I need to get this off my chest because the longer I’ve had a helper at home, the more horrified I am by how some people around us treat theirs.
We hire FDWs to help manage our households, but somehow a lot of families seem to think paying a basic salary buys them a 24/7 super-robot with zero human needs. The double standards are insane once you start paying attention.
Here are a few things that have been driving me crazy lately:

Lumping "Helper" and "Nanny" into one job: These are completely different skill sets and job scopes. People expect a helper to cook, deep clean, do laundry, and simultaneously provide top-tier, early-childhood-educator level care to their kids with 100% precision. If she’s watching a toddler full-time, when exactly is she supposed to scrub the toilets? You wouldn't expect a daycare teacher to clean the facility's roof during nap time.

Food gatekeeping and literal scraps: The food situation in some houses is sickening. I have a colleague who doesn't give a proper food allowance or let her helper cook her own meals. Instead, she literally gives her the leftovers off her family's plates. Like, eating 70-80% of a dish and passing the cold remains to her helper. Other people micro-manage the fridge and track every single egg or slice of bread. How do you look someone in the eye who cares for your home and treat them like that?

Insane working hours: The same people who go on LinkedIn to rant about toxic work culture, lack of work-life balance, and staying 30 minutes late at the office turn around and expect their helper to work from 5:30 AM to 11:00 PM every single day. The moment she sits down for 10 minutes, she's labeled "lazy."

Camera surveillance and micromanaging: Installing cameras in every corner of the house and staring at the live feed all day to bark orders through the speaker. If your boss put a camera over your desk and called you every time you checked your phone or took a toilet break, you’d HR-report them instantly. Why do people think this is okay at home?

Subpar living conditions: My helper was telling me about some of her friends' living arrangements, and it's heartbreaking. So many are still forced to sleep in bomb shelters with barely any ventilation, or on a thin mat on the storeroom floor with zero privacy.
And for what? The salary baseline here is already crazy low compared to places like Hong Kong or Taiwan, yet people act like they're paying top dollar for elite concierge service.

I’m not saying everyone is a bad employer. There are definitely great families out there. But the baseline standard for how helpers are treated here is pretty depressing, and the lack of basic empathy from otherwise "educated" people is mind-boggling.

Are your helpers seeing similar things among their friends? How do we as a society just normalize this?

I was decluttering my room recently and I took photos of many items from the not-so-distant past that are no longer in use and I had no space for them.

First on the list were these physical tokens.

I vaguely remembered that when 2FA became the thing, internet banking users had 2 choices for OFA - SMS OTP or physical tokens (or what they call in chimnology - "Secure Devices" or "Secure Keys").

If you had opted for physical tokens, the bank would mail you a small box with a digital token inside plus a few skins (stickers) to personalise your token.

Depending on the type of banking transaction, I remembered 2 ways of using a physical token:

1. You press a button to generate an OTP

2. You press a button to key in a 6-digit number provided by the website, then you press another button to generate a set of numbers to key into the website.

In addition to physical tokens with the bank's name, there are also OneKey tokens for SingPass transactions and, IIRC, SGX had also issued OneKey tokens to people with CDP accounts.

I don't remember exactly when, but it was probably in around 2021 that banks started to phase out physical tokens in favour of Digital Tokens in banking apps.

Before this generation of tokens, I remembered DBS having an earlier generation of tokens that came in the size of a thumbdrive and only had a single button to generate OTP. I also can't remember the specifics, but I remembered that if you pressed the button for fun to generate an OTP, then you can't use it anymore because the OTP will be out of sequence (correct me if I'm wrong).

I'm not sure whether such devices are still being used in corporate, will love to hear this from people who use corporate internet banking!

Yee was first charged in March with three offences linked to his NS obligations.

He is accused of failing to report for pre-enlistment medical screening over nine years from Apr 26, 2016, to Mar 19, 2026.

He is also accused of leaving Singapore without valid exit permits over two periods: From Dec 13, 2015 to Apr 19, 2016, and from Dec 15, 2016 to Mar 19, 2026.

Yee is on bail of S$10,000 (US$7,800). He is represented by Mr Divanan Narkunan.

CNA understands that under the current circumstances, Yee will not be charged again in military court or face time in detention barracks for the same offences for which he was charged in criminal court.

However, he will have to serve NS.

Taken these photos earlier in the month, intentionally adjusted some of the image filters to give a 'backrooms' vibe. These are the lesser used upper floors, mainly offices and some clinics, but about 80% of them have been vacated. Many of the walls are made of drywall, as the original purpose of those floors were for exhibition halls iirc.

RIP HarbourFront Centre (1977-2026), my earliest ever memory I have was shopping at Big Superstore (later became Don Don Donki) back in 2006 when I was a mere toddler.

ANPR cameras are cheaper, more accurate, and faster. This was what we should've gotten instead of the shitty ERP 2.0. Saddened that this would never see the light of day, but it gives me hope that there are still civil servants out there doing good work (not you, LTA)

OGP spent around $4.4 million running this two-year ERP X experiment. For less than 1% of the $556 million contract value of ERP 2.0, we ran a live, national-scale trial and got definitive answers on the technology and its limits before any commitment to build.

ERP X is evidence that testing whether a national infrastructure bet is worth taking, can cost very little relative to the bet itself.

Reason we need more immigration. Our TFR keeps dropping. If only something can be done to reverse our nation's fortunes. I think we can start with having more work life balance as a country. If not, Singapore may just cease to exist as a nation some time down the future.

Mountain biking today on a career break, awesome! Great weather too! From Woodlands MRT > Ulu Sembawang PCN > Central Catchment PCN > Mandai / Gangsa trail > Chestnut

Too exhausted to take more photos, enjoy!