Category Archives: Rant

Rant

New Year’s Resolutions

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I am not one for New Year’s resolutions. Never made them. However, recently I have been quite unhappy with how some aspects of my life have been going. So I decided to make some changes. And now seems like a good time to start as any. So here are my New Year’s Resolutions for 2023. Nothing too ambitious

  1. I will try my best to cut down on my Anxiety medication. No set targets, no time bindings, will just do my best without being miserable and see how it goes.
  2. I will stop wasting money this year. I will spend money as much as I want, within my means, but will stop wasting like here and here. I have made a comprehensive list of the mistakes and lessons learnt from last year. I will also try to start saving some money. No set goals.
  3. I will not consume alcohol except when the occasion calls for it. Not mindlessly when I am getting bored and have nothing else to do.
  4. I will listen to music more. Will give new music a chance.
  5. I will shave my head for good once I get a SIM card replacement and spend 0 effort or money on my hair. Finished.
  6. I will take less sick leaves.
  7. I will be more grateful for what I have in life.
  8. I will cut toxic people out of my life.
  9. I will start reading books again. Again, no set target. Will read as much as I enjoy.
  10. I will lower my time on Social Networks – especially Quora and Reddit. Will replace the time mindlessly scrolling these apps with book reading. Will lower my screen time.
  11. I will close the rings on my watch at least 6 days a week. Will run at least 4 days a week.
  12. I will call my parents, especially my father more.

Let’s see how many I can actually go through with.

Rant

Creative Cannabis Stores

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It is somewhat shocking, the rate at which Cannabis stores have popped up in Bangkok, ever since the legalisation. Seemingly overnight. Suddenly I am surrounded by more Cannabis stores than 7 Elevens.

Below are some that I see on a regular basis that I found creative.

High Society Cannabis Club

This is the one closest to my home. This started out as a small nook above a donut shop, but they eventually bought the property next door for their own place.

High Society Cannabis Store
High Society Cannabis Store
High Society Cannabis Store
High Society Cannabis Store

Kush House

The first time I saw this place, I thought it was a play area for children. But no.

Kush House Cannabis Store
Kush House Cannabis Store

Green Day Dispensary

I see this every day on my way to office. I find the name funny

Green Day Dispensary
Green Day Dispensary

Happy Star CannaBistro

CannaBistro hahaha.

Happy Star CannaBistro
Happy Star CannaBistro

Mary Jane Cannabis Dispensary

Nothing special, just reminds me of my friend’s band in college.

Mary Jane Cannabis Dispensary
Mary Jane Cannabis Dispensary

Sukhumweed

Nice plan on the words Sukhumvit and Weed

Sukhumweed
Sukhumweed

Wonderland

This is my favourite. It has no pretensions about what it is selling. Everything is clearly labelled.

Wonder Land
Wonder Land

As per Google, there are 241 cannabis stores in Sukhumvit area alone. Thais are extremely shy about smoking up, so it remains to be seen how long all these stores last on expat business alone.

Rant

How to be an Assamese

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Following up on articles on how to be a Tamil, Gurgaon-ite and a Delhi-ite, this one is about how to be an Assamese. Information gleaned from observing many friends from that region.

  1. Wear a goatee.
  2. Listen to heavy metal music.
  3. If you can, grow long hair.
  4. Smoke weed all the time.
  5. Say “Maksudai” and “Kela” to address incidents you don’t agree with.
  6. Go to study engineering/architecture outside Assam and pick fights with groups of Biharis and UP bhaiyas.
  7. Pretend that famous people were born in Jorhat and try to convince people of the fact.
  8. Sleep at 3 AM and wake up close to noon.
  9. Talk to fellow Assamese in Assamese while people standing with you who don’t know the language look befuddled.
  10. Be obsessed with the flesh of pigs.
  11. Pronounce “ch” as “s”.
  12. Shoot water out of your mouth to impress girls.
  13. Look at Bangladeshi migrants with disgust and treat them as filth.
  14. Insult every other type of food except Assamese food.
  15. Relish pigeon meat.
Rant

Pathetic Fool-5

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Taking my series further global, here’s Pathetic Fool 5 from Malaysia.

Pathetic Fool 5
Pathetic Fool 5

I discovered this one at a Skybar in Kuala Lumpur. She brought with her a framed photo of herself and set it on the table before being seated. Throughout her dinner, she kept looking at her own photo and asked her lover to take pictures of her, with her framed photo.

I am not sure whether she was crazy or just vain.

Pathetic Fool 5
Pathetic Fool 5
Health & Fitness, Rant

Samitivej Hospital Loot

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Although, ever since my surgery, my sinusitis has been much better, it still flares up from time to time. In Bangkok, it has been more or less fine last 2 years. But last weekend, it suddenly flared up. I suffered from bad headaches for 2 days and couldn’t take it anymore. Normally, I know exactly which spray to use to relieve my symptoms, but in Bangkok, it is not available OTC. This meant, I needed to go to a doctor (hospital) for the medication. Normally I go to Bumrungrad for other ailments, but this time, in a bid to save money, I decided to go to Samitivej Sukhumvit Hospital. Big mistake!

I got an appointment soon enough and went to see the ENT. Didn’t have to wait too long, saw the doctor within 10 minutes. I explained to the doctor that I am a long time sufferer of sinusitis and informed her which medication generally relieves my symptoms.

She said straight away this doesn’t look like Sinusitis and sent me for a CT scan.

For a sinus headache.

Once the CT scan was done, she looked at the slide and said this is not Sinusitis and referred me to a Neurologist. I complained that I just need a steroid spray but she sent me for a neuro consult anyways.

The neurologist ran a battery of tests on me and told me I have a migraine. I told her I have no prior or family history of migraines but she prescribed me a bunch of medications anyways.

Then I was sent back to the ENT. By this time, the formal CT scan report had arrived and guess what it said – “Severe sinusitis”. The ENT asked me to take the migraine medications and on top of that prescribed me some sinusitis medication too. Including the spray I wanted. They also scheduled 2 follow up appointments, one with the ENT and one with the neurologist.

Eventually, I walked out of the hospital with 9 medications (out of which only 1 that I really needed). I paid THB 8500 for this farce of a treatment. The insurance only covered THB2000, so I ended up paying THB6500 from my own pocket.

Samitivej Loot

Chutiya Banaya

After coming home, I threw away 8 medications, used the spray and experienced relief within an hour. Then I slapped myself 21 times and swore never to go to Samitivej hospital again.

Hate, Rant

Grab sucks balls

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Continuing with my series of services sucking balls, the latest entry is about Grab, the South East Asian super-app.

Basically, this app is a notification spam machine. Below is a screenshot of notifications born from 1 ride I took. Let’s analyse them starting from the first one at the bottom.

Grab Notification Spam
Grab Notification Spam
  1. The first notification is about the money being on hold. Really why would I care?
  2. The second notification is about the driver being nearby. Sure, this is useful, but ideally, it should be withdrawn once the trip starts. Apps have the capability to withdraw notifications in iOS.
  3. The third one is undeniably spam.
  4. Oka, the fourth one is about money being charged and useful.
  5. The fifth one is also spam. I don’t want to know with each ride how many points I earned. If I want to know, I can check the app.

Speaking of the app, there’s a notifications section in it, which is 100% spam.

Grab sucks balls
Grab sucks balls

Unfortunately, unlike the other services, there’s no way to stay in Thailand and not use Grab. You need it to order food , order stuff from different stores (Okay, you can use FoodPanda for these 2 things, too) and get around. There’s no ride hailing company in Thailand that even comes close to Grab.

Just debating whether to turn off notifications altogether from the app.

Rant

Oh! How I regret getting an eSim!

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My friends know about my eSim suffering for quite some time, as I have been doing constant RR about it for months now. Still, I thought I should put my ordeal in words to document it for my future self.

Why eSIM?

The story starts some time in 2020. Me and the wife were living in India, happy with Jio SIM cards for our Indian numbers. Both numbers were registered under my name. Then we found out we were moving to Bangkok. I was not sure if I could get eSIMs for our Bangkok numbers and our phones could accept only 1 physical SIM card at a time. So I decided to convert our Jio SIM cards to eSIMs before going to Bangkok.

I regret doing that, to this day.

Turns out, it is ridiculously easy to get eSIMs in Bangkok. Never mind, no harm done. But then, I realised we could not buy new phones because the Indian eSIMs can not be transferred to new phones. Never mind, we don’t need new phones anytime soon. I thought I could convert back our SIMs to physical SIMs the next time I went to India. Then we would be free to buy new phones in Bangkok.

The Second Mistake

Then I went ahead and killed my wife’s phone (And the eSIM inside it) attempting underwater photography.

Not mine, PC: Reader’s Digest

We use our Indian phone numbers to authenticate Indian banking transactions and what not (Indian society is built on OTPs). It was imperative we replaced her SIM as soon as possible. Suddenly, the pressure to go to India and replace our SIMs was real and immediate.

The Process

The process is pretty straight forward. You walk in to a Jio store, the personnel use an app to do biometric verification and click a photo of you. Then the request is sent to a back-end team for verification and once approved, your new SIM is activated.

The (attempted) rectification

I booked the cheapest tickets possible and travelled to Kolkata within weeks. I thought it would be a simple transaction and I would soon return with physical SIMs for both our numbers. My wife would get her number back and I would be free to buy a new phone. How wrong I was.

After a sleepless night travelling, I woke up early morning to find a Jio store and request a SIM replacement. It took them only 20 minutes to issue me new physical SIMs for both our numbers and was told they would be activated within 4 hours. Happily I went on my way. Soon, the 4 hours were up and the physical SIMs were still not activated. So we went to the Jio store to follow up and were told the requests were rejected due to “photo mismatch”.

I was flabbergasted. The only reason I could think of was when I had bought these numbers, I had longer hair and now, I had recently shaved my head. Either ways, I begged the staff to do the process again. We waited half an hour and again – rejected. With time running out for my return flight, I dis-heartedly bought a new number for my wife and left India with my tail between my legs.

The Aftermath

My wife had to travel to India to change her phone number with government agencies and bank accounts. I still have an eSim for my India number. If my phone were to die tomorrow, I would have to go to India again with no guarantee that I would get a replacement SIM.

Also, I cannot buy the iPhone 14 Pro Max 512Gb Deep Purple that I so desperately want.

All because of one mistake. Fuck my Life!

PS: US eSim users don’t face these issues because in the US, eSims can be transferred freely between different phones using bluetooth.

Rant

No, Google really isn’t better

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As of writing this post, Google has a 91.46% market share in search engines. As such, I understand straight away that this post would be controversial; but hear (read) me out.

For the last 2 decades, I have regularly used bing as the search engine of choice. I don’t remember why I started using it, but it must have had something to do with my Microsoft ecosystem phase. Either ways, I did dabble with a few different search engines (Read: DuckDuckGo, Ecosia) for a while, but used Bing overwhelmingly.

Over these 2 decades, I got used to people ridiculing me for not using Google. Recently, I started to wonder what I was missing out on. So I decided to bite the bullet and see what I was missing out on. I decided to use Google exclusively for a few weeks.

I was overwhelmingly disappointed.

Google doesn’t respect Wikipedia

I am a big fan of Wikipedia and refer to its articles multiple times daily for reference. Google just doesn’t want to show me Wikipedia results, for whatever reason. Here’re the search results of a popular tourist place on Google vs Bing

Where’s Wikipedia?

Google takes up more than half of the page to show me news reports from Chiang Mai. Then it takes up space to show me useless questions about it. Only when I scroll to the second page to I see a Wikipedia article about it.

Bing, on the other hand shows me some ads, but the Wikipedia entry is right on the first page where I can see it. I love how Bing shows Wikipedia results at the top of most search results, exactly how I would want it.

Irrelevant Image Results

Let’s say I want to see photos of the scientist Werner Heisenberg. Here’re the image search results from Google and Bing

Irrelevant Search Results

Its because of irrelevant results like this that people end up embarrassing themselves this way.

Integration with Office Intranet

Bing has this nifty tab called “Work”.

Work Search Results

Clicking on it shows search results from the company’s own Intranet. I find this immensely helpful while using Bing at work.

Porn

I don’t think I need to share screenshots, but Bing is much better for this purpose, trust me.

Beautiful Images

Bing shows beautiful wallpapers on its homepage. Google has its doodles but I prefer Bing’s wallpapers. Although if you search directly from the address bar like me, you would miss it most of the times.

Overall, I don’t think I would be changing my default search engine any time soon.

Health & Fitness, Rant

Anxiety Medication Withdrawal Fail-2

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To continue the series of posts about my battle with anxiety, I bring the latest medication withdrawal fail story.

As I wrote here, after my last misadventure with SSRIs, I stopped taking them altogether. Since I felt fine for the next few weeks, I assumed that I don’t really need them and forgot all about them since.

PC: Verywellmind

However, ever so slowly, my anxiety started to creep up back on me. There weren’t any drastic symptoms. Just things like worrying too much about work, thinking about work at night or during weekends. Also, the ever present feeling of dread that something will eventually go wrong.

I was very proud of myself for having successfully(?) given up this medication and wanted to prevent another medication withdrawal fails. So I decided to continue without it.

After I spent 3 successive weekends obsessing over work and dreading Monday, I decided I would keep my mind open about resuming the medicine and gave myself 1 month to decide, till my next doctor appointment. I didn’t last 1 month.

Last weekend, after dreading work all Saturday and most of Sunday, I decided to give up and go back on the medication there and then. I called the hospital & requested to see the doctor the same day. Thankfully they were able to put me on the waiting list and I saw the doctor within the hour. He took pity on me and put me back on Lexapro.

After bagging the medication, I immediately felt better. The world looked brighter and life seemed more beautiful. Of course this was a placebo effect as the medication takes up to 2 weeks to work. Over the next day or so, the placebo effect wore off, but a week since starting the medication, I already feel better.

Second reminder to myself, to not mess with medication that work well.

Also, it’s not worth avoiding medication (and for what?) if it works for you and makes you feel better

Rant

LinkedIn is worse than Facebook

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LinkedIn is supposed to be a “professional network”. However, as you can see below, it is anything but. I have posted about it before, but now I will go into more details

People posting personal news/updates instead of Facebook/Instagram.

Linkedin sucks
Linkedin sucks

Twerps posting sob stories for sympathy.

Linkedin sucks

People posting inspirational quotes or unasked wisdom

Linkedin sucks
Linkedin sucks
Linkedin sucks
Linkedin sucks

1-click AI generated messages wishing people on their work anniversary.

Linkedin sucks
Linkedin sucks
Linkedin sucks

Peddling Religious shit

The worst kind, as per me. People who have taken a contract (theka) to share breaking news with the rest of the world.

Linkedin sucks
Linkedin sucks

I am not currently looking for a job, so I don’t need LinkedIn as such. However, deleting the account makes me feel insecure. As if that perfect job I always wanted will somehow evade me.

It is pathetic, however, to see that people don’t understand the difference between networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.