My heart sank when I read this news Perak DAP HQ Damaged By Petrol Bomb This Morning

All Malaysians must come together to condemn and deplore such action so that this would not be the start of a new trend of politically motivated terrorism. Pak Lah and Home Minister Syed Hamid must publicly condemn such act and IGP must take immediate actions to investigate the culprit.

Indeed a sad day for all peace loving Malaysians.

A man came up to our office today asking for a cancellation of his local council summon - about RM30.

I told him nicely saying that if we are a good government, we have to honour the law, a crime is a crime and we must pay the penalty. Then he asked for discount, I was thinking if the summon is higher than perhaps it can be considered, but it's only RM30.

I know to some RM30 is a huge sum, but thinking that this guy here drives around in a car (proton), RM30 is probably just a week worth of petrol. He told me he is jobless, but again, I do not think his case warrant a discount. He got upset and walked away angrily.

It's kind of disheartening to know that the council has been directing people up to the EXCO offices to get signatures for discounts (In fact someone came up to our office this week telling us that the police told them to see Lim Guan Eng for a marital abuse case). I think a system need to be put into place for this sort of appeals. One way is for the councils themselves to handle appeal on their summons by setting up a small tribunal/appeal beureau.

And the Rakyat need to know, pls don't expect the MPs or ADUN to help you escape the law. That  may be the old way, but we are in a different age now. We'll look into unfair laws, but once they are laws, pls obey them and if convicted, pls go through the proper channel of appeals.

Signing Forms

Two weeks back, a young man came into our office and asked my boss to sign a recommendation to get a letter of good behaviour from Foreign Ministry to apply for working visa to Taiwan - my boss politely turned down his request because she did not know who is he and when asked to produce documents from work he could not. But none the less, she helped him to make a few calls and spent nearly an hour trying to information for this application to ease his job. Finally the guy got angry coz my boss wouldn't sign for him and stormed out of the office but not before threateningly said "I remember you Ong Kok Fooi!". - applying for letter of good behaviour? I don't think so.

The thing about signing documents by MPs and ADUNs, the people in the old system were used to BN leaders signing documents for them, rightly or wrongly. So now, everyone comes to us to sign their salary forms, their application forms, anything and everything. We would love to serve the people, but please do bear with us and provide proper identification and documenations when asking for certifying signatures and please ensure that you are not making false declaration when you ask us to sign.