It’s good to be a kaypoh nation

Asleep in car — by And­war

Ear­lier tonight we went out to Hol­land Vil­lage for a bite and to take a short break from work. At 11:45 p.m., park­ing wasn’t hard to find.

We parked next to a car that had its engine run­ning and its sole occu­pant motion­less in the driver’s seat. We didn’t think much of that and we went off to NYDC.

Fri­day night out at the vil­lage was some­thing we hadn’t expe­ri­enced for a long time, and I swear, peo­ple looked dif­fer­ent, and I think fash­ion trends must’ve changed a bit, because both of us felt a lit­tle out of place at this ‘young peo­ple cafe’, even though we were greeted by the famil­iar (and old) ‘NYDC cat’, who’s always at the doorstep of the cafe every time we walk past.

We sat amidst the din of many young peo­ple, and we ordered our drinks, and cake, see­ing as it is my birth­day. And then I took out my new Mac­Book Pro, hooked it up to the free wi-fi and started look­ing for bits of infor­ma­tion that might help the project we’re work­ing on, but the nois­i­ness of the place put paid to that.

Naomi grabbed a copy of IS Mag­a­zine and started look­ing through inter­est­ing stuff about our island’s night life and arts scene. She was done in about five min­utes, and at mid­night, I was very happy to have my wife kiss me and wish me happy birth­day, and we thought we’d spend the next half hour or so field­ing birth­day text mes­sages from friends and well-wishers. There were only three (and one of them was from Naomi), so that didn’t take us too long either.
Just as well, because as with most out­ings these days, we had to keep it short because of Naomi’s painful back. So we headed back to the car park, where the car with the run­ning engine and motion­less occu­pant was still there. The wind­screens were all fogged up, and we were a lit­tle con­cerned because it had been close to an hour since we’d left the car park.

“You think he’s ok?”, asked a very con­cerned Naomi, so I peered into the car just in time to see the occupant’s chin loll onto his chest, which moved in a way that resem­bled breathing.

“Yup, he’s alive”, I said, and we got into our car because, you know, we really didn’t want to be too kay­poh. And we don’t like kay­poh peo­ple, do we?

But some­thing stopped us from dri­ving off. Maybe it was the recent story about the taxi-driver who was found dead in a car park after many passers-by had thought he’d just been drunk and sleep­ing. So I got out of the car, looked into the win­dow, then decided to get back into our car, but we felt uneasy, and I got out again. Then in again, then out again, and in again until I thought, what the hell am I doing?

Then Naomi asked, “what the hell are you doing?”

So I got out of the car again and tapped on the run­ning engine car’s win­dow. There was no response, so I tapped harder. And some more, until I must have scared the bejeezus out of what we then knew as a sleep­ing man, who woke up and spent five sec­onds won­der­ing such per­ti­nent things like, “Whadda!…! Wha!” and “Whadda!”, before he found the but­ton to roll down the win­dow and ask me what I wanted.

“Are you ok?”, I asked, and patiently waited for his brain to reg­is­ter the ques­tion and for­mu­late an answer, which even­tu­ally came in the form of a puz­zled sound­ing, “ok, yah! I’m ok?”.

I then wanted to tell him, “You know, car­bon monox­ide is odour­less and poi­so­nous and car engines pro­duce a lot of that stuff which can get into the com­fort­ably air-conditioned cabin of a sta­tion­ary car”, but choco­late and cheese­cake and ice-cream makes your brain as fast as flow­ing molasses, so I merely said, “OK, you shouldn’t sleep inside your car so long, roll down your win­dows a bit”.

It’ll have taken a while for him to fall back asleep again, if that were his pur­pose. But Naomi and I were glad we did as much as we could with­out agi­tat­ing the sleep­ing man too much.

Of the many things I’m wish­ing on my birth­day, one of them is, please, don’t sleep in your car with the engine run­ning and the air-con on — it’s dan­ger­ous; and the other is, if you do see some­one motion­less in their car or any­where else in pub­lic, please, check on them to see if they’re ok.

I mean, if we’re kay­poh enough to be uncon­cerned that we’re caus­ing another traf­fic bot­tle­neck by slow­ing down to take a closer look at a traf­fic acci­dent in the next lane, we should be kay­poh enough to check on our fel­low cit­i­zens when it looks as though there’s a chance they’re in trou­ble and might need some assistance.

Embrace your inner kay­poh! You might save a life. Come to think of it, kay­pohness should be a civic duty.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Hol­land Vil­lage, kay­poh, NYDC, sin­ga­pore