Latest TODAY column: Time to fly the coop? Better not, outside not so safe
Excerpt:
WHEN you are old, and you cannot produce anymore, it's time to take back all your benefits, put you in a plastic bag and gas you with carbon dioxide.
You have a choice, of course. Be sent for canning and be the next can of ayam curry, or make yourself useful to our nation's Total Defence and volunteer for the 5,000-chicken Culling Exercise codenamed "Operation Lao Kuay" (Old Hen).
Your employer does not care how many degrees you have taken, or how long you have served, or how many eggs you have value-added to the company.
Once you reach old age, there will be three other younger chickens waiting to take your place at the coop. There might even be another 20 foreign chickens waiting to come in and lay 100 times your egg quota for half the chicken feed.
Either you have planned for this day, or you will join Operation Lao Kuay to help us figure out how to kill the rest of your brethren if one of you stupid birds managed to get yourself infected.
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Full column:
Time to fly the coop? Better not, outside not so safe
All the same, we old hens and old cocks will have to get used to living on less
WHEN you are old, and you cannot produce anymore, it's time to take back all your benefits, put you in a plastic bag and gas you with carbon dioxide.
You have a choice, of course. Be sent for canning and be the next can of ayam curry, or make yourself useful to our nation's Total Defence and volunteer for the 5,000-chicken Culling Exercise codenamed "Operation Lao Kuay" (Old Hen).
Your employer does not care how many degrees you have taken, or how long you have served, or how many eggs you have value-added to the company.
Once you reach old age, there will be three other younger chickens waiting to take your place at the coop. There might even be another 20 foreign chickens waiting to come in and lay 100 times your egg quota for half the chicken feed.
Either you have planned for this day, or you will join Operation Lao Kuay to help us figure out how to kill the rest of your brethren if one of you stupid birds managed to get yourself infected.
Smarter birds among you would have already put aside enough money to retire. Some of you, I know, were hoping to withdraw your CPF early, because you got retrenched from your last job and no farm wanted to hire older chickens.
But the CPF (Chicken Provident Fund) Board says you must wait till 55 and not a day earlier. It is probably too late to regret that you did not set aside some of your fairly substantial takings when you were a high-flying chicken. Now you find you have no nest egg or savings to tide you over.
All this while, life was good. You ate, you slept, you laid eggs. You had health plans and other benefits. They gave you a fixed income with a 13th-month annual wage supplement at the end of every year. You could afford your 5-room Condo coop, paid over 30 years. You could buy that plasma TV instalments to watch your favourite movies like "Chicken Run" and "Singapore's Brainiest Chicken".
Now you find that your chicken feed is going to be only 70 per cent fixed and the rest is performance-based. If the coop does well and you perform, you get it. If poop hits the coop, you live on less. It is worse — 50 per cent fixed and 50 per cent variable — if you are higher up in the pecking order.
Your career was your life. Every day, you woke up and had a quick breakfast, then sat down and produced.
You even put off having chicks to have a lifestyle and develop your career. Then time went by and, suddenly, you were not the young hen you used to be and he was not that young rooster. You and your rooster had no time to mate and no strength. And you stare at your eggs now, wondering what it would be like, if you had focused on making chicks, instead of making eggs.
Along the way, technology stole some more of your work. People preferred e-Eggs and not the manual way of laying them. Some wanted to return to the good old days of manual laying and refused to buy the computer-harvested ones, saying it would cost jobs. But you knew it was the the future and there was no stopping progress. Who wants to go back to regular eggs, when the modern ones come faster, fresher and with healthier nutrients?
Of course you tried to upgrade yourself. You took courses, retrained, retooled. But when you had the papers, they wanted experience. When you had experience, they wanted papers.
You even saw a job website asking for a brick-layer who had to have a diploma. Imagine that. A brick-layer who had to be Internet-savvy enough to surf the web and find that job posting. And to be able to send an email with his resume for this brick-laying job. Did he also have to include photographs of his work?
"Here is a photo of the wall I did, see how straight it is?"
If a brick-layer needs to be so advanced, what more chickens? You have to learn to use the Internet, but your claws cannot even hold the mouse properly!
Sometimes, you must have wondered if you should have even remained a chicken. You hear of a few hen friends of yours who migrated to other farms, seeking a better life. But you hear that they have anti-chicken arsonists and chicken delivery boy killers there too. So maybe it would be safer to stay in the coop, in this farm.
Better not to fly the coop. Outside not so safe.
And somewhere along the way, you were told that instead of being a chicken, you may want to consider being a monkey. Monkeys were nimbler and more adaptable. Chickens were not.
Who asked you to be a chicken and not a pink dolphin? Pink dolphins are cute and have societies to write letters to the Government to free them. You are just an ugly chicken, with no one to write letters for you.
You are just a meal.
Anyway, it's too late for you old hens and old cocks to be dolphins or monkeys. Better get used to living on less. Eat more grass, less worms. Don't buy branded feed.
At least you still have a contribution to make. If there are any questions about the Mobilisation Exercise, you can go to the website, www.birdflu.gov.sg and read more about where to sign up.
Chick with the IT department in your coop.
We'll need 5,000 chicken volunteers for now. If we need to practice culling again, and you miss this opportunity, you can participate in Operation Lao Jiao (Old Bird).
mr brown is the accidental author of a popular website that has been documenting the dysfunctional side of Singapore life since 1997. He wonders if 5,000 rubber chickens could have provided the same training experience as 5,000 real ones.
