mardi, juin 12, 2012

PR, PR, where art thou?

excluding the 2 weeks break, renovation has been proceeding along pretty smoothly so far.

in terms of what has been the minor stumbles, i guess its been the case of the unknown unknowns. basically me and the girl are total noobs are home makeover: we do not even know what we do not know, and having an ID who is more than happy to accommodate my sometimes over-imposing requests, means that we frequently run into cost overruns, which obviously is a serious problem, and we find ourselves having to also frequently temper our wants and look more into our needs.

case in point, we were out shopping for sanitary wares last week and we had to go shopping twice, just because we didn't know that there were toiletbowl+sink packages in the first place! needless to say, we went for individual items that caught our eyes (and butt feel), and that translated to a rather hefty bill the first time. luckily, sense prevailed, and we went for the cheaper but packaged route after we were briefed on the economics of homeware shopping.

luckily too, that i am quite familiar with the project management process (occupational hazard), and i was able to manage my ID quite well thus far. by the way, if you want to know, projet pothaus is already CO-ed now. however, i have yet to get my LSMP nor PMP endorsed. luckily there's no need for a Logs Annex cos projet pothaus is less than S$15M in cost. =P

anyway, what i realised so far is that there are very little singaporeans in the entire ID/ renovation industry. let see my experience thus far:

ID: malaysian
ID husband: malaysian
construction workers: bangladeshi/ chinese
electrician: malaysian
electrical workers: chinese/ malay (not sure singaporean or malaysian malay)
laminate flooring salesperson: singaporean
cement screeder: chinese
window contractor: malaysian
sanitary wares salesperson: malaysian
blinds contractor: malaysian

not sure if this is representative of the entire industry, but what happened to our FT/FW to citizen/PR quotas? point to ponder: in our zeal to rapidly modernise and grow our labour force, have we applied the same stringent standards to the outsiders as we have to our own people?

[disclaimer: this is just a point for ponder; the people whom i've dealt with so far are as good as they can be, to the point that i am afraid that singaporeans can no longer compete with them. but is that reason enough for us to stop developing our indigenous workforce, or is that just taking the easy way out?]

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