I had a few incidents when I was in primary school, even after so many years, it always makes me laugh on how I made a fool of myself:
1. I remember when I was in standard one, I only did average in my study but I did get position 10 in the class, and a gift was given to me during the sport day prize giving ceremony. The gift was a brylcreem in soft transparent plastic tube. When one received a gift, he or she must accept it with both hand upright and then to bow one's head as a gesture of respect to the teacher handing out the gift. I did exactly as the protocol demanded, but then I was too short and when I bowed and my head knocked against the gift table. It drew a big laugh from the panel of the teachers sitting behind the table and I was deeply embarrassed by the event!
2. During the school holidays, I saw some of my friends who were doing a thriving business selling ice creams in the village. I always thought it was just an easy means of earning some extra income for my school expenditure. I asked around on the possibility of I myself getting involved in the same kind of business and they told me that I had to go to talk to the boss of the shop so as to allow me to sell his ice creams. The boss looked at me and said I was too young for the job, he doubted my ability to sell. And after some pestering and he was kind enough to let me giving it a try. The boss gave me a thermo-insulated container together with a ringing bell as tools for the ice creams business. A few friends of mine from the houses next door joined me for the job, and we walked around the more familiar places where we had our relatives and friends because they were our better chance and more likely potential customers. And we rang the bell as loud as we could as we walked through the lanes and paths of the village. After a hard day work, we ended up selling half the ice creams but we had eaten the other half at our own expense because of the tiresome walking and the hot weather, of course at a discounted price minus the profit!
This always taught me a lesson that things might seem easy when we see other people doing them, until we try that on our own, then only we realise it is not really that easy as we always thought!
3. This was not a very funny incident and it had taught me life-long lesson. During that time, it was common for village folks to gather some gunny sacks or just used flour sacks made from a very tough kind of cloth, together with some scooping tools and went to the tin mines nearby to scoop up some tin rich soils. Tin mines were dug by excavators and then high pressure jets were used to shoot at those ore bearing soils so as to be washed down and then sucked up by powerful pumps to the "Palong" where the heavier tin ores were deposited over an array of trapping troughs as the ore bearing soil flew over them. Near to the end of the "Palong", some of these sands still have some remnants of tin ores and therefore villagers usually salvage them. Occasionally they stole some from the nearby areas where tin ores rich bearing soils were only exposed and made available after great depth of layers of sand were dug out. It was not legal and outsiders were prohibited to enter the mine areas and usually guards were posted to safe guard from such petty theft of tin ore bearing soils.
I joined the group one day on this endeavour and the guard on duty was alerted and I was caught as I was the youngest and ran too slow while all the rest fled the area in no time. My mum "bailed" me out after negotiating with the mining "Kongsi" chief clerk because I was too young to be considered as an offender!
After that particular incident, I always bear in mind that I have to be very careful not to follow the crowd instint, doing what other guys are doing without considering the consequences.
A few years later, there was a case that involved the beating to death of a guard in one of the tin mines around that village. Greediness reared its ugly head and theft of tin ore became conspiracy of insiders and the smuggling out of tin ores from mines was rampant. Somehow when money was involved, sad to say, human life had become worthless to the perpetrators!
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