Basket.

A week before I published the tirade you can now see below, The Organisation pushed out a fresh new directive on "blogging" (I would have thought Organisation directives more formal in their language). I can condense the entire thing into: "You are not allowed tell the world about our poorly formulated policies, excessive mismanagement of human resources and the unbelievable incompetence of our career personnel. Instead, you must direct all the perceived slights, injustices and downright ill-treatment you have suffered, which our generally abject standards will ensure is a very fair amount, to our resident experts in not-giving-a-fuck. They will proceed to ignore whatever you put through and you will be forced to internalise years of abuse, unfair treatment and utter lack of regard for human dignity, snowballing eventually into a giant mass of hatred and vengeance that will serve as the engine to drive you on to find that imaginary crock of gold at the end of the rainbow for the rest of your miserable life on this island of the morally bankrupt."

All you can ever find at the end of a Singaporean rainbow is emptiness and a distinct feeling that you got cheated. The lucky ones will still have a vestige of a soul then. The unlucky ones would already have sold it to me.

But back to the latest immortal edict from The Organisation. As you might have guessed from my above abridgement, it contains little more than the usual crap about how proper channels for seeking redress exist and they must be used. It's always this parroting line about proper channels. When they first used it I could believe it, but it's been overused; misused. I wouldn't care if these channels actually worked, but they don't. If they really did, The Organisation wouldn't be so poorly managed as it currently is.

You can forget that rubbish about a 3G Organisation. The fact is that The Organisation is very much stuck in what is popularly known as "1G mode", which is, well, all stick and no carrot. Yes, of course it used to be worse, but a common line circulating amongst us Organisational dregs is (colloquially) "last time police wear shorts". Now they don't. Times have changed, and rather than change with the times, the Organisation seems to want the times to change back.

In short, I don't want to hear any more tales of the fearsome discipline in the old Organisation. It's a different world now, in many ways a better one. More people are educated to a higher standard. Information flies thousands of miles in seconds or less. People know more, and they expect more. They expect to be treated like the educated people they are, not brutishly like the runaway slaves of old. They expect to be told the reasons for doing what they are asked to do. They will follow orders but expect these to be reasonable, and for those giving the orders to set good examples, instead of merely setting out peremptory commands.

Until the Organisation ceases attempting to crush dissent with black text on white paper, and instead understands some home truths and gets rid of some of its more outdated employees, it cannot move forward to become an Organisation of the current. It will become a relic of the past, staffed by proud men in dead-end jobs, served unwillingly by those best-equipped to contribute to it.

It does not need to be said that such an important Organisation must be one for the future, and not for the dead past. Change, or wither.