my workplace (at a certain ward in a certain gah-men hospital) is like one big pot of steaming hot porridge/burbur/zouk/zhou/flocons d'avoine/okayu/*tongue click*porridge. cooked in one big third-world looking metal pot that looked like it survived several STOMP performances and the 2nd world war.

ok lah, so there are no afrikans or japanese or frenchmen at my workplace. but you get the idea right?

the point is, i have a lot of chinese colleagues. and we're not talking about the singapore 'han-lor' type of chinese people. i'm referring to the china chinese. the ones who come from Hubei. the ones who migrate from Beijing (it's BEI-ZHING hor, not bei-jeeng). the ones uprooted from Gunagzhou. so many different accents you hear everyday. it's really titillating cos my brain somehow draws a connection between chinese accents and the chinese new year. i feel like February everytime i arrive for work.

all these, of course, lead to a very bad habit that i have: spotting bad grammer spouted by my china colleagues. in fact, let me just give you one prime example that happened last week:

(every morning the night shift staff will pass a summarized report of each patient over to the morning shift staff, the night shift staff was passing over a patient's report to me, the morning shift staff, in english; excuse the medical jargon)

Night-Shift: 26/3 is Mr Tan Tan Tan. He's a nuerology over-flow case clerked by Dr Tan Tin Tin. Patient is quite 'shiao' (the china nurses can never ever pronounce it as SIAO). because he got head injury.

Me: (reading the case-notes) he has DEMENTIA is it?

Night-Shift: yah correct. patient is quite DEMENTED also.

at that point of time, having just watched the horror movie SAW 3 about two days before, i had really vivid visuals in my mind. i imagined my nightstaff being hung on a big cross (ALA Madonna-style minus the disco-esque reflective surfaces), and having her limbs and arms twisted inside out. and the patient (a 60 plus year old ah pek) is sitting on a wheel-chair watching with an evil and menacing look.

that's DEMENTED.

when i last checked, my 60 year-old ah pek was lying there on the bed with saliva drooling from the side of his mouth, haven't had one too many doses of his psychotropic drugs.

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