Speech Therapy

Here i am. It's bleeding 20 minutes past midnight. Haven't had some decent sleep in bloody ages since, well probably early last week, considering the amount of work that i have to do now, which also explains the fact that i have not been updating this blog as often as i would have wanted to. Seriously, yes, it's not that i have nothing to talk (or actually write) about ,considering the fact that the past few weeks have been one of the most eventful weeks in my life, but i have just been THAT busy. I mean in the past week or two, there has been 2 deaths in the family, (well actually one of them was a pet cat, but since he was like almost 9 years old, i would consider him as a part of the "family"), there was Valentine's day, which incidentally wasn't too eventful for me and would forever be remembered as the day when the traffic in KL suddenly just got TOO horrible, i went trekking, yes, outdoors (*gasp*), had a serious rethink in the way i do some of the stuff which i do, and also the my running nose is *STILL* running.

Actually I am working now. Not that there's like so much work to do, but the thing is, when you are working in the IT line, and *especially* when you are working on a 24 hour production server, the only time you can actually do your stuff on production would be the oh so early hours of the morning. "You wanna do something on production? Will it affect any of our users? Yes? Do it at midnight!" Thank you very much. Excellent. The thing is, what i am running now will take several hours, and actually kicking it off does not take much effort, it's just the tedious part of monitoring the darn thing during the wee hours of the morning.

I have just been reading some football news and i have decided that i HATE Gary Neville. I mean, how difficult is it to hate someone who, while playing in a local derby, didn't get a decision his way (a dive attempt i hear), then goes and head butts an opposition player, get sent off for it and then after the game writes in his column in a national newspaper that he doesn't regret head butting and he isn't worried about it since it was supposedly "out of character" (yeah right!!), and then has the audacity to say that his ONLY regret from that whole incident is that he would miss some matches after that! I mean, what on EARTH is he on?!! I know that i am sometimes... well.. ok.. most of the times biased against those Manc scums, but WHAT DO YOU SAY TO THAT? Gary Neville. You are an idiot. There is ABSOLUTELY no way that you can justify yourself headbutting an opponent, claiming it was bleeding out of character. My God! I mean, even the Manchester United board is against him on this one. I hope you enjoy your 100,00o pound fine.

People have been complaining sometimes that it is actually quite difficult to talk to me in real life, and i somewhat am a bit difficult to warm up to in a conversation. I've actually analyzed the way i interact with people for the past few weeks, and i have come to realize that whenever i talk to anyone, i always give them a straight, short answer, which is sometimes insufficient. Therefore, as my better half has pointed out to me, sometimes, people would need to ask me like several questions until they get the exact answer that they need. A typical conversation would be something like.

Person A: "Wow dude, cool tshirt. Where did you buy it?"

Me: "Erm.. Mid Valley"

Person A: "Where in Mid Valley?"

Me: "Uh.. At a shop on the ground floor"

Person A: "What's the name of the shop?"

Me: "Err.. British India (or whatever)"

You see, the problem with this situation is, by the time person A get's his answer, he would have lost his patience in talking to me already and would probably have given up on any attempt of communication. Me on the other hand would have probably also felt pretty annoyed with Person A already by that time since i would probably be thinking in the line's of "What the hell?! Why the hell is this fella so darn interested in my friggin tshirt?!!". So a better answer would probably be something like..

"Ah, i bought it at the British India in Mid Valley. You know.. the one at the ground floor"

.. or something like that. Anyway, the point is, what i have been trying to do conciously now, and from now on is, to always give as much information as possible whenever people ask me questions, especially when trying to make conversation, but not overdoing it by just splurting out an hour's worth of speech (people would be running away screaming "Psycho!Psycho!" if i did this!), but merely just a 2 or 3 liner instead of the usual one-worders / one-phrases like "OK" or "YES" or "Mid Valley". I know, this is probably something pretty basis and probably no one else has this sort of, well i wouldn't actually call it a problem-lah, but yeah. I have actually tried it out on someone i met during the weekend, and from what i see, it does seem to make a difference when you are striking up a conversation with someone else.

Anyway, gotta go back to my stuff. Later.