The one morning in Mitre 10

Date was the 17th of April 2010 on which the story went.

The night before, Chenny reported a leaking tap to me. I had noticed this problem long time ago and had thought about getting it fixed, but I was lacking of confidence at that time, so I just left it with fingers crossed. But that night when Chenny told me the problem and I went to have a look, I knew I could not just get fingers crossed, I had to get it really fixed as soon as possible. Obviously Chenny tried to tighten up the knob too forceful and had completely collapsed the inner fitting of the knob. So now, not only the washer has to be replaced to stop the dripping, I will also have to find a substitute knob.

On the next morning, I had a quite high level of motivation to travel to Mitre 10 by bus because the weather was promising, cloudy and cool but no rain -- it is a kind of good weather for outdoor activity.

The bus dropped me off at King's Plant Garden Center. Then I continued the remaining 800 m to Mitre 10 by walk. My walk had developed into a funny pattern in the last three months due to the Parkinson's disease. The gait of my walk looks like I am in a hurry to reach the destination that I am sort of running but am in small steps. Muscles of the arms and legs are abnormally tense. And this rigidity consumes a lot of my energy, this is especially worse when I walk along the footpath next to a busy road. The rumbling noise from the traffic makes me nervous and this worsens my balance that I am afraid I may fall to the road. So I have to tell myself to slow down, to be relaxing, but the legs remains in its fast but small steps dashing forward. Walking on the footpath with all sorts of wandering thoughts flowing through my mind, finally the vast Mitre 10 building stood before me.

I felt excited when I walked through the parking lot and marched toward its entrance. The excitement increased steadily while I was a bit closer to it. I thought it is something to do with my DIY spirit which knows Mitre 10 is the home of DIY.

When I stepped into the area that the gate sensor reaches, the automatic sliding door swiftly opened for me. I walked into the building and saw aisles and aisles of product shelves before me. I thought that Aladin must be feeling the same when the genie stood before him when the cloud from the oil lamp faded away.

I got my shopping list out of my backpack. "seal tape, assorted sizes of washer, glue gun, PVC gutter glue, hand tools for repairing electronic device", four or five items totally, but as I walked through the aisles, I was wanting more other items than those in my shopping list. The new design of tools and hardwares on display were challenging my temptation. Obviously my DIY spirit was being childish and ambitious.

On the way to the plumbing section, I saw multi-purpose rope, then my thought went to those overgrown branches of the tall tree in my garden. I should have one of this rope for pulling the branches to be felled to the desired direction. I saw a big range of plastic rollers, then I thought of the sliding doors of our cupboard that needed a new set of rollers to ease the open and shut operation. Now I came to the hand tool section, the desire to buy items like --drill bits set, gutter cutter, plastic welder, plumber's clamp, vice, glue gun, mechanic's tool set, multi-function hand-tool and etc.

I ended up picking up an electronic tool-set priced at $14 and quickly walked away from that section so as to shake off the annoying temptation.

I finally came to the plumbing section, the main purpose of this trip. I searched for washer. If possible I'd like to have a single pack of assorted sizes. There are rows and rows of products displayed on the shelves. I wondered how many stockists will be required to manage hundreds of thousands products of the whole company. Soon I had found the items that might be required by the leaking tap.

If I was not in a hurry to go home to undergo the repair, I would like to spend more time to browse around in the building till they close for the day. Perhaps I should spoil myself by spending in Mitre 10 a whole day in the near future.

I paid for the purchase at the checkout point and walked out of the building unwillingly. Nearby the entrance was a sausage sizzle stool emitting the lovely sizzling onion smell. it was a cloudy day, a cool day, a day suitable to have sausage sizzle, so I thought and walked toward the sausage stand to buy one to please my DIY spirit. And that's concluded my day out in Mitre 10.

Ps. The repairing of the leaking tap went smoothly and was successfully done.

Will the world be better off by 2020?

One of the papers that Chenny chooses to study this year is business ethics. Not long after the term commenced in March, we had a spontaneous chat during the dinner time. Very seldom had we had long, formal and academic talks, but this one was. The chat gradually drifted to his further study on Business Management, then he raised a big question "Will the world be better off by 2020?" and invited my input of thoughts about this topic.

I read quite a lot of news reports relating to this topic in recent couple of years. Most of them predict a worse one, and so does mine. I had a compulsion of writing an essay type document on this subject at the moment when Chenny raised that question. The next day I worked out a 750 word report to at least prove the logical part of my brain is still functional although it lacked supporting statistical figures..

Below is my writing.

The world will be worse generally by 2020. So I believe.

My conclusion that the world will be generally worse by 2020 is based on the following arguments. 1) dysfunctional consumerism, 2) worldwide moral backward 3) technology over dependence.

Consumerism has a bad image nowadays. People seem to have realized consumerism is the cause of destruction in many ways, such as the threat to ecological balance; overuse of natural resources; encourage unnecessary consumption. These are a few examples of the nature of consumerism.

Almost no exception, when any country experiences an economical downturn, its government always turn to the remedy of consumption stimulation. During the worldwide financial crisis in 2008, in order to slow down the recession, Taiwan government issued agreed amount of consumer voucher. Taiwan Pres. appeared in the TV, using the voucher to buy food and goods to stimulate consumption in an attempt to alleviate the impact on small businesses. Other countries in the world also adopted similar ways, though differently, to seek for a solution from consumerism.

Apparently most of the free countries in the world adopt consumerism as an instant remedy of economy stimulation. As a result, this approach to economy stimulation causes a lot of waste on their national resources, and perhaps still see the recession worsening.

Because so far in the world all the capitalised countries have no other solutions than the consumerism approach, and we know what it will lead to. That's why I believe it will not be better off by 2020.

The second point that supports me to believe the world will not be better off by 2020 is the fact that the worldwide moral standard is going backward.

Overall moral standard has a great impact on the country in terms of social cost. If corruption is commonly found in the government, this country will see no future. A nation's social security will be fragile if the moral standard among the people is too low. Read in the news you will see what the overall moral standards is like in a country. Police was attacked; infants were killed; shops were robbed, and etc.

Although it is impossible to erase all crime or corruption from a society, what we are looking at is the tendency of its increase and its severity. And the statistic reveals the worry is not wrong.

And the consumerism will make the issue of moral standard a lot worse. We all can tell this by common sense.

The third point that makes me believe 2020 will not be better off is our over dependence on technology, especially the IT technology. We know that today everything we do is depending on computer and Internet connection. When there is any accident occurred, chaos follows immediately. We all experience traffic jam due to the failure of traffic signals; the long queue in supermarkets check out point; top secrete information hacked, all these result in social cost rocketing.

My arguments sound pessimistic, but I'm only reflecting the truth and facts. The solutions I can think of are on the following.

Setup a ministry of moral education. Teach people to live simple lifestyle.

Largely increase the spending on fine cultural promotion and cultural related tourism development.