Thursday, January 20, 2011

#2 Something unusual that happened that day: Glue

It is time for the second assignment post! This post requires an unusual thing that happened. I consider this a hard theme as not many chances in our daily life that something unusual is able to occur. However, it was very lucky for me to have something revolving around this theme to write about. As you can see, the title of my post is "Glue". What can we do with glue? Sniffing it? Obviously not! I am talking about super glue and other than helping us to paste things back together, it is hardly seen that we put super glue in the keyhole of letterboxes. You might be thinking who will do that, right? Let me tell you all about it!

(Photo: Self-taken)
As seen in the photo, it is the letterboxes of the block I am staying in. Just two days ago, around ten of the keyholes for the ten units had been glued using super glue. This prevented the owners, including my family, to retrieve the letters. At first, we found out that all the units which were glued were all within each other reach. All the affected neighbours did not know the reason why, but I later found out that there was someone in our block who had borrowed money from loan sharks. When I was young, one of the unit numbers was painted on the wall with "O$P$" just beside it. This was a history of someone owing the loan sharks money and we guessed that the loan sharks had come to create trouble again. Furthermore, we had checked the letterbox of the unit who owed the loan sharks money and his was also glued.

(Photo:Self taken)
(CCTV covering the area of the lift lobby and the staircase)
As I mentioned, loan sharks had come to our block to cause trouble before. I remembered once that they sent a envelope containing hell notes and a threatening letter. Coincidently, the Member of Parliament of our area, Mrs Josephine Teo came for house visiting before the loan sharks had come to glue the keyholes. My father related this problem of having loan sharks to create problems to her and suggest having a Close Circuit Television (CCTV) installed directly at the letterboxes, the lift lobby and the staircase. This will ensure that the faces of the loan sharks will be caught although they can escape if they came again.

However, when the loan sharks came and glued our keyholes of the letterboxes, we knew we had a chance to catch them as there was a CCTV facing at the letterboxes. Little did we know, it was only our dreams. We found out from the town council that the CCTV had not been working and the faces of the loan sharks were not captured in the recording. We were all very disappointed in the town council for such careless act.

(Photo:Self-taken)
(Photo of the wall after the CCTV had been removed)

As you can see from the pictures on the right, there are two holes drilled in the wall. This photo is taken after the CCTV had been taken down and up till today, a new CCTV has not been replaced.

This incident has also made us very busy. My mother had to wait downstairs for the postman to arrive, along with other neighbours. Not only that, the postman was very particular although we had explained the problem to him. All we needed was him to open up the letterbox from the back so that we could take our letters. He refused to and he wanted evidence that we stayed in this block. My mother showed him her Identification Card(IC), but he was still reluctant to open the letterboxes from the back for us. He wanted a police report! How unreasonable! Nevertheless, my mother and another neighbour went to make a police report at the police post just a block away so as to retrieve our letters.

I think this is an unusual encounter as we hardly could see what a loan shark had done to our letterboxes using super glue. Although my father had fixed the keyhole after that, I feel very livid about the loan sharks and I hope they will be caught sooner or later. Finally, let me end this post with a song targeted at the loan sharks! It is "Gonna Get Caught" by Demi Lovato and I hope the loan sharks are "Gonna Get Caught" soon!  

(Quote of the day: The only correct actions are those that demand no explanation and no apology -Red Auerbach)

       (Many thanks to YouTube uploader: izabella1992)

Posted by Yi Jie at 6:41 PM