first post

It’s been a while since I wanted to start an English blog, but was still yet to find a topic to start my posts. Well I finally had an inspiration of what to write after coming back to Ipoh during this mid-term break. On Monday, wei li, yee yee and I went to bowl in Ipoh parade. It was still rather early then, around 11+. In the bowling alley we saw this amazing incident that struck me and got me into thinking.

The manager or so of the bowling alley had a small area in front of the counter and the other entrance chained up to block others from walking by in order to do some cleaning. What was really incredible is that they took 4 people to mop the small area, not counting the two ‘supervisors’. We played 3 games each, took more than an hour, and they were not done cleaning that small area when we were leaving. It was truly unbelievable. They had one man using the machine mop, two women mopping manually, and the fourth putting some soap powder and clean the side of the walls where perhaps the angle of the mop could not reach.

Well perhaps that’s how we have low unemployment rates. If they can take 4 people to clean that small area in an hour, I can’t possibly imagine what it would be like if one is to clean it on its own. Takes 4 hours maybe? I will just die of boredom if I clean that same area for 4 hours.

It reminds me of an old theory of John Maynard Keynes, where he once said that in order to increase the GDP, the government needs to increase spending and inject money into the economy. According to him, it doesn’t matter how the government spend the money. It could be employing people to dig hole, fill them up, re-dig, re-fill, re-re-dig, re-re-fill…… So perhaps some people do believe in such ideas may still work today. But does it? I don’t know, but let’s hope it does, for now we have four more people employed and we have a clean bowling alley.