Interesting Behaviors

My foreign colleagues and friends like to share with me the interesting behaviors they observed for some of Malaysians they met here. Most of these are quite funny but it can be quite embarrassing sometimes. Here are some of the common observations:-

(1) Does not like to walk

An observation which I must agree with. Look at how we park our cars at the shopping mall. We will first park at the parking lots nearest to the entrance (even though it may be a parking lot for the disabled) so that it saves a few walking steps. See the cars illegally parked at the commercial streets especially around the banks during the weekdays. We can ask ourselves and look around how often we walk to the shops for meals from our apartments or houses even though the locations are near and the weather is not hot.

(2) Lack of patience

A lot of Malaysians will never queue up and wait patiently for the turn without the attempt to jump queue. A colleague of mine shared his recent experience when waiting for his turn at one of the hospital. Many visitors (generally they are not really sicks) walked to the counter every 15 - 30 minutes for checking their turns or negotiating for faster turn for them with all sort of excuses. They even asked their kids to check for the turn hopefully to obtain the service faster. I observed the similar experiences usually in the customers service counters at the bank. The walk-in customers would often interrupt the customer service staff that is serving the customer to hijack the attention for information. You will get so annoyed that the customer service staff often stop serving you and begin to respond to a couple of these adhoc customers who interrupted your conversation. This behaviors are really rude for me as they are wasting people's time.

(3) Keep "intimate distance" with others

Do you stand behind the yellow line or leaving some spaces in between when there is someone in front of you performing transactions at the ATM machine or at the counter? A lot of people does not realize this and keep very "intimate" physical distance when others are performing financial transactions which should be private and confidential. Frankly speaking I think this is because we are not sensible to the privacy for the others.

(4) Litter anywhere, anytime

My foreign friends are usually stunned when they see kids or even adults throwing out rubbish from the moving cars. I had worse experience in my apartment when the lift floor is often filled with kids' urine. Due to the open design, the balcony at my apartment had always been a rubbish bin for the residents at the upper floors. Once there is even a dead rabbits thrown at my balcony. A few years ago, the Indonesia house maid used to curse when she had to clean up the balcony littered with dirty woman sanity bags. What an embarrassing and disgusting behaviors by some of the people around.

(5) "Last Minute" Behavior

It is not uncommon to see our renown "last-minute" behavior especially before the deadline such as 30th Apr every year for tax form submission or the year-end rush for claims. I had a bad experience in the last year-end for the dentist visit when many people rushed for dental visit at the year end to utilize the dental benefits from their companies. I had to queue for more than 5 hours for the service. A visitor, who brought his entire family for dental visit, told me that this is the 7th dentist he visited for the day as all the other dentists were filled with year-end appointments. Well, I am one of those with this "last-minute" syndrome.