, there can be mounting frustration and discouragement. There have been countless times where I’ve heard ‘Government tak mau buat apa-apa, kami peduli pun tiada apa-apa juga’. Again of course, these are rather simplistic assumptions and there’s so much more to be explored to further understand the intricacies of the socio-economic and cultural structure that makes for the fabric of our nation.

Rather than to think that people do not care, I would rather like to think that we are still unaware of what we can do and the legitimacy of environmental movements. Surely, there has got to be something better than just recycling.

At least one person I know think that the ‘Adopt-a-turtle’ program sounded cute.