Ridiculously Fast

You don’t need to be in your middle age to know that life comes at you fast – in-the-fractions-of-a-second fast.

Decisive split-second turn of events can ruin your whole life if you’re too slow to catch up with the pace of your environment. I mean, there are these very little things you take for granted which will forever change the course of your miserable destiny. We take the most familiar examples: you’re queueing for the bathroom and you’re next in line. You realize that this guy is going to take very long and for the sake of efficiency and productivity and to materialize what you write in the recent English test regarding ‘‘exceptional time management capability’’, you went for the sink to brush your teeth while waiting.

And so you brush and brush and brush and because the toothpaste’s new flavor is so... relaxing... you fell into the deep abyss of hygiene paradise – the Zen garden you’ve been looking for the 17-21 years of your life. And then you hear the door creaking. And it slams shut again. You snap back to reality. And that’s the moment you scream “Oi, memotong!” (Don’t tell me you curse people in English)

“Dude, mind the queue please?”

“Well, get absorbed in tooth brushing some more and expect people to wait for you.”

“What? I thought it’s a free country?”

“All you have to do is brush faster next time.”

“But you should have reminded me that my turn is up!”

“Dude, you know why automotive companies in motorsports pay millions of dollars just increase their performance by 0.0047 seconds?”

“Nope.”

“Because that’s what it takes to win. Every time. That's what they call split-second engineering.”

“Do they do that to toothbrushes?”

“No.”

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The most horrible chain of events that happened to me that began with being half a second slower occurred when I was 16.

It was the first semester break and I took the bus from Jasin, Malacca to Melaka Sentral. I arrived at 7.25 pm and the bus to Seremban was well departing at 7.30 pm. So I dashed across the terminal knowing that missing this bus will forever end my reputation as the eldest son in the family. FYI, my parents were EXTREMELY skeptical of my maturity and independency. Maybe they haven’t heard me talking about war-profiteering? They never trusted me to ride home alone until my two successful campaigns in the previous episodes in which I managed to return home safely, alone, for the first time. I saved RM40 in both trips.

Back to dashing across the terminal. So I was successfully tackling every turns and corners at the lowest possible time taken, from the south-east end of the terminal where I arrived, way to the north-east end, where my bus was supposedly waiting for me. I was confident I was going to make it. That was, until – stress on ‘’until’’ – an anonymous ah moi dropped her Coke. I managed to sidestep, but in my heart “NO! I LOST 0.57 SECONDS!” The moment I shot through the platform door, the bus waved away with thick, black, diesel fart. Just. Like. That.

But I had no time to throw childish tantrums. I proceeded to scour the whole terminal looking for the next bus to Seremban. Nil. “7.30 pm is the last bus, dik. Sorry, lah!”

I slumped down in devastation, sinking into the waiting seat. “Damn Coke can! Why do you have to be so slippery!?” I was putting 99.27% blame on the Coke can. If it hadn’t been so slippery, the ah moi wouldn’t have spilled her Coke. Or maybe because in the 0.0073 seconds of my sight of her face, she was presumably cute. The rest 0.23%, I blame the atmospheric pressure of the terminal for letting condensation happen on the Coke can’s surface.

I fished out my phone and dialed the boss.

“Hello?”

“Hey dad. Um, so I missed the bus by 0.0073 seconds.”

“Oh. And?”

“And... um... uh, Happy Father’s Day, dad.”

”Gee, thanks son. Hey, have a nice night in the terminal.”

“Yeah, thanks dad. Bye.”

Because I was 0.0073 seconds slower for having to evade an ah moi’s Coke, I missed my bus. With that, I missed the last nightly download gate for the beta-client of a hideous MMORPG that a friend had hired me to download for a reward of RM150, a free 3 semesters math tutorial service. For the whole remaining 3 semesters, I had to listen to various friends trying to explain funny trigonometric logics – instead of the guy who was in the 7th rank of the National Mathematics Olympiad’s 16-29 years old category (he was a rank away from representing Malaysia to the International Mathematics Olympiad in Kazakhstan).

And for the remaining three semesters, I had to put aside my own pocket money to fund travel expenses, instead of Parental Scholarships. Or else, I have to ride with mom. Mom. Mom. Mom.

Other than ridiculous split-second near misses that can forever dislocate your destined fortune, do you know that you could miss the prestigious “MUET Band 6 Candidacy” if you missed a comma? Imagine missing a comma and losing the privilege of appearing in the national headlines!

Glossary


ah moi = "a girl" in Mandarin Chinese. In this context, a Chinese girl.

MUET = Malaysian University English Test