Famous Export of Kuala Lumpur? Jams

Oh No! This is a different kind of jams that you wouldn’t usually eat in a morning breakfast to fulfill your hunger needs after a good night sleep or even find it under some supermarket shelves. This is even better! You can experience it. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. That’s assuming that your office is located in the of the most hustling and bustling city of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur.

As a salarymen of corporate Malaysia, my main mode of transportation is by driving to work due to the inadequate public transport system. I have good faith that once the MRT and LRT extensions comes online it can help ease the traffic congestion within the city center.

Getting back on topic, on average I would spend 2 hours sitting in a metal box contraption with 4 wheels rolling to work. Thank goodness they invented air conditional! It would be hard to imagine to be stuck in a jam with out it. Just imagine the misery everyone would have felt.

Well, my office is located near 1Utama Shopping Mall while I live in Cheras and I don’t look forward on commuting to work everyday with my mind thinking it’s time to get stuck in the road again.

Having 2 hours wasted to being stuck in commuting is ridiculous. I can do a lots in 2 hours ( 120 minutes ). Let me list some of the things down.

  1. I can watch 5 anime episode non-stop. Assuming each episode have a run-time of 24 minutes.
  2. I can read close to 100 pages in a book.
  3. I can watch 1 movie.
  4. Hangout with friends or family.
  5. Write some useful code to an open source project or my own apps.
  6. Let loose myself to play the latest and greatest RTS or FPS games

The list goes on.

Thanks to the flexibility of my workplace I can come in a little bit later. Sometimes If I am lucky and the traffic decided to be good, I can arrive to office in just 30 minutes top. However, going home is another story all together. I need to read the tea leaves, feel the wind’s speed and pray hard before leaving office. It could take somewhere up to an hour or an hour and a half just to get home!

It gets even worst if it is on Friday. If you decided to leave at says 5.30 PM then it will set you back 2 hours or more to get home. If it was raining beforehand or just started to. You can get a bonus of additional 1 hour added to your original time limit. Congrats! Now you might need 2 and a half or 3 hours just to reach home.

Remedy

What I usually do is to listen to podcast, radio or use the time for introspection. The first 2 activities won’t take up much mental faculty unless you are doing some introspection. I would recommend to avoid scrolling any social media app or learning a new language as it can quickly suck your willpower dry before you reach the office. You need those limited willpower to make decision while you are working.

Driving in a traffic congestion is a very draining experience. So, don’t add more workload to your brain. You would like to think that you can multitask but it comes with a cost due to you switching context frequently between activities.

In conclusion, when the Bandar Utama MRT station start to function which is just in-front of 1Utama Shopping Mall I can maybe use it for daily mode of transportation. I guess the only thing that changes would be my monthly allowance for Tollgates will be shifted to getting a monthly MRT pass. I am looking forward freeing myself to doing other things on the train.

Photo Source: Pexels

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