It’s Official: MOM Is Fed Up And I Reap The Rewards!

Just a couple of hours after the last post, I actually got a call from MOM telling me, lo and behold! MY APPROVAL IN PRINCIPLE HAS ACTUALLY BEEN APPROVED! I think this has something to do with that last visit yesterday morning. The officer at the desk (They’re called “officers” now, no one wants to be a pencil-pushing bureaucrat) must have had something to do with it. She was pretty baffled (AGAIN…) when the records showed that my application for a 10 day process had been pending since January, and since I had nothing to do with it, logic dictates that, against all odds, the bureaucracy must have fouled up somehow. I suppose in order to prevent further blame from burning up the ladder (The girlfriend’s theory is that they probably lost the application and just won’t admit it) they just went and gave it approval in order to hush it up and keep it all in the closet.

So now that the Approval In Principle has been given, I can actually go off and register a name for a business and then hire myself to it, thus circumventing being illegal in Singapore, WITHOUT having to apply for permanent residency.

Thank. GOD…

Crank Up The Drama Magnet

One of the double edged swords that seems particular to my life is that even when I am trying my best to avoid drama, it breaks into my house, ties me to a chair and forces me to watch the slide show it made of its trip to Iraq and North Korea. Which is to say that once one worry is addressed, another shows up asking to be invited to the party.

The worry in question is the next step in bureaucratic hurdle of starting a business, getting the Banker’s Guarantee. This is essentially hostage money. When foreigner goes and starts a business in Singapore, a Banker’s Guarantee of $3,000 is required. You put up the money, they hold onto it, and one of two things happens; when you decide to pack up and go, you rescind your employment pass and you get the money back with some small interest, or, you get arrested for sleeping with 15 year old girl at the fish net stocking party you threw with your clients (“I swear to God, she LOOKED 21!”) and the money is taken by the bank as punishment for you not behaving yourself. One of the steps that is required to do this (Being poverty-stricken, I threw myself at the mercy of Ching and she delivered. I owe you biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime, girl…) aside from putting up the money is that you have to present a business plan, usually the same one that was presented to MOM to get the approval in the first place.

However, the business plan that got us approval in the first place was sitting on the girlfriend’s E: drive, and that, due to some incredible carelessness on the part of the computer repair guy when she brought it in, has been mistakenly reformatted, and we only made the ONE print out. I get queasy just thinking about that. I’ve made multiple copies of my novel which I believe are sitting with various friends as a redundancy measure, I never did that with my third book I’m currently writing. The guy who fucked up felt so bad that he threw in a free graphics card as compensation to her, but in my case, I’d just look at all that work gone and irreplaceable and a graphics card just wouldn’t cut it. If I’d lost my OTHER novels in the process… shit, that’s 8 years of writing down the tubes…

So anyway, after placing a rather worried call to MOM asking if it was possible to get a copy of that business plan back, they gave us a FAX number, if you can believe that, to which we are supposed to fax our request, and they will “consider” it.

Damn you MOM…

Press “X” To Dodge

The tedium of Blitzball finally got to me and I’ve moved on to something else to ease my frustration, only to find it may just increase it. Running around a rocky area called “The Thunder Plains” trying to dodge 200 bolts of lightning in a row in order to get one of the components required to assemble one of the various Ultimate Weapons for the the characters.

Dodging 200 bolts of lightning, what sick bastard came up with this one?

Probably the same kind of sick bastard that is actually sitting down trying to do it.

Damn you, Square. Damn me too, while we’re at it…