pity the housewives

It’s been 2 days I am home. I’ve got a terrible flu (no, it is not avian flu) that forces me to stay home for rests. Being home during the weekday for two days really bores me to death. Not only that I am too weak to do housework but also I can not connect to the internet (read: outside world) until Aco is back -- he's got a pcmcia. It is ridiculous knowing the fact that Kabelvision’s (tv cable and internet broadband provider) head office is just less than 1 km away from our house! When we first moved in, Aco and I visited the office to apply for the connection, but they said no plan to extend the cable to our neighborhood. We then applied for the second time last month, together with our 20ish neighbors, expecting that 20 connections would be more interesting for them to invest. However til now, no news whatsoever.

So, I ended up watching local television. Most of the programs are gossips, criminal news, quizzes and what-so-called “sinetron” (mini series drama). This is just a brief statistic from 11 local channels from 7am – 5pm on Wednesday:

• Gossip show: 23 programs, average duration: 30 minutes, prime time: 7-9am, 11am-1pm, 2-4pm.
• Criminal news: 14 programs, duration: 30 minutes, prime time: midday
• Sinetron : too many to count, duration: 30-60 minutes, mostly morning and afternoon. (more in the evening, though)

I believe most Indonesian housewives are fully-engaged with this black-box during the day. If I were a housewife, I would probably spend most of my time at home watching TV while I was cleaning, washing, cooking, and ironing. It is very easy to get engaged, you just need a remote control and a TV (of course). In my opinion, TV is the most perfect media to educate people, especially housewives. With good programs-such as in Discovery, Animal Planet or National Geographic, TV can make the greatest change ever in human life. The power of knowledge and experience shared will give a multiplier effects to the children. They can gain knowledge from their well-educated mom. In the long run (borrowing from Aco's term), good quality human resources are simply there at the market. Instead of launching BOS ("bantuan operasional sekolah" -- school assistance aid) that needs to be advertised hugely in 2-full-page newspaper to justify the achievement! Get awake, minister!

intrusive, intrusive!

i once wrote a short paper titled "do consumers buy advertising?" (sorry no weblink). i concluded, yes. and that means, advertising is a good thing. but i might need to restate my position. why? lately i feel bothered by many ads got into my cell inbox. when you travel across countries, it might be a good thing that once you reactivate your cellphone in the foreign airport, you get this message telling you some good deal on calling rate. but not too much, please.

now, even the government can have access to your cellphone. i hate it when there's an incoming sms from somebody not in my address book, yet, her/his/its name appears as such. see? meaning i HAVE to recognize it. i am forced to recognize it. believe me, this is not the same with ads in newspaper or magazine or tv. on today's cellphone, you have less freedom to ignore such sms. you have to read it.

and not just cellphone. the comment field in blogs are in danger, too. freedom has dark side, no?

(i'm tempted to talk about intrusion in google, too. yes, now, whenever i want to surf with google.com, i HAVE to go to google.co.id first. hey you out there, why are you forcing me to use co.id?)

productivity vs toilet

What is the correlation? You might not be able to link it directly, but this is how I relate these two things together. Economists (including Aco) calculate productivity by dividing output with input. Input in this case is defined as the sum of resources (capital, human resource, etc), where output is the final product of a process. So, the larger the result from that division, the higher the productivity is. Then, what does toilet have to do with productivity? Well, probably not many people might even think of it. But I think toilet affects the productivity.

This is the story of a toilet. I had quite a number of intriguing toilet experiences that no one ever think about. In one of my project assignment at a government oil and gas company, the toilet in the building where we worked for about 2 years was very “fascinating”. There were 4 toilet rooms with toilet bowl in it, but no toilet seat at all. Imagine how you are going to pee in that kind of situation! The first time I used the toilet, it took me about 5 to 10 minutes to get the best position to pee in this toilet! I was curious how the others can survive with it. So, on one conversation over lunch with my colleagues I asked some of them on how they use the toilet. And, I got amazing stories! A woman colleague told me that she used to do half-squat every time she peed because it was impossible to sit on the toilet! The other one said that she sometime sat on it –with the help of a roll toilet tissue to cover the bowl--because she could not stand the squad position if she had “big event’ that usually took minutes. The most hillarious one is that some of them even squatted over the toilet bowl to avoid contact with the non-hygienic bowl! For some of my metrosexual male colleagues, the toilet thing was really a big problem. They solved the problem by going to a five-star hotel located about 1 km from the office just for “pup”.

Another experience I have now is quite the same, even though not as hilarious as the previous one. I am assigned at the state utility company where there are 2 toilets which tissues as the problem. Sometime I have to spend 3-5 minutes looking for tissue. Some of us try to find another toilet in different floor. You do the math for the time spent on these non-value-added activities!

You may think that this toilet story is just a tiny problem that you would not be bothered to think about it. But, have you ever calculate the economic side of this extraordinary situation? How much opportunity and time we can save if we have clean and proper toilet? Let say, 15-20 minutes of no added value a day, can be accumulated to 100 minutes a week, 2000 minutes a month and 24000 minutes a year (equal to 400 hrs. try converting this to consultant rate: 8hrs = USD 600-800). Not to mention that actually bowl-type of toilet is really not suitable for some of Indonesian people. Instead of seating on the bowl, they squat ON it! If you are the next person using the toilet, you have to really clean up the seat!

Back to productivity, when the output is less due to employees’ beyond-control factors, it is the responsibility of the employer/client to solve it. Working environment is not simply office, computer, networks, colleagues, documents, but also toilet and temperature (I’ll write the last one later in different post -- I can assure you, this is as much interesting!).

alias

Alias

have been watching "alias" lately. mostly out of curiosity after reading the graphic novel some years back. it's not dissappointing. anna seems to disagree, though -- she always falls asleep with those glasses on her nose. (surely she loves "friends" way more. even "everybody loves raymond" can not beat her sleeping call).

back to "alias". garner is a bad actrees. don't be critical on acting skill, if i may suggest -- just take it easy. it's sidney bristow. forget about garner. (but that guy who does sloane and another one playing jack bristow are good).

great place to work

this morning i told aco i want to be a parliamentary member. less work (or should i say no work to do?), less thinking, but good salary with lots of allowances. they themselves just approved another 10 million rupiah allowance per month, excluded the following compensation that they had already have (in million rupiah):

• basic salary:4.2
• position allowance:9.7
• intensive communication:4.14
• honors allowance:3.7 (what the hell is this?)
• package allowance:2
• electricity:2
• telephone :2
• family allowance:0.588

compare that to a worlwide management consulting company where i am working in now; with its famous slogan: "great place to work", ours are really nothing.

however, money is not everything. i still value our personal development, critical thinking, respect to others, integrity, honest and hard works more than those allowances. and lastly, i don't want to be a person that is cursed by millions of indonesian people.

the power of "thinking without thinking"

Yesterday I turned down one candidate that I interviewed for a vacancy in my office. It is not that she doesn't meet the qualification, but something was telling me that she is not the right person that we're looking for. People might think that I am subjective. Well, thanks to my husband who bought me "Blink" (to cheer me up 'cause I couldn't go with him to Phuket, sniff) which makes me more convinced that you actually can make a very good decision in the first 2 seconds. That’s the power of our brain. As Malcom Gladwell said "with mastering the art of 'thin slicing' we can think without thinking."

Cheating on my laptop

I have been blogging for more than two years now. In all those time I have been with this very laptop, my R32 ThinkPad. Am considering now to get a new one. I’m a believer in Moore’s Law (“The number of transistors per chip that yields the minimum cost per transistor increases at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year”) but as Anna correctly points out, increased computer power might not be my key reason. It’s the weight that bugs me more. What keeps me from not doing it, however, is the cost of migrating to a new one. I hate moving. I have so many software installed here – original CDs of which I have lost (or even if I still have them, I have to make big effort to run through all the installment process again; followed by reorganizing all the auxiliary files and docs). Not to mention my very ill filing system (blame it on Google desktop search!). [Hey, am I revealing my outdated knowledge in TI? There should be a good migrating software out there, right?]

Once I ran a back-of-the-envelope calculation of a cost-benefit analysis on getting a replacement laptop, done by myself whose tech know-how is limited. It told me, I should hold on for about one or two more years… (But this ain't got no bluetooth, ooh…)