Sunday, March 11, 2007

This thought just entered my head

I received a letter from Mr Liew Heng San. He is the current Chief Executive Officer of our Central Provident Fund Board.

It's about my NEW SINGAPORE SHARES. Exciting news. Receiving money is always good news. Free money that requires zero effort is better than good. It's gooder. Getting free money that requires zero effort is the goodest news ever!

I know I won't miss this piece of news. Because it came to me in four languages. English and Malay on one sheet and Chinese and Tamil on another sheet.

CPF has got it's own scholarship program. It's got a Work Improvement Team (WITs) program running. As well as a Staff Suggestion Scheme (SSS). But really I wonder why should I be getting two sheets of printed paper just to let me know that I have $X amount of money which will be credited into my default bank account by 15 April 2007?

Why can't CPF members decide a default language so that all correspondence be in that language? Maybe even have a "opt out" method of doing things like the Human Organ Transplant Act (HOTA) where members will get English and Chinese language correspondence unless you opt to have other languages like Malay, Arabic, Tamil, Sanskrit, Polish, Japanese, Chinese (the longform, as in how the Taiwanese and Hongkongers will write), Aramaic....

What this one time effort effectively does is to reduce the amount of paper used for this exercise by half. During the CPF top up in 2000/2001, there were more than 1.9 million Singaporeans who were eligible for the top up. I'm not sure how many Singaporeans received this notice about NEW SINGAPORE SHARES. Let's say it's also the same number that received the CPF top up.

So imagine the amount of paper saved. Almost a million sheets.

A standard ream of A4 paper packs about 500 sheets. That's about 5cm thick. A million sheets would be 2,000 reams worth. That's 10,000cm. Or a hundred metres.

I hope I am wrong somewhere along this thought.

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