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Tuesday, June 27, 2006

The Class System.

When one thinks of class, one's mind immediately travels to days of Old England where a person's social standing was generally determined by being in one of 3 main classes; upper, middle or working/lower. The Class System is of course, still practised today albeit with not as much restriction (no "Off With Their Heads!" should a rich person want to be with a poor person) but definitely just as much ignorance, i think..

wanna hear a story? last weekend, i went to a wedding. it was in a beautiful ballroom, in a beautiful 5-star hotel, with beautifully rich guests. the age median was about 55 (even though the bride and groom were 28 and 30, respectively). for some reason, the dinner was not the usual 8 course chinese dinner. it was a buffet with different counters for different food set all round the ballroom. In theory, this would actually have been a fantastic way for guests to mingle while they went to get their food. Unfortunately, in real-time, it was chaos.

So oklah, there are like 10 counters right? 1 counter got roti jala, naans, curries, another counter had dim sums, another one had roast beef and yorkshire pudding, another one had sushi and sashimi, there was a tempura counter and a local fare one as well (char koay teow & fried rice)..very posh right? wrong!!yours truly had to wait 20 minutes for a measly serving of char koay teow followed by queueing another 15 minutes to get 2 tiny siew mais (reminder:5-star wedding)...but i digress, that story's for another entry, its just i got hungry thinking of all that lovely food not being eaten by me....anyyyyways..what i was going to say was that it's always interesting to see how hungry people react to food...even the upper-class...there was queue-cutting, blatant grabbing of all the prawn tempura(leaving only eggplant and ladies fingers) by one lady and all-out hogging of the entire counter (when a person stands directly infront of a counter so they can "book" whatever food they want first)...classy, huh?

Lemme tell you another story..2 weeks ago, my car couldn't start. I was at one of the petrol stations in Centrepoint and it was late. I turned the ignition twice and the sorry sounds that came out of her are not ones i want to remember. There were about 3 shabbilly dressed mat motors still loitering around and i started to leetle-beet panic lah..then one of the fellas started walking over..lageee panik..he got closer..i didnt bloody care if the place was gonna explode or not, i took out that damn handphone and started to dial..he knocked, i dropped my phone..."Miss, you takde air batteri lah".. fast forward 20 minutes later, my car was as good as new..Zamri not only filled my very,very empty battery water thingy, but he also replaced whatever lubricant i had to replace lah..all with the help of his two friends..lovely boys..and i found out later that they didn't even work at that station!they were just helping me out!

So, in the old days, one could tell which class a person belonged to from their accent, their clothes, their interests, the way they raised their children and what kind of food they ate. if you think about it, things haven't changed a whole lot. the question is..does the class a person is in really determine how classy that person is?