Back to Basics – Bangi

After plying our golf in the upper market golf courses like Mines, Kota Permai, Palm Garden, Glenmarie and Tropicana, sprinkling in KGNS and Sungai Long; we decided to go back to our old haunt, Bangi Golf Resort. I have not played there in more than a year and a half. I don’t recall the last time I played there but it’s probably back in 2014 or so. Nothing much has changed, except I don’t recall it being a cow grass course. I always imagined it to be a bermuda fairway!

We teed up on Bangi 1 and 2, taking care to avoid the 3rd nine – and I promptly sent my first tee shot OB, and ended up with a triple bogey to begin my round. The second hole par 3, I three putted for a bogey and I thought, ah shit, here it goes again – I am having one of those stupid game days.

Then a funny thing happened.

I birdied my next hole, a Par 5 which I drove and my second shot landed just off the fringe of the green. The other hole I wanted to one on the green but failed and plopped into the water, but at least I still bogeyed it. I played pretty well, and at one point, between the last 2 holes of the front and the first 3 holes of the back nine, I parred 5 in a row. The 12th hole was a par 5 which after cutting the corner, I found myself with a 9-iron into the green. For a Par 5. I sent it into the bunker but I used my putter to tap it out of the lipless bunker to around 4 feet of the hole to set up a birdie putt.

At that point, me and my partner were playing against the other two guys and we were setting up fringes for the following:

a) Twin pars or better in a hole – 1 fringe – we were both going for birdie putts and his was 3 feet away

b) Sandy par or better – 2 fringes – both of us were hitting from the bunker our 3rd shot and both ended up 3, 4 feet away from the hole respectively

c) Birdie putts – 2 fringes – both of us were going for birdie putts

d) Escalation – 2 fringes – We were hitting our escalation for 3 or more pars or better in a row.

And we were going for a full house having won the game, up the dormie and playing for the buy (or bye?), so we were on the verge of hitting them for 11 balls for that sixer frame. Because we are not Dato’s or Tan Sri’s, we usually attach RM5 or RM10 to 1 ball so imagine the stake for us cheapskates.

Amazingly I missed my birdie putt right. But we still settled for the rest of the fringes. That was the most complete wallop I ever experienced in a hole and I am glad I wasn’t on the receiving end of it.

Overall, I ended up with 86, with that birdie miss my biggest, but also compounded with a two more 3 foot putts I missed, so the score could be a lot better. But hey, that’s golf.

The next round we are trying to book KGPA, as they now have a new nine set up and I am looking forward to playing there.

Renewing Maid Permit in Malaysia

Due to my limited activity in golf, I’ve decided to start writing about other stuff that I want to complain/bring attention to in this blog. Else, I will probably not be updating it for months.

OK – just to share my experience to renew my maid permit in Malaysia – in 2016. Strangely – it was quite a pleasant one, which is a first.

I think Malaysia has come a long way from the days of absolutely horrendous quality in government services. Those days, simply to renew your IC would be akin to you walking naked in the Sahara desert for 40 days and drinking your own piss. Everyone dreaded going to that place at the old State – where death awaited you in the form of government servants working with the KPI of serving a total of two citizens in a year. I remember one time, I was queuing up for the bloody IC thing for 3 hours from Lunch time. Finally, there were only about 3 people in front of me and I thought I would get through, when they announced they were going off for the day and to come back again tomorrow. W.T.F. Angry also cannot. Shout also cannot. So go back lor. And wake up tomorrow at 6 am and start sitting in front of the bloody office for them to open at 9 am.

We have come a long way since then. Nowadays I go to the Immigration Department in Sri Hartamas. The one opposite Publika. I renewed my IC the other day and really, it was FAST. I mean less than half hour my name was called, I did all the necessary photos etc and in 2 hours time, I can come back to pick up the new IC.

So how about renewing your maid work permit?

a) For maid less than 4 years, it’s mandatory for you to get a health check via Fomema. To be honest, even after that, it would be wise to just go for a yearly healthcheck. We had an incident where previously our friend’s maid had a tumour that was cancerous, which would have been caught if she had gone for regular checkups. Maids are humans too, and they deserve medical rights like everyone else, because they become almost part of the family.

b) So download the Fomema form. Link is as below http://www.fomema.com.my/images/Forms/Foreign_Worker_Medical_Examination_Registration_Form.pdf

c) Fill up the form. If you don’t know your worker’s code, the one starting with W, it’s ok, you don’t need to fill that up. For clinic name, you need to decide where you want to take your maid to.

d) List of clinic found at http://www.fomema.com.my/index.php/doctor-availability?view=doctoravailability

e) I would recommend if you can get a booking at clinic with Allocated X-Ray facility it would help. You can opt not to fill this up and only fill it up later, because you might not get a slot at the clinic you want. So get them to check first. I think those with X-Ray facility is devilish difficult to book. So just fill up what you can.

f) Pay around 200 bucks (for female maid. Never seen a male maid before). How to pay? I think cheque might work, but for the sake of ease, I just went and do an online payment via CIMBClicks. Under Billers -> Fomema Registration.

g) Once paid, get the receipt of payment, and print it out as well as your filled up form. You need to photocopy your maids passport first page as well as work permit page.

h) Now, you need to get your butt to Fomema with all the documents and maid actual passport. We thought everything was online, but no, we still needed to take a day off and go to the Fomema office at Menara Takaful. You can google map it. Parking is expensive there but easy to get. Fomema is on the first floor.

i) Once you are there, pick a number, wait, go to counter and show them all your stuff. You can pick your clinic then and there, show them you already paid and the process is less than half hour. They print out something to you and you just need to take that form to all the clinics you go to. I have no clue what is the value add of Fomema in this instance except that it may just be another scheme to add a middle agency to fleece off our money. I don’t know. Its not very painful though so what the heck.

j) So now you have the Fomema printout and in it you have worker’s code and the clinic you are supposed to go to. You can do it another day once you set a time with the clinic. For me, I went the next day with the actual maid (cannot photocopy maid, mah). I chose a clinic in TTDI called Mahanum and it was FAST. I think looking for parking took longer. Just show the paper, the doctor will see the maid, get all the sample urine etc or whatever and tell you to go to the X-ray. They will recommend one and the one they asked us to go was nearby.

k) There is an X-ray facility clinic Mediviron at TTDI itself, near the VADs building. It has is own parking for customer in front, so we just went there, did the X-Ray and that was it. No need to shuttle back and forth the other clinic. Overall, spent less than 1 hour to get everything done. Take leave for the morning is enough. Got time to play golf some more. And also no payment, just show the Fomema printout.

l) So now, just wait for the results – it should be out within 7 days. You can check online at http://www.fomema.com.my/index.php/online-results?view=onlineresult either the worker code or passport number. If you see “Suitable please proceed to immigration” you are almost there.

m) So here is the weird thing. It tells us to ‘proceed to immigration’ but immigration no longer handles this. They stopped processing maid renewal 2 years back. So if you are an idiot like me who believes everything this stupid Fomema says, you would take another morning off and go to your favourite Immigration centre (mine at Hartamas), park and go to the counter and ask: Where to renew maid work permit, ah?

n) And you will be told you have wasted your life there because now, everything needs to go through the richest middle agency of all time: My EG. Yes. The one that will make billions because everything is forced to go through them.

o) So technically Fomema = Stupid. Tell us wrong thing. They deserve their own bullet point for stupidity. Like it would kill them to just say: “Please contact MyEG now because we are living in the electronic era”

p) OK – now MyEG is like Fomema. Middle guys that sleeps with our government so everyone makes money together. No matter, what to do? You can opt to go to MyEG at Bandar Utama (KPMG building, first floor) and go through the maid renewal there or you can login their portal and do everything there.

q) Depending on whether you are comfortable to transact via their portal (It looks like it was designed by a bunch of Iguanas), you can opt to pay via Visa/Mastercard or via online banking. I selected online banking as I didn’t really trust their system (again – it looks hilariously horrible, which just shows all the billions have been pocketed to God knows where and they paid an online agency RM600 to build the website).  Again – what to do? Complain also useless.

r) So we put our entire personal information and financial information at risk by using their payment facility and pay RM631 for the renewal. That is a lot of money, but I suppose with so many middle men, everyone needs to be fed. The process charge is around 125RM. So if say, 200,000 maids present in Malaysia needs to be renewed, My Eg has made RM25,000,000 just like that. If you put in the other non-maid foreigners, My Eg will make A LOT OF MONEY. Now, why can’t they get a proper portal? Like, even after we pay, for me to go back and see the history of what I did on the portal is impossible. It’s like literally the most hogshit service website in the entire planet.

s) Now, once you have paid you will be given option to either deliver to your house or you can opt to collect onsite (at their HQ in Bandar Utama). I suggest you do the latter because you will not have a clue when these jokers will come to your house. If you need to have someone else be at home (like your angry mother in law), you need to write a proxy letter and make sure she is also holding the maid passport.

t) After 2 – 3 days, I suggest you call MyEg 03-7801 8888 to check if its ready. Good luck getting through. They are a bit like Telekom, Tenaga whereby their call centers are generally manned by simians. It took me around 40 minutes to get through, and you pray dear God don’t let my call drop. Once through you can give the passport number, they will tell its ready and you can come. I did note that if you call early morning around 9 – 9.30 am you can get through easier. Now, hilariously, while waiting on the call, they request you to email them at their support email address and they add: For faster response, please email us at blah blah. They actually said that. So I emailed them for fun. It’s going into 15 days now and the only thing I hear are crickets. Faster response my foot.

u) So finally – you go to KPMG building level 1. First, print out the payment receipts and the MyEg document after you made your payment. Of course, bring your maid original passport and your own IC. MyEg seems to be renovating their office because I was directed to some makeshift waiting area that smells suspiciously funny. Walk in and tell them you want to renew maid permit, you will be sent to a room, and asked for documents, your IC etc. Then you wait a bit and they will call you to another room where the nice gentleman will stick the new work permit on the passport and tell you to go on your merry way.

There. The full steps. Total money will be RM631 for MyEG + RM201 for Fomema medical. Total time taken – around 1 hour for the Fomema form, 1 hour for checkup and x-ray, and 1 hour for the actual getting permit pasted onsite.Online process includes Fomema forms and payment, MyEg forms and payments. I’m writing this down also in part because I am very forgetful and I have to go through this cursed process next year again.

To be honest I am pretty OK with the whole process, except that it cost quite a lot. Because I am flexible in my time as I run my own business (I say take leave doesn’t actually mean I take leave lah), it’s no issue for me, but I suppose it can be frustrating if you have to actually take leave and then find out you are being given the runaround like that Fomema telling us to go to immigration crap. However, I must say this really beats queuing up for the whole day and then being told I didn’t make the cut. Damn you, old IC department in State!

Birdies Galore

I have recently gone on a purple patch in my golf game of late.

Playing three games previous at Tropicana, Palm and Kota Permai, yielded me birdies in each round. Anyone knowing a 16 handicaper struggles will know that getting a birdie is as rare as spotting a pink hyena doing a riverdance.

The Palm garden birdies were probably the most memorable – two in a row to end the front nine, and for Kota Permai, the very first hole Par 5. Strangely even with these birdies, I still ended up shooting 87,88 and 89 on these courses, showing that gross score improvement is still difficult to come by.

This year, with much less golfing, is turning out overall, better golf. My drives are less wild eversince I decided to shorten my grip to the point of my right hand almost gripping the shaft itself. Another change I did was instead of tackling the green, I am almost always going short of the green. The reason is because I can then approach with a shorter club, and I am not too worried about controlling and can just muscle the whole thing in. I am dropping to a 9-iron now for my 150 meter shots, and a 6-iron for 170 meters. I am not saying I am reaching these distances with these irons, but they are close – even if I drop at 140 meter with my 9-iron, the ball can still roll onto the green without taking those bunkers into consideration.

Where my game need utmost upgrade is in chipping. I am still yipping it like a monkey on opium and I lose amazing amount of strokes due to bad chips, bad punch outs from the woods and overall just horrendous management of these supposedly easy shots.

Also this year I’ve stopped taking in all the statistics on my game and just take in the score. It seems with less calculations on the course and analysis, I am playing better. I don’t care about my 3 putts anymore and I putt better. I don’t care about missing the fairway anymore and I am hitting those fairways. I don’t care about how far I drive anymore and I am booming it. It seems like the less I scrutinise myself, my immense natural talents are now shining and I am achieving my God-given destiny of playing a consistent 16 handicap. Yes. I am being sarcastic.

Also – I have had some emails (thank you) wondering if this blog is ever going to be updated. To be honest, I don’t really have a lot to update on golf. Ever since that Pussycat Woods decided to call it quits and then do a comeback and then decide to quit again, I’ve been more than disillusioned that the game of golf is actually going backwards – which it is. If you look at how Taylormade is struggling and part of it is being farmed out by Adidas, and how Nike has stopped producing golf clubs and how overall, nobody really gives a crap anymore about golf and everyone is into cycling or jogging or swimming or lawn bowling – the trajectory of golf as a popular sport is somewhat declining – even with the yawn fest of Olympic golf not doing it any favours. Of course, this is my opinion based on extensive research of looking at Google for the past 2 minutes.

I can actually see the disinterest in it. In early 2000s, a lot of my colleagues were eager to try out golf. We even set a pool fund and get people together to play golf together, and organised outings to golf clubs like that stinkhole Bandar Utama golf course. We went to the driving range. Of course, the fact that we were all single and there were girls we wanted to tackle also picking up golf had a major impact to our motivations. Especially if you are already familiar with the sport, we can do the “OK, here is how you grip it” and then taking the advantage of holding her hand without getting a slap in the face or a call for harassment. Yup, it was a great maneuver.

But nowadays, when we talk about golf to my younger employees, they just go “meh”. The fact is, we are regressing back to the point where golf is now an old man sport. Because we are, naturally becoming “old men” as we hit our 40s or so. The younger generation doesn’t pick it up. Instead they pick up this strange activity called ‘jogging’. Which is significantly cheaper. All you need are shoes and a road.

So – I suppose, I will consolidate other articles into this blog. I run a blog called Giladad where I write about my travails as a father, but that readership has around 1 person- my wife so she knows what I am complaining about (her).