Yesterday evening, a news conference was held by the Land Transport Authority (LTA), train operator SMRT and Thales, the French company that supplied the new signalling system for the East-West Line. The responsible parties were on hand to pose questions and queries about last week’s train collision at Joo Koon MRT station that left 36 people injured.
The highlight, however, would be when reporters cornered Minister of Transport Khaw Boon Wan to get a juicy quote about reliability issues besotting SMRT. He didn’t disappoint:
“I gave myself 4 years. We are halfway through. If not for (the Joo Koon collision) as well as the flooding incident, we were actually making good progress, as PM Lee described before,” he said, with Channel NewsAsia capturing the moment.
The response to that clip is exactly what anyone could expect when it comes to the current state of Singapore’s public transport system: hostile, pugnacious, and critical of the powers that be. But come on people, this is 2017 — surely the usual whining and complaining done on the internet can be more creative.
Thus why we point your attention to the witty repartees of several netizens who took their chiding to funnier levels by taking the same quote Khaw used and turning it into silly remarks. Which in turn, points out Khaw’s flawed logic — who cares about “good progress” or what someone else said when the situation on the ground seems to have actually worsened?
Without further ado, here are the snarky comments the transport minister inspired. Have fun.
