BMC Presidential Inauguration - 6 January 2012

So after a long and arduous journey, resulting in many a broken wallet, exploding waistlines and the witnessing of much subterfuge, the club and its 6 esteemed members have finally concluded the race for the newly elected 2012 BMC president, and the winner is none other than …….. Jonathan CHOO Jon Neng, aka Juice or Merc E350. (But now demanding that he be referred to simply as Prezzie or if u must use an acronym, TKY)

And lo and behold, as with all good traditions, much like the significance of wearing the yellow jersey in Tour de France, or the smashing of a bottle of champagne at the launch of a ship, the party made its way to what is now legendary hallowed ground….. SKCR (pls see pic with the 2 goonsters who are respectively now club P and VP) for the inauguration.

As with tradition, and as a show of presidential magnanimity, all club members are allowed to eat their fill to their hearts content for all food items served not only at the SKCR stall but also from any stall in the Mei Chin Food Centre, save for one condition, which is there be no wastage of food ordered. Should there be any food left over, the person who made the order will have to pay for the order.

So being the hungry beasts that we all were, the orders were made fast and furious. But some mistakes were bound to be made, and Jason Lau aka Businessman, as usual had to order his carrot cake (its like a religion for him) and in addition, 2 bowls of fish ball soup (at the instigation of Maigai who agreed with Jason that there should be some soup) and was of course left having to eat up whatever he ordered since no one else wanted to help out, except for Maigai who sheepishly helped out with the soup but not the fish balls.

I then proceeded to order 2 whole chickens, 6 plates of rice (+ additional 2 bowls), 3 plates of vegetables, and a fried grouper from one of the other stalls as SKCR had ran out of Yu Sheng.

Having polished off the entire meal save for some scraps of carrot cake and the bulk of the fish balls (poor businessman had to pay…. in my view he definitely was NOT practicing our club motto of “avarus non bardus”), we proceeded to take a healthy stroll of no more than 20m to a cleaner table to have coffee and trash out the new terms and amendments to our club constitution as proposed by the new Prezzie.

To be fair, our newly elected President, Jon came fully prepared for his proposed amendments to be made towards the club constitution. Whilst not quite on par in insightfulness with Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, or as charismatic as Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, we were still all ears to what he had to say.

First off, Jon started off by clearing off all the easy amendments, which provoked no significant negative responses. These are that -

1.  All BMC Lunches aka BML (save for presidential winner’s address at SKCR) had to be in an air-conditioned location.

2.  The respective paymaster for the week is allowed to bring a friend, subject to the paymaster being responsible for his friend’s tab.

3.  That the presidential title will be held for a period of 1 year, and following this, the next election cycle will begin.

4.  That the minimum spending per session will be fixed regardless of how many members are in attendance.

5.  That the minimum spending will be changed to as follows: 

a.    Spending will be set at a minimum of EURO 30 per member.

b.   Since we have 6 members as of the date of this publication, the minimum spending is set at EURO 180 per BML session.

c.   Verification of minimum spending condition being met will be calculated based on the prevailing EUR/SGD FX rate on our I-phone Bloomberg app (or its equivalent) as at the point of payment.

d.    There is a dual level knock-out feature (personally I think this is rather daft, but I could not get a unanimous agreement from all other members to oppose this measure). Should the EUR/SGD trade above 2.50 or below 1.00, the minimum spending condition will lapse and we will collectively agree on a new formula.

6.   That should any of the overseas members of the BML club (namely the HK president, Gilbert Chong or Shanghai president, Oon Sheng Lung)  be present during our BML, that they be offered to join us for 1 sitting - gratis, and the minimum spending for that session be raised by an additional 30 Euros.

7. Every member will be allowed one free pass to postpone his BML session to another designated date, with no questions asked. However every subsequent postponement will be at a cost of 50 Euros each to be added to his BML session’s minimum spending criteria.

Having warmed up, Prezzie then moved on to the following more dicey amendments -

8. That Dann Sim will be the official driver for all BML sessions. Jon however (wanting to cultivate the aura of magnanimity) offered to be the club driver for 2 out of the 6 sessions, for which one will be to drive Dann when he is the paymaster (in order not to be in breach of the original constitution), and for a second session of Dann’s choice. This however had to be pre-determined as Jon is of the view that Dann being a flip flopper, (oh my car is being polished today so cannot drive / will have a meeting in Tuas at 11am so no time to reach back to get the car in time / I decided to take public transport today cos I wanted to check if Lui Tuck Yew is doing his job etc etc). And so, after nearly 2 weeks, and as at press time, Dann had yet to finalise which member he wanted to designate to Jon to do the driving for. (It was Veg, then became Collin and so on and so forth).. Should the designated driver not be able to provide his vehicle for whatever reason, the driver will then be responsible to provide in full the taxi service to and from the BML location for all members.

9. That Collin Cheong is designated as the official camera man and BMC blog manager. For this he will have to ensure that a fully functional minimum 10 mega pixel camera be present at every BML session (there were some rumblings in the background that the minimum should be a DSLR camera, but that was dropped). Using a camera phone was strictly unacceptable.

10. That I (the club vegetable), had to be the designated BMC writer except during the turn when I am paymaster where Maigai the club VP will be the writer.

11. That the blog must be updated regularly and as such Club cameraman will be given 48 hours from the date of the BML session to provide the photos to the Club writer who in turn will be given an additional 14 days to provide the finalized content back to the Club blog manager (in this case also the cameraman) for his uploading within a further 48 hours.

It was at this point that Dann Sim - looking dazed for quite a while (pls see pic) after having seemingly felt how the winds of change had short changed him, and that looking back he should have seriously considered fighting on for the presidential title with more vim, vigour and $$$ - suddenly saw and pounced on an opportunity to up the ante for the Club writer and cameraman. He requested that a penalty of Euro 50 be imposed should the deadlines for updating not be met. My response together with CC was just as swift and we pointed out that if the club driver failed to drive (which is very much in his control since he drives to work daily), the penalty of the taxi fare for all members would not amount to even SGD 50 to and fro let alone Euro 50. His proposal was thus spiteful and not in the spirit of our club culture. Eventually, it was decided that the penalty be set at 10 Euros.

12. That Maigai other than being the club VP (we did not touch on the possibility that if something calamitous happened to Jon, would that mean that MG is prezzie?) is also the official Club Entertainment Officer for the club, and will be the back-up for the Club cameraman and writer during either person’s absence. His rather light responsibilities was a result of him being a so called “worthy opponent” during the title challenge, which resulted in him holding the second highest BML bill on record and in actual fact the highest total spending throughout the title challenge period. (It was definitely not his original intention to spend the most and not be a prezzie. It’s just that I think MG’s overall planning is sloppy and his mathematics is not so good)

13. That Businessman aka Jason Lau will NOT be allowed to take a ride in either the E250 or E350, since the maximum allowable limit per car is 5 persons. He will be responsible solely for his own transport to and from the BML location for all 6 sessions.

Following this, we ended our inauguration and left as a party of 5 (Jason had to go find his way back as Jon said that the new rules were immediately in force). The total bill spent by Jon at  Mei Chin Food Centre amounted to just $100.10

By: Club Scribe