Kafka

Kafka was one of my favourite authors. He is a very what you might call guai lan writer, and very funny if you are following what he's trying to do, a king of black comedy. His characters are always caught in psychological turmoil, and nightmarish situations. And he accomplishes this not by setting big obstacles in front of his characters, but putting them into situations which are by right fairly mild, but because of some inherent weakness of the character, he is unable to overcome them. He makes the main character feel very small and pathetic because they are defeated by relatively trivial things. They spend most of their time second guessing themselves, and undergoes existential dread, and struggle to reason their way out of the situation over and over again but none of this ever changes the fact that they are doomed. Kafka is one of the few authors with an adjective named after him: Kafka-esque.

I was in a Kafkaesque situation earlier today. I tried to get to a friend's house in a faraway housing estate, and had my handphone ran out of battery. At first I was really complacent about it. It had happened before that a handphone had conked out of me, and when I turned it back on, it appeared to have enough in reserve to at least show me that address. It didn't happen this time. But I thought, OK. Nokia chargers are quite common, and it should be fairly straightforward getting that stupid address out of the phone book.

It was not. The first person I asked, I noticed that she had a Nokia handphone. She refused to lend it to me, because she said that she was waiting for a call. Fair enough. Another person was a salesman, and he said that he didn't want to let anybody see his handphone. I guess it's true, it is difficult to allow a stranger to see your most personal belonging. The person in the handphone shop was very gracious and allowed me to put my SIM card into his Sony Eriksson because I knew from experience that if I were to put my SIM card into another Nokia phone I would be able to see my messages, and therefore the address. Unfortunately that trick didn't work for Sony Erikssons. There was somebody else who had a Nokia but the batteries didn't match. There were shops which had Nokia chargers but the new models all used the smalled plug. A security guard had a Nokia charger but it was the new type.

There were some other encounters where I could have been nicer, when I asked to borrow somebody's battery, and I asked him what kind of phone he had, feeling pretty sure that it was a Nokia. He said, his was a Samsung. I said, "Are you sure?" and then he whipped it out, saying, "Yes. A Samsung". That was quite embarrassing, even when you consider that every time I tried to explain my situation to people it was embarrassing.

Some people were nice, others were annoyed. Some were apologetic.

There was 1 encounter which almost made me blow my top. This guy had 1 handphone, exactly the same make as mine. I broke my rule to not ask somebody who was walking. (Till then I had only asked people who were either standing in a queue, or sitting down and waiting. This is the exact opposite of the water rule, which holds that when you want to drink water in the wild, you must always take your water from a source which is moving.) I asked him, fully aware that if he were to lend me his battery my problem would be solved. His response: sorry, I'm in a hurry. I asked him 3 times and got the same answer 3 times.

It was not the best I could do. I could have explained to him that it would require less than 1 minute of his time (which is probably true.) I could explain that if I were to borrow a battery it would not invade his privacy at all. I could explain that I would have wasted 2 hours commuting if I were to leave from the town centre empty handed.

But I'm not a person who likes to push too hard for favours, because no favour that you have to push very hard for is ever truly free. And I was getting worked up, it might have ended badly.

I noticed that the more shabbily a person is dressed, the more likely you will have a good response. The most polite people were an Indian labourer and the security guard. The least happy people were the people who manned stores. And I can imagine that they were thinking, I cannot ever grant favours like that because if I were to do so and word gets out there will be hell to pay.

I want to resist the temptation to be cynical about these things. I don't want to criticise them and say "you know, Singaporeans". And I don't think it's true that we are special at all. Maybe you can be cynical if life's been a little too comfy for you and you can afford it. People whose lives are on the line are more likely to instinctively know that they can't afford to be cynical. Hemingway wrote in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" about the "smell of death". You can't afford to be wearing the smell of death on you, no way.

I don't interact with people very much. I don't think I'd make a good salesman because I second guess myself too much. All salesmen will go through 100 people and get 99 rejections and 1 success. Good salespeople will rejoice over the 1 success and think to themselves that it vindicates the other 99 unsuccessful attempts. Bad salespeople will grumble that the 99 rejections make the enterprise not worth while at all. I belong to the second category unfortunately and I sometimes wonder if I have been too spoilt in my choice for a job, which is similar to a scientist who gets paid so long as he puts in a certain number of hours for his work. Even as I think that my evening has ended in failure in a way I'm glad for this experience and what it has taught me. It has not taught me much which is truly new but reminded me of some of the things I had previously learnt.

The other thing is that fate sort of makes up for my bad luck. Through searching for an energy source for my hp I bumped into Shingot and his wife. (No, sorry, Shingot doesn't use Nokias). We had dinner together, it was great, we caught up, asked him about his new job. I needed that because, frankly, asking for favours is very draining for me.

Naturally I didn't make it to my friend's party. I also had problems making it to the one that he threw last year. First I went on the wrong day, then when I turned up I was horribly late, even as I had a great time. This year I didn't even make it at all.