SAY SOMETHING NICE CAMPAIGN : Why it's kewwwl to be Malaysians Reason #1 :

We get many holidays..wait...I should sound more excited...let me add some exclamation marks..here we go,...We get many holidays!!!!!  Depending on which side you are on, some may even say far too many, of course the employees will claim we could do with more. Well, we have many races with many religions ergo many holidays. That plus our annual leave makes quite a decent number of leave from work. This is of course excluding self-created holidays from MC (Medical Certification) or perhaps the kind of holidays we get when the incumbent government take a big win in the General Erections..oops, I mean General Elections (which haven’t been happening lately and I doubt will happen in this near future) or Malaysian almost obsolete football team take on Manchester United on a friendly match and accidentally won (or if we employ a couple of Banglas with offensive body ordor that really pissed those Mat Salleh's off until their concentration derails and they score their own goals.....) and of course etc etc etc.  If the state of confusion be made into a religion and is called “Confused-cius”, we will have a few more days of leave. I said “a few more days” because I suspect that Confused-cius, , may hold quite a majority number of disciples.

Yes. Festive seasons and holidays.  It is fun going back to Kampung and Malaysians are such a high spirited lot that we could even take the traffic jam almost every festive season, created by mostly our tolls. I mean, we Malaysians celebrate EVERYTHING, just give us half the chance. The Malays will in a split second congest the highways and tolls heading for Kampungs during Chinese New Year, sometimes the Chinese will have to wait for the traffic to clear off and head back to their respective Kampungs just in time for the Pre Chinese New Year dinner. The Chinese are very competitive lot but unfortunately they cannot beat the Malay record timing of getting into the car to head out of town towards the Kampung when any holidays are declared.

And speaking of tolls, another cool thing about being a Malaysian is that we don’t really have to queue up like those boring Brits if we don’t want to. It’s not like any good Samaritan will come up to those people who cut queue and tell them off, something along the lines of, “We are in a hurry too dear”…or “I think your Kindergarten teachers had left out the alphabet Q from the syllabus because you sure look like you haven’t heard of it”. My favourite is “Kambing biri biri kat UK pun reti beratur….”. I mean, look at the LRT system for instance. We save time simply by rushing into the LRT the very moment the door opens and well, the people from inside will HAVE to now hurry up to get out. This is definitely less time consuming. Fantastic! 

And oh… look at our tolls. Some people may go about 35km an hour but one can roughly estimate the distance of approaching a toll when we notice the sudden speed increase of the vehicles for no apparent reason…well, not apparent until we reach the toll of course. And well, the Smart Tag was created again to save time, although it is rather unfortunate that it is a misnomer because frankly, the Tag is the one that is Smart, the user…not so. Some of the users are so not smart, that it beats the purpose of having a fast lane rendering it fit to be renamed as “Semak Tag” or “Schmuck Tag”. It can only achieve the title “Smug Tag” when all the users are idiot-proofed.Oh but I have digressed.

As for those who are left in KL during the festive seasons, we truly appreciate the non-traffic jam situation so much so that we will almost be in tears when it is time for the people to head back into KL. I’m sure the KL rodents share the same sentiments as the KL-ites.

And THOSE are just the official holidays. Let me start on what I’d like to coin as “hidden holidays”. Notice how sometimes in your say, telephone bills for example; there are “hidden charges” that only a person with the skill of observation paired with high index suspicion would notice. Well, MC to me can be categorized as “hidden holidays”. Based on experience, and I do blame the General Practitioner for enabling this (due to business competition of course), MC (Medical Certificate)is viewed by majority public as the answer to mostly problems that have nothing to do with being sick, which is what the MC was originally for. MC is like a Superhero, the answer to man’s problem. Leave not approved, no problem, get MC. Fed up of work, get MC. Child falls sick, parents take MC. Jet lag and feeling lazy to go to work after a long holiday? Ah, small matter, take MC and call it a short break to recover from a longer one.

Now….see how cool it is to become Malaysians? We get to use up all our medical leave privileges to solve all of our life’s problems. That’s what I meant by we have abundance of holiday.

So there you go… the first reason why it is cool to be a Malaysian. I’ve got a couple more articles to go and for those who are used to my writing style, you will inevitably notice how much effort I have injected into behaving and abiding to the “Say something nice” campaign. (Only you will agree that this is me being nice).  My mom use to tell me, “If you have nothing good to say about something, then don’t say anything”. Pffft!! We hardly listen to what God says…what makes moms think we listen to them. But hey...you must believe me when I say I'm trying... ...Click here to find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.....