Collin Ng's Blog

It is the last day of 2014 to a start of another year ahead.  It is a "ritual of sorts" for me to post my last thought for 2014 on the last day of 2014.  How did 2014 go for me?  For starter, the year did not augur well for the aviation industry, most particularly Malaysia Airlines when the world received a rude shock on hearing the missing MH plane in the early part of the year which has yet to be found.  The sombre mood worsened further when another MH plane crashed from the Ukraine internal war conflict some months later.  While the world has yet to fully recover from the double whammy, days before the year is over, AirAsia Indonesia plane crashed while enroute to Singapore from Surabaya.  Like many I do empathy for the affected families and hope they will recover from their grieves soon. On a personal note, I do find year 2014 not that bad a year for me though not fantastic to say the least.  However, I do get to know more nice people through th...

I joined the airport team of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines in 1985.  I was the latest recruit and was the youngest.  I was 23 then.  Aside from Simon Oh who is of the same birth year as me and he joined some months earlier, the rest of our colleagues are more than a decade older than us.  Added to that, they had already worked more than a decade with the company.  For some, two decades.  It was just a beginning for me.  If I can remember well, Simon was few days older than me.  We even share the same birthday month in February. He was a 'little feisty dragon' at work.  He has a fearsome Chinese name called Oh Kim Leng and in Hokkien, it means golden dragon. I remember Zohri who used to work as office messenger running errands.  He was later promoted to handle simple passenger service tasks.  Zohri spoke with a unique slang, almost like an ang moh but not exactly close.  I liked to call him 'Zorro'.  Yes, I was quite a rascal...

During my airport days, I used to have this colleague who will not hesitate to extend help to strangers in distress.  As far as I can remember, she is always overlooked by the management when it came to promotion or perk of sorts.  Perhaps, she was not the complaining sort and therefore, taken for granted by the management then. When I joined the company in the mid 80s, she had already spent more than a decade with the company but still stuck in the same position.  She is one who will not complain about too much work or went around gossiping.  Most of all, she will not pull rank to the junior just because she was more senior, rather the other way around is more true.  Quite frankly, I have never once witnessed her losing her cool while handling difficult passengers. Once there was this elderly lady passenger who missed the flight, had to stay in Singapore for few days and had no money on her.  My colleague could not bear to see her stranded high and dry...