Dark Age

On almost every Wednesday without fail, some people will receive an sms from me saying something to the meaning of "Wednesgay lunch, 1230 @ XXXX". Yes it's a deliberate misnomer, and I did it tongue-in-cheek because, oh nevermind.

It's a ritual I look forward to since I can count on a lunch where business is discussed in minimum. Trust me it's hard to get that kind of lunch when you work in the financial industry. This rate that sanction this bill that line this limit that wanker, you know the drill. Je deteste.

Of course what gathering like that won't invoke the old stories told to death many times (so much so that people who hang around us bunch a lot can tell the story themselves!). So today's lunch session was no different. We retold stories and jogged each others mind for the nitty gritty details of those days. Today's predominant topic was what happened to us during Dark Age.

Our Dark Age, or Zaman Jahiliyah to most meant Form 2. Secluded in New Hostel with only 6 prefects to watch over us and largely no warden supervision. We went apeshit to say the least.

I was in Dorm IT (beats me what does IT stand for, since the other dorms are named numerically), popularly known as Dorm Budak Jahat. Needless to say, I was shocked to learn I've been thrown in that dorm instead of the goodie two shoes dorms that I belong to. Hey, no sniggering! But then I had to blend in the crowd, so to speak...

Some of the things us Dorm IT folks did:
- play hockey, rugby, volleyball, footie, basketball, squash and tennis. Yeah, inside the small space of circa 25x30 feet, inclusive 7 double decker beds and 14 wooden lockers). Cue many broken window panes, lockers and shitloads of bruises and cuts. Kids are crazy.

- the dorm used to have 9 double deckers, but we send 2 of them crashing from our 2nd floor corridor. Reason? Because we can't find a better solution to remove those empty beds so that we can play all of the above. We also have an extra locker that initially served the purpose of holding the brooms and dustpan et cetera. Pretty soon it became the place we practiced our 'karate' skills. It did not last long, that locker.

- created a 'secret passageway' to facilitate movement after lights off. We simply used the space between the ceiling and the roof! We had 1 or 2 cases of people misstepping (you have to step on the wooden beams, not the soft asbestos(?) ceiling) and fell right through. Others just poked a hole here and there with their feet.

- have gigs using Gaban's top of the range walkman and someone's PC speaker (an arrangement we used until Form 5), headbanging to the likes of Green Day's Nimrod, The Offspring's Ixnay On The Hombre, Goldfinger, Rancid, Bad Religion et al. We were into punk back then, and the KL folks would feed our appetite for the best punk music available at the time. Ohh, Korn and Metallica was also included in the playlist at times. And of course, Butterfingers!

- organize outside food orders from the Rahmaniah restaurant just across the road from our farthest corner of school fencing. No phones needed, we only need a lookout and someone to to yell out "Rahmaniah!!!" until someone came over and took our order. The downside was that we can only yell when there's a car passing so that the prefects don't hear us. It also meant that Rahmaniah folks too can't hear us. Hoarse voice was the order of the day, but what wouldn't we do to get a decent nasi goreng ayam and fresh orange back then?

- fool around with a bottle of aerosol and lighter. It was fun to watch Tuah blowing those flames like it was a KRU concert (they were kinda cool then, and don't pretend you never liked their old songs!), but it was much more fun to see Tuah coming back to the dorm after getting caught by a prefect. Said prefect simply took those apparatus from him and blew a flame at Tuah, resulting in burnt eyebrows and singed hair. Tuah minus right eyebrow = funny as hell. Tough love indeed.

- Gets beaten up quite a lot by the seniors due to our behaviour. Some more than others naturally, but I think we all got our share in the end.

Before you panic and start thinking about yanking your kid (or future kid) off boarding school altogether, consider this next fact. That crazy bunch now are bankers, engineers (8 of us have engineering degrees from all over the world, imagine that), a pilot, a consultant and other assorted professions. We all turned out alright, even though people have written off some of us as hopeless back then.

Who would've thought, huh? So next week, anymore takers? Tak pakai tie kena bayar lunch!