There is a first time for everything.......

Today, there is an urge to start a blog. An urge to document some of the things that happened in my life. I have never written a diary all my life, but this blog would sort of be a the first.

Yesterday, I experienced my first earthquake in Singapore. Not once, but twice in a day.
First time happened at 11:50am. Suddenly, I felt giddy, and I realised that the chair is moving.
Everyone in the office start talking loudly "Did you feel it??". Well, since it was the near lunch time, we just evacuated the building early for Lunch. Everyone had their first time at the same time. LOL. Everyone was on the streets or so it seems. We carried on with our "tissue paper chopping" of places and had our lunch.

After lunch and back in the office, everyone settle down into their own cubicles. Then at 1:50pm, the giddness came back! The earthquake was back. Funny thing is that, like any typical Singaporean, we just dismissed it since it is the second time. Sets me think.........

Singaporeans are not used to disasters. Our worst natural calamity by far would be the floods caused by continuous rainfall. Even that doesn't bother us unless your car is submerged by the flood in the underground carpark. But I think Singaporeans feel more for not striking the 10million Toto or the stock market crashing than some flash floods or earthquakes.

I attended a BCP(Business Continuity Planning) seminar. The speaker is also a Singaporean. He said that we are so immune to disaster that we do not know how to react. He recalled being in a hotel in some other country. While watching the news on TV at night, the fire alarm bells went off. He quickly put on some presentable clothes, checked his hair, checked for his wallet and passport, before slowing opening his door thinking of walking towards the lift. When he opened his door, he found people of different nationalities rushing about, some in their pajamas, some looks like they just woke up from their sleep, and there was one that was just wrapped a towel around himself and still has shampoo bubbles on his head.

That leads me to think that we should have a higher sense of urgency and plan for disasters because we have always been to protected while growing up in Singapore.