While the four anecdotes in this essay are all from Singapore, something tells me similar things happen all over the world. Three of them relate to quality issues in transport, but they all stem from a common "don't know and don't care" attitude.

Every time, I encounter this, I shake my head and wonder why anyone ever thinks that the human species is somehow the pinnacle of evolution. We can be such duds.

 
Encounter 1

A friend of mine called me. We had lots of things to go over as Indignation, the gay pride season, approaches. But he's a busy guy and he can only snatch a bit of time here and there to touch base with me. One good opportunity is when he is in a taxi; in the 15 minutes or so of the journey, there isn't much else to do work-wise, so he calls me.

My phone rings and we talk. Five or ten minutes into the conversation, he says, "Hold on, hold on..."

And I overhear him saying to the taxi-driver, "Why are you going around in circles?"

Inaudible.

"But when I got into your taxi, you said you knew where Chinatown MRT station was. You assured me you knew."

You get the drift. It went on like that for a few minutes until they found the station.

I'm sure readers will agree that this is a common occurrence in Singapore. People play at doing their jobs without feeling any need to have job knowledge.

 
Encounter 2

Some months earlier, I myself was at Chinatown metro station. That day, I happened to have a camera with me, and so took this picture:

The blue notice tells disabled persons that this entrance doesn't suit them. They should use Entrance C instead. Fine, but where the hell is Entrance C? There's absolutely no clue to where it is. 

This is the kind of shoddy work that drives me mad. The notice affixed to a pillar is supposed to solve a problem for the customer but in fact does not. 

This failing is even worse than the taxi-driver's, firstly because the decision to put up a sign and the approval of the words would have involved a middle to senior executive; and secondly, because the execution of the task would have involved more than one person. Yet nobody noticed how stupid it was. Or if anyone noticed, he obviously didn't care.

 
Encounter 3

I see that public transport operator SBS is introducing a new model of bus. Its chief features are (1) an unusually low-riding chassis and floorboard, so that on boarding the step up from pavement or road into the bus is minimised (for children and old folks) and (2) a pneumatic "kneeling" feature that lowers the bus even more, if needed.

I believe it has one more feature which I have seen in other countries: floor-plates at the entrance and exit that can be lowered into a ramp to permit wheelchair-bound passengers to board and alight. I haven't seen these in use so far so I'm not sure if this new model is really equipped with them

I think they are, because the interior of the new model appears designed to be wheelchair friendly. As you can see from this photo, there are bays on the starboard side that seem perfect for wheelchairs (the white arrow was added by me):

Clearly, this is no cheap model of bus. These features, like the pneumatic kneel, cost money. What I thought curious was where they installed a grab pole. It's clearer in the picture below.

The broken white lines have been drawn in by me to indicate what appears to be the minimum width of the passageway for wheelchair access. If that's the case, then a grab pole (arrowed) has been positioned inside the minimum width, which would completely negate the wheelchair accessibility of the bus.

If I am correct in my analysis, we could be spending lots of money buying a fleet of such super buses only to have their main feature rendered useless.

On the other hand, I may well be wrong; it may be possible for a wheelchair to negotiate around the grab pole. The reason I say this is because I believe we import buses in the finished state and the grab poles would have been installed by the manufacturer. They won't have gotten it wrong, surely?

Or were the buses imported semi-finished with the interiors fitted out locally? In the old days, that was the certainly case. If that is so, I can quite well believe that the grab pole was thoughtlessly positioned. It would be completely characteristic of the kind of work we find all over Singapore.

* * * * *

 
Mistakes like this come about because people do their jobs with the narrowest possible job knowledge. Taxi-drivers know how to drive a vehicle without knowing where places are, sometimes without knowing even the language skills for communicating with passengers. Signs are put up without a sensibility about customers' point of view. And just possibly, bus interior fitters go about their jobs with zero knowledge about wheelchair access -- or maybe didn't even know that they were dealing with a wheelchair-friendly bus.

Narrow knowledge and tunnel-vision seem particularly prevalent in Singapore. As a society we've never prized wide horizons for our minds, according instead more value to specialised technical know-how. Is it the result of a very exam-based education system, I wonder?

 
Encounter 4

It hit me again a few weeks ago when I was giving a talk to a class of journalism students. At one point, I referred to my observation that Yawning Bread articles dealing with politics in other countries tend to get the fewest readers, compared to articles about local politics, social or gay issues. My conclusion, I said, was that Singaporeans don't seem to have much interest in the wider world.

This may be understandable if we lived in a large country like India, the US or China, I explained, but as citizens of a tiny city-state that must interact with the outside world over almost everything, from the vegetables we eat to the air we breathe, this was worrying.

President Medvedev (L) with former President Putin (R)

I don't know what got over me next, but I impulsively decided to ask the class to name the President of Russia. This had been in the news just a few weeks earlier, with one man ending his term of office and a new president inaugurated. Out of about 25 students, none of them knew the name of the new president (Dimitry Medvedev). One or two, after a little effort, could name the past president (Vladimir Putin).

I have to admit I was disappointed. It wasn't a question about some small country in Africa, but about one of the world's nuclear powers and a major oil and gas player. This wasn't a high school class, but a university class -- in journalism, no less.

Are we as a society, too ready to accept second-rate standards?

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