Red cross and red tape

On Easter Sunday, Bear and I did a bit of charity work, and went door-knocking for the Red Cross. Technically, I was the one who volunteered, having been at home when the phone rang and the kind of person who cannot say no (unlike Bear, who knows how to say "nothankyou i'mnotinterested" really fast and then put down the phone), and so off we went with our little name tags and little plastic red cross bags and fiddly little receipt books. I even wore my red dress, for the look of it, and Bear put on his good shirt. :P

In the end we did alright, considering half the people in our street weren't home. Everyone else was very nice about it and gave 5 or ten dollar notes, with one guy emptying out his 5 cent collection into the bag. Most common excuse for not giving appears to be "I've given enough money already", which is fair enough, and at one house we were almost mauled by a snarling black dog, but it was good fun nonetheless.

In other news, Bear and I have set off on the road towards applying for a spouse (de facto) visa for me, after working out that the benefits (residence!) would probably outweigh the hassle and costs, although i have to say the hassle has been considerable Already, especially the stupid medical thing. Hopefully, after i make my 4th appointment to see the third medical specialist he will write a letter to the immigration authorities saying: Stop sending this poor girl around making appointments and taking tests and giving her money away there is absolutely nothing wrong with her and so give her a visa please. Thank you.

That's the health check side of things... Thankfully the australian police check was relatively simple and straightforward, but the same can't be said of the singapore version, where i had to visit the police station here three times in order to get a set of fingerprints taken (i have really grubby looking hands now), and answer all kinds of questions about my income and reasons for emigrating! Hilarious.

Living in Sydney has somewhat attuned me to being sensitive to being asked questions that are really quite unnecessary. I suspect there is a bit of a culture in Singapore where the standard is to collect as Much information that could possibly be slightly relevant at all for every person, nevermind if you're never going to use all of that or if it's even any of your business to know!

I remember when i first took over the post of Secretary for our little singapore students' association at UNSW, i was just astounded at the membership form. So many details! From the mundane (address, contact details in sydney), to things like address in Singapore, passport/IC number(!), NS status(!!), race (!!!), etc etc. I wouldn't be surprised if you had to fill in your bloodtype. I just scrapped the whole thing of course, no way was i going to make people fill that in, nor was i going to type it all into a database. Bureaucracy! Such a waste of time!

Of course i later found out why there might've been all those details... A singapore overseas organisation (that i won't name) told us, give us the details of your members and we'll give you money. Apparently they did this every year. I told them, no, we can't, its illegal, plus wrong you know. They said, we need their details please, especially things like NS status and stuff, and we'll give you our sponsorship. To which i said, did you not hear me correctly? I am not giving you anyone's details without asking them first, and even then, i don't have all that bloody useless information. To which i think they got angry and said, we gave you the information pack! with all the forms to collect that information with! and i said, what? where? no you didn't! and at that point the (then) president of our little association said um... you know what? now that i think about it, i might have some stuff from them in my room somewhere, err.. kinda forgot about it.

And then i said, oh. well. OOPs.

Still, they had no right to demand those details. As if it was their Right! Ballwipes.

:P