Patience is a Foreign Virtue.

You know the old adage: Patience is a virtue. What they failed to mention was that patience is relative, especially to the kind of society you live in.

You see, in Singapore, we apparently have all the patience of a Spanish fighting bull.

I was at the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority today, applying for a new passport, since my previous one was misplaced. I had been to the ICA before, and knew the kind of time I would have to sink just to queue for a turn. I mentally prepared myself for a long wait.

At about 9.30am, I approached the Information Centre for a number. I was told to get a passport-sized photo before approaching one of the counters to apply for a new passport. So I took my number, and proceeded to queue up to have my photo taken.

Now the thing is, while I was queuing up to have my photo taken, my number was called, then skipped by a counter, where I was supposed to apply for my new passport. So by the time I had my photo taken, I had missed my turn, and had to wait for some random counter to pick up my number.

So there I was, seated in the waiting area, praying my number would appear on the screen. There was a couple sitting nearby; the man was Singaporean, and his wife spoke with a Indonesian accent. She had a baby in her arms. He cracked a joke that his wife didn’t get, presumably because she had a little trouble with English, so he looked to me for a laugh. I smiled, acting amused, then turned away.

Fifteen minutes passed, and we were still waiting. I finally plucked up the courage to approach one of the counters being used, and explained that I had missed my number while taking my photo, and asked when my number would next appear. The Malay woman politely asked me to sit down, keyed in my number into the queue, and continued talking to the applicant, an old man wearing shorts and looking extremely out of place. I then realised my number would now appear at the back of the queue. I was a little annoyed, then I decided I had nothing better to do anyway, so I sat down, and began daydreaming, a common activity I engage in when I’m bored.

Thirty minutes later, the daydream ran its course, and I was still waiting. The same applicant was there, still speaking to the nice Malay woman. Apparently, the old man had lost his Identification Card, and the Malay woman was telling him that he could not go through the procedure without his Identification Card. He argued that he had already spoken to an officer about it. The Malay woman then gave up, and told him she would speak to that officer personally to double check. She promptly left, leaving a long queue of people behind, waiting.

Now, a note about the queue system at the ICA. The numbers in the queue are preassigned to specific counters. This means that a number waiting in queue would have to wait for the preassigned counter to free up, regardless of whether the other counters are free.

Let’s take an example to illustrate this: There are three counters, A, B and C. There six numbers, 1 through 6. Once in queue, the numbers are immediately assigned to counters. 1 and 4 are assigned to counter A, 2 and 5 to B, 3 and 6 to C. Now, if there is a jam in counter A on applicant number 1, and counters B and C have already finished processing numbers 2, 3, 5 and 6, number 4 would be in the unlucky position of waiting for number 1 to finish, even though counters B and C are idle. The only exception to this is if the staff at the counter personally takes on a number, for example, counter B decides to be productive and take on number 4, even though number 4 was assigned to counter A. However, this rarely takes place, since the staff aren’t paid by the number applicants processed, and most of them seem occupied with idle chatter amongst themselves.

Right, that’s done. Meanwhile, the nice Malay woman has yet to return. Thirty minutes have passed since her disappearance into the vast unknown of the closed door behind her counter. The man has begun to swear under his breath. He began ranting on to his wife about how long it has taken, and how inefficient the staff were. I made the mistake of glancing at him, and catching his eye while he was cursing. He then changed his story.

“Oh, it’s not their fault. I don’t blame them. It’s the bloody system that’s wrong!”

My first thought was: “How Singaporean.” When the slightest thing doesn’t go our way, we start complaining about “the system”. About how things need to be changed. It then occurred to me how ironic it was that Singaporeans were known globally to be politically indifferent, despite the fact that all we do is complain about “the system”.

I realised that we are all so used to living in such a privileged society, and that we take the simplest things for granted. In Singapore, privileges become rights, and luxuries become necessities. We’re all so used to having things go our way, at our speed, that the slightest slowdown seems like forever to us. We have become incredibly spoilt, and incredibly impatient.

Back at the ICA, the couple finally got their turn at the counter. I was still waiting, now pondering on how disappointed the older generation of Singaporeans must be, watching how we live our lives with such arrogance. “The older generation knows what patience is,” I thought to myself.

In that moment, an old lady, who had been sitting beside me all this while, began swearing loudly in Malay. By the look of it, she must have been in her seventies.

I chuckled on the inside.

Another 15 minutes passed, and I finally got my turn. The whole process of replacing my lost passport lasted all of 2 minutes. I got up and left. The waiting area seemed much more filled by the time I left.

I passed by a few people, who were swearing and cursing at how long they had to wait. Out of curiosity, I took one last look at the slip of paper containing my queue number that had been given to me hours ago. It said,

“9.35 AM.

Queue Number: 6119

No. of people currently in queue: 0.”

Blame the Internet.

So here we are at the first post. I’m not sure how I got here; I’m not even sure why I made a wordpress blog. Maybe I’m curious as to why this seems to be the latest craze: putting your life up onto the internet, undoubtedly the most unsafe way to store information.

There are those who argue that they don’t post up any personal information, so nobody will know what nobody’s supposed to know.

So what do people post up then? I read through some of the blogs my friends have, and, more often than not, the posts are just narrations of their day-to-day activities. So what’s so interesting about that? Does anyone really care that you had to use the bathroom six times in three hours?

Then there are those who write for the sake of portraying themselves in a different light. People want to be larger-than-life. On the internet, where nobody really knows anybody, you can do that. You can paint up a different picture of yourself for everyone to see.

Then there are those who use the internet to unleash their anger and hatred towards society. Who abuse the anonymity granted to them by the internet to express their feelings of loneliness, pain, and rebelliousness.

How melodramatic. I often find myself darkly amused by their posts, and laugh to myself, wondering when such people will ever grow up. I also find myself worried. Worried for a generation drugged up and high on the internet, which has bred a culture of egotism, ignorance, and shocking immaturity.

But today, I’ve decided to leave the moral high ground, step off my high horse, and create a public blog. To see how it feels like.

Because there is another group of people; Those who blog because they derive some sort of twisted pleasure watching their words appear in public domains, propagating ideas they may not totally believe in, for the sake of seeing how far mere words can go to affect their peers.

For better or for worse, I now consider myself one of them.