While on our way back from the web meeting, I was bewailing on the strong political movements that exist within the walls of Temasek Hall. While I’m not new to politics — work in the SAF camps and my short stint in KPMG had given me quite an insight — the intensity of such a hunger for power falls outside my expectations.

I didn’t know how the hall decides who should head the committees, but I will expect the ability to perform the said job to come under one of the criteria. Apart from hands-off delegation, blatant bossing, and incessant whining, the vice-head knows no shit about web design. And her inability to code a single line of web standard markup insults my intelligence. Seriously, it’s akin to getting a pre-school to handle your company’s accounts and expect no signs of irregularity.

Every part of me wants to contribute. I wasn’t the perfect designer in town, but I know what it takes. So, as a member of this focused group, I’m tasked to share, to design, to code, to coach and to maintain. Whoa! I’m all so flattered.

It’s high time I start doing something good for myself.

A reason why I’m not a fan of project meetings is because precious time is so often spent wasting on group brainstorming sessions instead of idea pitching or sharing.

Yesterday’s meeting was a classical example of such a sin committed; three hours spent watching members staring at each other while I battle on with myself coming to reconcile with the incredulous gay-themed drama they came up with.

So after three hours of non-productive eye starring meeting, I went on to another meeting that was held in hall. The phone has never been so busy, three missed calls and several short messages; the phone wasn’t with me. Wow, I must be really important, so much so that my input was critical for the survival of tonight’s submission. But wait a minute, wasn’t my proposals tragically rejected?

So earlier on today, they called me to remind me that the submission was today, and that I should go and discuss on how we would want to proceed to shoot the remaining of the drama. Upon reaching, I was greeted by a computer with an open word document, and all I had to do was to correct the drama treatment littered with grammatical errors and boring sentence structures.

Mind you, if you read Tributum and find yourself dozing off after three paragraphs, I guarantee you basking on the seaside in Wonder Dreamland in one sentence of the treatment. See, my job for the day was the group’s copy editor, my ideas or creative directions were sans-required.

The premise remains the same — Human with gay tendencies and the power of invisibility playing tricks on his ill-mannered Singlish-speaking university mates. I feel so uber-ashamed being an NUS student.

On a lighter note, my media writing assignment came back with much improvments. Happy, not gay.

As the entire campus shifts towards the semester’s crunch period, your project members naturally display signs of dissatisfaction they have for you. My project members (not all) do that.

I have spent three hours brainstorming on ideas which were not taken into consideration. No hard feelings about that. But it does not help me think better if one member continually stares into blank space while the other came up with script dialogues based on malformed grammar and off colour jokes - to which were perceived as hilarious.

I’m beginning to feel the impact of Singlish and its variants on my university coursework. As much as I desire to improve on my writings, project mates like these became the obvious obstacles standing in my way. The disdain does not apply on the historical and cultural aspects of the language. I appreciate how quickly we refer Singlish as part of our national identity, but to make it inclusive in academic work degrades the quality of my work, somehow.

And apart from this, one of my project mates suffers from confidence issues. Very desperate he often gets, he assumes credits ever so quickly while negating my efforts I have put in. Chancing on all the opportunities he can get, he never fails to highlight how unsatisfied the lecturer is with my work. In a nutshell, I get all the blame and he gets all the self-proclaimed fame.

As far as I know, he’s Christian by faith. I’m not anywhere nearer to being Christ-like by any standards. But the way I see things, he needs more divine intervention.