Work hard Boy...and you'll find...

The problem with not having enough cash on hand if and when needed has haunted my life eversince I made my first pay check sometime in 1969 working as a medical field assistant for an American doctor who was doing a research of tropical deseases in Terengganu. I was hired through the Institute of Medical Research (IMR) and we were working out of Kuala Brang doing back then research on cholera and malarial deseases and hordes of otheres that was prevailent then in the jungles of Ulu Trengganu. Most of the kampung areas we had covered back then are now under water after the Kenyir Lake was constructed. Travelling into these areas in the Ford Bronco Land Cruiser back then was the thrill of a lifetime and adventure in itself especially for a teenager just out of high school. Sometimes we were stuck in mud on rainy days in the middel of nowhere and often we had to sit around on the muddy grounds fixing sores and applying bandages to broken legs instead of doing actual research work, but it was all educational and helped build my character for better or worse. I had money back then more than most of my peers.

The I decided to work for Bristow Helicopters, a chopper company servicing Esso Exploration in the oil and gas exploration off the coast of the South China Seas. Out of Surrey, England, the outfit was run predominantly by British pilots and had a German chief engineer. My job was communications, the wireless operator, the radio man, keeping in constant contact with the Drilling Rigs off shore and the Control base in Kuala Lumpur. The drilling vessel 'Discoverer Two' was back then operational doing the exploration and I later left Bristow to work on this Ship as their radio operator.

One of my most unforgetable expereinces working as a radio operator for Bristow Helicopters was receiving a May-Day call from the Discoverer Two in the middle of the night. The call came very soft that i could hardly read what was being said. May-Day! May-Day! This is the Discovere two calling Trengganu, come back!! I almost shit in my pants when I realized that the Ship was in trouble and i had fallen asleep on the job and worse had turned the volume down on the radio! And so there i was strainig my ears to hear the call when I could have just turn the volume back up and had no problem hearing at all. Needlesss to say, the Discovery Ship had a blowout and the impact was strong enought to tilt the whole vessel an an angle, (something like that, I learned later). The Danish captain of the Discoverer 2 had fainted and all hell had broken loose on board...there i was alone in the radio room imagining the worse.

The Bristow Helicopters operations base was located in Seberang Takir inside two bungalow houses that used to belong to the former Mentri Besar, the late Dato' Ibrahim Fikri. In the main building was the operations room as well as the dining and staff lounge. Most of the pilots and engineers were roomed in the next adjacent building and so i had to leave the room and rush over to wake everyone up. I started with the Operations captain who answered the door stark naked and simply told me to wake the whole crew up while he walk back into his room to get dressed.

Back at the radio room the captain asked me to call the Local police department and the Navy and the Airforce and get their permission for the two choppers to fly at night on a rescue mission. What??!! The Airforce?! The Navy?! You got to be kidding right? Nope! Just do it or you will be out of work tomorrow. Try it sometime! Calling the police was not hard but the Airforce? The Navy? in the middle of the night? Not like I had the numbers on the board somewhere to begin with. So i did the next thing that came to my mind and that was to tell the policemna answering my call that it was a matter of life and death od many at sea and that he was to contact the Airforce and the Navy to ask permission for our choppers to fly and unscheduled flight that night., all these done in the Trengganu dialect Malay and the police man was also rudely awaken from his sleep too perhaps. How do i do this he asked me back! Wake up the chief of police for crying out loud i yelled back at him. I have the feeling he did just that for after a while came the permission from all authorities for the helicopters' night rescue flight.

The rest was history. I bought a motorcycle while I was working for this company and in the early seventies it was a big deal to be owning a sports bike and running aroung town like an easy rider.

I was twenty years of age when i worked on board the Discoverer 2, a Seismogrphic Research Ship looking for oil off the coast of Trengganu. It was while working for bristow helicopters that i came to realize for the first time in my life how much i hated the Brisitsh expatriates for their arrogance, aloofness and prejudices toward the locals and how some locals would kiss their asses every inch of it to curry their favors. I liked the German Chief engineer even if he was tough on everyone where work was concern but after office hours he was one of the guys. The British and the French pilots stuck to themselves and frowned upon locals who showed any sense of intelligence or got too friendly, some still do till this day unfortunately!. My lesson about life and careers began after being exposed to these jobs that I did soon after my high school education. I never continued my education into college untill I was in the United States.

Working on the Drilling Ship as a radio operator was boring as hell for me and so I applied to work on the platform or the Derick itself where I thought the action was. I used to watch the guys from my porthole at the radio room handling the hundred feet long pipes in and out of the drilling hole and wondered what it would be like for me to do it and wondered even if i had it in me to do it. I got the job and the first day i was on the jod i busted my hand so bad that I had to have it looked at by the Ship's captain who was also the Medic on board. He wrapped it up tight with a piece of gauze and sent me back to work, I did and found out after awhile the black and blue on the palom of my hand was gone at the end of the day. The Deck Boss, an elderly guy who reminded me of Buffalo Bill in the Western movies kept me going. I learned the job fast and got to be quite good at it. I could handle the long pipes as they slid up from the ship's lower deck pulled up by a whinch line and alter attatched to the top of the revolving pipe that was already in the hole. The whole procedure was as dangerous as it was challenging. The guys working on the deck was constantly covered with hot mud that kept shooting out of the pipe everytime it was uncapped to be joined by the next pipe. The floor was as slippery as one can imagine being covered by the mud and when handling the the hundred feet ling pipes as they swung from the edge of the deck free towards the center one is tested to the max in how to avoid getting knocked off one's feet while clinging on to these pipes. This was how i hurt my hand, I had slipped and placed my hand against the revolving pipe in the hole to stop myself from falling and the pipe i was supposed to hold back from swinging into the center came and smashed my hand. Immediately after the impact i almost passed out when I slipped off my glove and saw the blue black discoloration taking place before my eyes amidst sering pain. I saw the line on the horizon tilted to one side and then the other as I started to fade out of conciousness but I was rudely jerked back into my sense by someone smacking my back hard enough to throw my hard hat to the ground. I looked around me dazed and found the old guy Buffalo Bill standing there smiling at me and told me to get to the Captain's room and had him take a look at my hand.
After my hand being fixed by the captain I returned to the Derick area and reported my conditon to Buffalo Bill, he told me to get bat on the job to my utter dismay. I did not back down but kept at it grabbing the pipes and then the 'Thongs' the best i could and by the end of the day I felt like my hand was all forgotten, no more pain, like nothing happened. Buffalo Bill came over tapped my on my back and asked about my hand. I showed him that it was perfectly ok by gripping and releasing my fist. It was short of a miracle I thought. Then he took off his glove and showed me that his little finger was half missing like some yakuza deal made him cut it off. He pointed at the chain that was used to wrap around the pipes each time the joints were tightened.
Why do i describe this whole scene in such detail? Because there always skeptics who cannot accept that an artist like me could have done what I did somewhere along the way in my life. Not that it mattered to me but to my children it is my way of saying hey, I worked!

My next employment was in Georgetown, Penang it was after I have had enough of the East Coast life and living under my oldest brother's watchful eyes was not exactly what i thought was the coolest thing for me. He was also formerly my highschool teacher and the school's disciplinary teacher to boot. I needed to break loose and carve my own future elsewhere, where i did not have to compete against my twin brother for a spot in the sun. The move was prompted after i was kicked off the Discoverer 2 for challenging the Deck supervisor to a duel which ended up in a standoff. The cause was about learning that I could understand and spoken good English and detested being subjected to filthy and abusive language by my superiors as my fellow workers were subjected to when they could not understand a word of English to understand what 'mother fucker' or 'son of a bitch meant'. If they had known what the expatriates were abusing them with there would have been blood shed alot earlier than before i stepped into the arena. So much for ignorance is bliss as they say. In those days there was no government body to turn to for complaints as Petronas was unheard of.
Hiring and firing of locals in those early days of the petroleum industry in Malaysia was done through a Jew who acted as the middle man and he was assisted by a Malay smooth talker, a shyster and between them they made a killing over the salary earned by the local Malays working on the oil rigs. I was made aware of these by the Americans who i befriended on board the Discoverer 2. These middle men were like parasites that bled the ignorant young fishermen who opted their fishing jobs for a glamorous job which was said to pay well. The injustice done to these pioneers of the oil rigs workers was inhuman and dehumanizing by any international standard but by Malaysian standard "apa apa pun Boleh lah!!" Today looking at the petronas employees strutting around in their fancy gears and sporting high brow lifestyle claimming how much profit and how far they have come, I want to puke! It was the ignorant Trengganu fisherman's sons that got the ball rolling and they deserve better than getting what is righfully theirs taken away from them purely on political grounds alone. The Malays have a saying ' Lembu punya susu, Sapi dapat nama'. How many gave their lives in the early years of the petroleum industry in Malaysia? How much were they or their loved ones compensated with? Does the mighty giants sipping the blood of the people in the ivory towers care to ask or even recognize?
My services with Hagemeyer Trading Company on Leboh Pantai in Penang was what i would consider as my first real job. I was offered the job by a friend who was asked by his Chinese friend to find one or two Malays to work in the company as the malaysian governement back then in 1970 had made it mandatory that there be a percentage of Malays employed in major companies and banks all over the country. On my first day i was placed among the administration department keeping records of sales and anything to do with accounts. For someone who hated maths with a passion the job was like a true grit test and i do not know how I lasted as long as I did but I did, I survived. Then i was transfered to the Matsushita sales department where i was required to make out Delivery Orders and cater to the needs of the salesmen. After being grilled and thrown around by an elderly Chinese lady who ran the department like an Iron Lady I was transfered to yet another department which was involved in sales of Nipon Victor Co. Products. The department was also ran by another Chinese 'Iron lady' but alot younger and not as immaculate as a concubine as the one that ran the Matsushita or then known better as the National products.
All in all there were about five or six seperate departments involved under one roof and they dont really get along between one and another and it was a challenge to be passed around from one department to another while I was undergoing my trainning. Working among the Chinese one has to earn their trust and than their respect and having done this there is no better education one can get than from a group of Chinese who sometimes hated eachothers' guts but have great perserverence in not showing it in the face of day to day work. Like the store keeper will swear all bloody hell about one of the department heads in front of you but you make no mistake of telling it to the person, this was an unwritten law that you learn to observe.
As i progressed in the company I was allowed to become a salesman like hitting the streets with batteries," National Eveready Batteries." I tried every damn stalls and stores there was in the Georgetown area but try as I may it was like I was up against a brick wall of no takers for batteries, or selling was definitely not something I was great at.
I was one day called into the office of the 'Old man', Mr. Van Der Muellen for a pep talk. He said to me that if I could survive these groups of Chinese who bounces me around the various departments, learn all they had to throw at me and succed I would have a great future in the business world. The old man was soon replaced by a younger Dutch by the name of DuBois who was married to a Chinese. This guy was slick and we did not see eye to eye from day one but he kept his temper with me to just dirty looks. Later he was caught for embezzlement and sent packing with his wife to God knows where.
Making money? Work? I did my share, here in this country and overseas. I was not one for staying too long on one job till weeds starts to grow out of my toes but whatever i did i gave my best and did not take any nonsense from my fellow workers whether they be my superiors or those who work under me. I am today not so financially well established not because i was lazy but because i never did beleive in saving for the rainny day. My mother God bless her soul, said to me that I have holes in the palm of my hand when it comes to money, I beleive her so.