A few days ago, the roadworks people came to paint the road outside my office. They painted the yellow and black stripes on the roads to warn cars to slow down at certain spots. At first, I was impressed that they even bothered to come and paint the roads! But then…

I noticed that the job was pretty simple, just painting diagonal yellow and black stripes across the bump on the road, and yellow horizontal stripes before the bump. Now, this job shouldn’t require too much man power, right? Well, I was wrong in assuming that! They had about 3 people painting the road, and about 5 – 6 others just standing by the side of the road, leaning against their trucks, smoking (I would be amazed to find any blue color worker in Malaysia nowadays who doesn’t smoke!) and talking. Now, how exactly did that help them to finish the job quicker?

Not only that, but whilst the 3 guys were painting the road, one of them accidently spilled some yellow paint all over the side of the road near our office. You would think that he would try and clean it up, right? Wrong again! Like I said, the Malaysian mentality…there are just no words to describe it. Instead, what he did, was to dig up some earth, and cover the yellow paint up!!! Well, they left soon after that incident.

But, that’s not the end of the story. My boss came back from a meeting, and he didn’t see the paint on the road, and he parked right over it. Wet yellow paint meeting black tyre…not a pretty sight. This was taken a few days after it happened, after raining heavily several times, after driving for many, many meetings. I guess it’ll be pretty hard to come out! =)

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