Thursday, June 12, 2008

Construction Industry is Down

The Malaysian construction industry seems to have grinded to a halt! Looks like, the steep fuel price hike by the Government have sent the economy in the coma. I am no economist but I truly think the hike was at the wrong time and just too high. Wouldn’t a gradual increase be better?

No use being depressed, as this will take a toll on one’s health (trust me) and its’ definitely not the right time to add hospital expenses to my dwindling income. So cheer up and smile. In fact I asked a friend recently, why he was smiling. His answer, “The smile is holding back the tears”. So now I have a stupid crooked smile plastered across my face!

I read somewhere to always look for the good or positive aspects for any situation. So what can we do? For me, I have made up the followings things to do :

1) Improve Engineering software – As a structural steel engineer I have lots of spread sheet software that I have written over the years. Now is the ideal time to improve on it. For example, add details or sketches, so that the output is more comprehensive (actually, hope it looks more impressive ha! ha!).

2) Improve Marketing. A major part of my job is looking at drawings and seeing whether I can reduce the cost of steel/building. Based on 20 years in this line, I can safely say that. the cost of over 90% of steel buildings/structures can be reduced, anything from 5% to 40%. This is specially applicable the present, as soaring material cost, have driven most projects above their budget. Unfortunately, I am not very good at marketing my services (which accounts for my old beat up car).

3) Be kind (Non Engineering). Although I did not feel like eating anything tonight, I still went out to the coffee shop and ordered a bowl of noodles. May not be much, but the old lady selling the noodles seem quite happy to see me, maybe because most of her customers seemed to have disappeared since the price hike.

So that’s what I planned to do. Any other ideas or comments will be much appreciated. Bye for now and take care.

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