Thursday, November 08, 2007

The Fast, The Furious and A Bloody Traffic Jam

Something looked odd the other day in Taman Desa. Just down by the new part of my beloved suburb I found myself in a traffic jam that would’ve put the Federal Highway to shame. I could have read the latest GQ from cover to cover and still not clear the light.

Worse, I was frustratingly close to my favourite Mamak food outlet but found myself queued up in a rather quiet street. No passing traffic in front. Just a queue and pissed off drivers. That’s because in their infinite wisdom, City Hall decided that the rather quiet intersection in front of me (one so innocuous that most people didn’t they had to stop when approaching it) needed a traffic light. One that would actually keep free-flowing traffic to a standstill.

That’s essentially what a bureaucracy does. They decide on things/processes that slow life down to a stop. It kinda reflects how they work themselves.

It’s not what I like, to put it mildly. I recently took up an offer to get back into television again, a career path I sorely missed. I’d been on the lookout to get back in despite running my own ad agency for more than three years. Then Media Prima asked if I’d be interested in running their New Media video creation team for a new lifestyle portal they were launching. It would be like TV but it would be entirely internet-based, with short form programming and doing the kind of stuff you won’t get to see on free-to-air TV.

Workling life has been flying at Media Prima since I joined. And since we launched the portal, www.gua.com.my I’ve been on this amazing journey, being involved in a start-up once again, with full-fledged trade launch, media launch and going ‘live’ with our aim to deliver Malaysia’s best online content and be numero uno. Life is not complacent here. We live it on the edge. The cutting-edge.

So you can imagine what it must be like to get stuck in a lousy jam. It’s a sick joke and Taman Desans are also scratching their heads. More lights have cropped up in other parts of town and I bet the main contractor assigned to the task is happy to get more work, planning his next holiday in Koh Samui. It’s only tax-payers’ money, after all.

The present management of Media Prima turned the group around from debt-ridden a TV company to pile of cash-cow subsidiaries that dominate advertising expenditure.

Maybe they should be running the country too.