Picture this. It’s 9am, and you’ve made your way to whatever godforsaken government office is necessary to get something of significance notarized, re-stamped, filed and approved. You take a number.
Picture this. It’s 11am, and you’ve been called to take another number, after being assured your documents are in order.
Picture this. It’s somewhere between noon and 1pm, and suddenly the brightly lit room you were shivering in (why is the AC so darn high?!) has cleared out of employees. If you can’t beat them, you may as well join them — you go and get lunch.
Picture this. It’s 2:30pm and people are slowly coming back to their desks. Your number has been called again, but you still need to wait for another level of approval. Things are looking up.
Picture this. It’s 3:45pm and you’re nowhere near leaving, but as it turns out — it’s someone’s birthday. You sit there and watch everyone leave their chairs to sing Happy Birthday, and eat cake.
Picture this. It’s now 5pm, and although all of your docs are now ready, you’re not allowed to leave with them. Why? Oh, because it’s already 5pm and the cashier went home. Come back tomorrow, k thx bai.
*A slice of Coco KL life, circa nine years ago. We left out a coffee break or two for length’s sake.*
Maybe it’s those painful (and still crystal-clear) memories that made us identify so closely with the Malaysian man in the following clip, who flat out snaps when encountered by the same kind of treatment from a group of civil servants here in 2019.
https://twitter.com/HilmiAdi/status/1100544673473425408
Twitter user Hilmi Adi Ruzaini posted the short clip, showing a man angrily tell the bureaucrats that he should not be treated like an animal after patiently waiting as asked and jumping through every required hoop. Hilmi explained that the man had waited from 10am to 2pm, only to then be told by an officer that they lacked the manpower to complete his paperwork, and oh yeah — that it was break time — despite the fact that plenty of employees can be seen milling around in the background.
We haven’t seen this kind of agreement in netizens’ responses since, well … we’re not sure we’ve ever seen this kind of agreement in netizens’ responses. It seems that for a lot of Malaysians, this man was them [us!], and while there have been improvements in the efficiency of our civil service, it’s still not remotely enough.
A word of advice from the original poster though. While we’re all living vicariously through his rage, let’s keep it clean.
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