Now Everyone Can Fly

In case you are not aware, "Now Everyone Can Fly" is the tagline of AirAsia.

AirAsia is a low cost airline, and honestly, if you do not care about anything else but cost, AirAsia is a good choice.

Before you think I am being paid or bribed to say this like some other blogger is, hold your horses.

AirAsia sure gives you competitive airfare, sometimes so low it's hard to believe. The thing is, that's not the only thing that's low with AirAsia.

There are also low quality planes, low quality services, low punctuality, low inflight food supply, and low customer care and responsibility.

If you have ever been on an AirAsia flight that was on time, congratulations! Quick, go buy lottery! For the rest of us, please expect a delay, it comes as default and consider yourself lucky if the delay is under 60 minutes.

If you are flying AirAsia on a long flight or flight involving a meal time, please do yourself a favour of either packing your meal, or pre-order the inflight meal. Else you might just end up like my sister-in-law who had to go hungry while flying back from Australia because the aircraft ran out of food.

If you were stuck in that unfortunate situation and you cannot stand hunger, then maybe you should try to persuade other pessengers to sell you their meal by offering twice or three times the meal cost, using the money saved from the cheap airfare, of course.

If you are planning an important trip, for example to attend a convocation, wedding, or just a hard-earned vacation, think twice before you choose AirAsia. Imagine you have applied for your annual leave three months in advance, booked the accomodation and transportation, rushed for days to get your work sorted so you could have peace of mind while you travel, checked online regularly on the flight and pre-ordered the inflight meal, only to find out one week before the trip that the flight you have booked and paid for six months ago has been cancelled... >_<

The reason? Something about aircraft maintenance and nope, there is no alternative flight on the same day offered as replacement.

<sarcasm> As we all know, something as important as aircraft maintenance is always scheduled on a whim to cause disruption to the service instead of planned well in advance to minimise impact to business. </sarcasm>

So if the timing of your trip is also low priority, or the convocation and wedding ceremony can be delayed, like for a mere few weeks, just for your sake, then yea, go go AirAsia!

Oh, I haven't got to the best part yet!

Know how we found out the flight has been cancelled? Well, father-in-law needs to cut short his trip so a change of return date is necessary. It's while asking for a change in the return flight that we were told the outbound flight has been cancelled, and earliest flight available is 9 days after the original date.

What. The. Fish and duck.

Imagine if we didn't need to change the return date. That's one week before our trip and AirAsia hasn't bothered to inform us about the flight cancellation yet.

Bollocks.

Unbelievable craptastic low quality of service!

Now, for the icing on the cake (yes, still more!), remember the advice of pre-ordering inflight meal? Yea, we followed our own advice since the original flight has dinner time smack in between, the meal cost came to RM60. AirAsia cancelled the original flight and new flight is now on graveyard shift time (midnight to early morning), there no longer is a need to have inflight meal so we thought of cancelling that.

RM35 for processing fee please.

I have used WTF and bollocks, so I will just go with speechless.

Now everyone can fly... but do you want to?

Sorry Me

His Royal Highness King (Young Man) Hsiang is already three, yet he often falls when he is walking.

Hopefully it's just carelessness and his lack of attention on where he is going and not something serious.

He fell again while we were leaving Tesco today, wifey admonished him for not paying attention on walking and he said:

"Sorry mama."

"Don't say sorry to me, you fell and made yourself pain pain lor."

"Oh... Sorry myself."

*pause*

"Sorry me." *pats his own head*

Crunch Time

Recovered from the flu/cold/slight fever that prompted the previous entry in a record two days, usually it took me longer (yea I know, weak, fragile old man). I think it's due to all those vitamin C tablets I consumed.

After the flu I had my first ever gastritis that rendered me immobile, curled in pain on my bed. I am no doctor, but I am guessing it's due to the citric acid from all those vitamin C tablets I consumed... Good thing my mom has some Chinese medicines at home, still I had a delicate stomach for three days hence.

Then the workload skyrocketed. Today's the first time I turned on my home computer since the weekend, had been working till the wee hours everyday after dinner these few days. So the hostile takeover of the Wednesday badminton session wasn't such a bad thing after all, I left the office about the same time as we usually end our session anyway.

Really bad timing for so many things to happen at the same time period. So much to do, so little time.

It's either bad timing, or simply because I am such a slow person. The price of working in snail speed (but very thorough!) is the sacrifice of my sleep.

And health, humour, blogging desire...

Alrighty, back to work!

Under the Weather

Special Effects

This is an X-files entry.

Since I have no idea how and why it happened, I will just give you the facts (as usual), and let you draw your own conclusion.

The following are graphs of empirical data collected using same set of equipment, it's largely an automated process with human involvement required only at the start of each data collection to do some manual handling that doesn't change any of the equipment involved.

First, this is what a normal data looks like:



Good and dandy, data like this is what I need.

However, sometimes things go haywire for no apparent reason, same set of equipment, different day and time, different person who did the manual handling, the data turned out like this:



The human involved manual handling part should really not affect the data, so logic deduces that it must be the equipment that causes this.

But hor, the few data collections after I resumed the responsibility of the manual handling part showed that everything is alright, for example:



Strange, and I haven't a clue why. The superstitious explanation is that perhaps the equipment only works if I handle it myself, and not other people. So when I was unavailable and asked a colleague to help perform the manual handling part, the data went haywire?

I know it's not logical, so I simply dubbed this the N-effect.

As if the N-effect is not bad enough, I had the misfortune to experience something worse, simply by having another colleague tagged along to learn when I did the manual handling part.

Behold! The M-effect:



Basically, no data at all. >_<

After two days continuously getting data like this, I smartened up and did the manual handling part alone with nobody around to induce any "special effect".

And yes, my data turned out fine after that.

*X-files music* The truth is out there...

来来来，来单面说

他们说：

“这些衣着性感女表演和高音量不仅干扰附近居民，也影响回教徒的祈祷，这根本不顾及回教徒的感受，也欠缺敏感度。”


其他的人说：

“这些每天五次*刺耳的高音量祈祷不仅干扰附近居民，也影响非回教徒的清静生活，这根本不顾及非回教徒的感受，也欠缺敏感度。”

“我孩子晚上八点入睡，没半个小时就被祈祷声吵醒，都不站在别人的立场想想。”

“由于工作需要凌晨三点才能入眠，三个小时后又被念经声弄醒，搞得整天都精神不足，真的会短命。”

“总是在人家用餐和休息时祈祷，真的是吃睡都不安宁。”

“不到一公里内有两间回教堂，每天五次比赛吵人。”

“上回和英国来的朋友一同在外享受晚餐时附近的回教堂开始念经，老外顿时失去食欲，说好没礼貌这样硬性干扰别人用餐。”

“声音污染，减低我们的生活素质。”



*斋节期间一天六次

Baddy

Baddy, my own short form for badminton, as I put in the court reservation instead of the "meeting" other people defaulted to.

I guess with so many meetings everyday we are bound to run out of meeting rooms until meetings have to be held at the badminton court... =P

Today's turnout was a lot better than Monday's. Why ler? Don't they realise a good exercise is just the thing to counter Monday blues and makes you sleep soundly at night? =)

The thing with Wednesday session is that there are also a lot of other people playing so the place is usually packed. And since I booked the (old) reservable courts, the others would go early to swarm the (new) first-come-first-served courts, which have better lighting and floor grip. So we don't get to play on those courts lor. =(

We have another colleague joined us today, a decent badminton player. The good thing about being the one with lesser skill is that I get a lot of chances to learn and improve from the other players. The bad thing is of course whoever partners with me has to be used to losing. =P

Anyway, I had a blast, drenched in sweat by the end of the session, I likey!

Those immature or easily offended by perfectly normal organ should stop reading now, consider yourself warned. ^_^

There is this one thing that worries me though...

You know, my undies are always sweat-soaked by the end of a session, and I have to drive at least an hour to get home, will my, er... "wonder bar", or erm... "joy rod" get a cold ah?

=P