By: Teng Choong Peng
First published: 22 May 04, TODAY

I woke up one Sunday morning with an insatiable urge for yong tau foo.

I drove across town to Lorong 7 Toa Payoh for what I believe is Singapore's best yong tau foo. I was raving about the taste to my wife when I saw the ominous sign: "Upgrading in progress".

For those who live in Toa Payoh and heard a scream at around noon two Sundays ago, it was probably me. Don't you just hate it when your favourite hawker centre is closed for upgrading?

I have nothing against a spanking new food centre. But what annoys me is that there is a good chance my favourite stalls will no longer be there when the food centre reopens.

It happened when the food centre in East Coast Park was upgraded, it happened in Upper Bukit Timah and it happened in Redhill.

Here is my gripe - in Singapore, we think we add value, but very often, it is just busy work. Don't you feel sometimes like the proverbial prisoner shifting dirt mindlessly from one part of the prison compound to another?

We are told: We must boost productivity, we must increase the bottom line, we must have more babies, we must discover our inner selves, we must show proof that we are economically viable and socially savvy.

I know of a fairly large company whose employees were sending too much "spam" email to one another. To eradicate this social menace, the sending of such messages was banned.

But to add value to this move, the administrator decided that all departments that had to send unsolicited emails were to seek the prior approval of the administrator.

Once approved, the administrator would send an email to all staff informing them to go to the office notice board to read the message.

What about the school that thinks that students having their own tablet PCs adds value to their learning?

Do schools really think that these pricey, oversized PDA-type gizmos help their students achieve more? Is the old-fashioned jotter book not good enough?

Sure, PCs save the time needed to transcribe from paper, they put digital information at our fingertips and we can connect anytime, anywhere.

Still, does this mean that we don't need jotter books anymore?

Or what about - this is my favourite - the public transport system?

Commuters were once found to be under-paying their fares. We needed a system to ensure commuters paid for what they used. Great idea!

Executives who mooted the proposed solution were probably lauded for their foresight and for thinking out of the box.

A few months and an ultra-sophisticated system later, we had to start charging commuters for the fare cards to cover the cost of the technology because commuters were not using their cards enough.

Where will it end?

The next time you think of adding value - Stop!

If you have been roped in as part of a task force, a waste-cutting committee, a parent-teacher association or if you are a teacher, counsellor, manager or crew leader - Stop!

Ask if you are adding value or just shifting sand.

The graveyard is full of people who think they are indispensable. It's time we started culling the sacred fowls of efficiency and results.

The people who most often make the difference in our lives are the people who are willing to waste time with us. It's people, not economy, stupid. It's Jonathan in the next cubicle and not a cost centre.

There is beauty in the status quo: The same street corner, the same ice-cream man, the same neighbourhood, the same daddy who comes home from work every day at 7pm for dinner, the same rain that falls on the window panes.

Let's protect what is truly sacred.

And let's not forget the yong tau foo at Lorong 7 Toa Payoh.

The writer, aka Dr PC, lectures on computer technology in a local polytechnic and addresses your PC problems in the Help Desk section of InfoTech, the IT solutions paper.