Saturday, March 21, 2009

A Day's Earnings For A Momentary Pleasure

We are after all just human—we can't escape from making mistakes every now and then. And some of us are lucky to learn from these mistakes. Others are not so lucky—they forget all too soon and repeat them over and over again.

A friend told me that life in Singapore is very, very competitive. The cost of living is very high, and many people have no choice but to have two jobs to make ends meet. Buying an average car in Singapore is like buying a decent house in Malaysia.

When I visited Singapore last December, I took the cabs to move around even though they had very efficient train and bus systems. Due to the size of Singapore, and because of the limited areas that I covered, I'd say an average cab ride in Singapore is worth S$10 to S$15. Of course the amount can vary substantially if one were to travel from one end to the other end of the island on every ride.

Anyway, considering the thousands of cabs in the streets of Singapore, I can just imagine the level of competition among cab drivers even after taking into account the number of visitors to Singapore. The cost of an average hotel room, S$40 for a "service", and a subsequent visit to the boutique would probably easily wipe out an entire day's earnings of a Singaporean cab driver. And one can only wonder what kind of story he'd tell his wife—on where his entire day's earnings had gone to.

And a few months down the road, he finds out further repercussion from his mistake—one that's gonna cost S$12,500 to remedy. Oh man! that must be like many, many trips taking passengers all over Singapore. If luck is not on his side, maybe his wife might even go on strike for a couple of months; and that's really bad.

But we learn from our mistakes... and hopefully we won't repeat them again, ever.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

How do you know he is married?

Cornelius said...

lateral line,

I knew from here. Check out the 2nd paragraph. I have not verified that information, of course.

Apple said...

So, is it that hard to earn money in singapore?So, why many sabahan youngster went there to work?

Cornelius said...

Because, Ryuzaki, for those Sabahan youngsters who went there to work, it's even harder to earn a living in Sabah. They can get better salaries in Singapore, but they also tend to spend more. You can't expect to get it both ways. Well, at least not for the majority. It's just that at the end of the day, you can hope to have a bit of savings for the effort.