Manners, Please!

First declaration to make here is that, I am fully aware that I neither possess most upright characters nor I am among highly well mannered ladies. However I still know where is the 'bottomest' line that I should never cross, inshaAllah.

I and my unit had a meeting with the Singapore MHI Sale Manager last week. The sale manager came to our office with the intention to introduce his company, and services that it offers. Since Malaysia has announced its plan to go for nuclear power, this sale manager specifically promoted the nuclear related equipment manufactured by MHI. Okay, a bit about MHI.

The abbreviation stands for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. It belongs to Mitsubishi Group, one of biggest conglomerate company in the world founded in Japan. For people in power plants, MHI is known as one of big OEMs. However, MHI also engages in various fields of expertise. The products and fields developed by MHI include aerospace structures,shipbuilding and marine sructure, forklift, general machinery,and of course,wide variety of power plant products(simple cycle turbines,wind turbines,diesel engine,etc). They also manufacture nuclear power equipments and they develop APR1000. APR1000 belongs to PWR type of reactor and PWR is the most commonly adopted nuclear reactor technology, followed by BWR. APR1000 is yet to be proven technology, but Mitsubishi has already developed PWR reactors which have proven safe and mature. In Malaysia, Tunku Jaafar Power Station Combined Cycle 2 (PD2) has its turbines manufactured by MHI. That`s about it on MHI background.

Coming back to the Sale Manager story. The guy is a Japanese.To my amazement, he speaks English very well, although he has been attached in Singapore less 2 years. From our discussion, he picks up the language very well because he was engaged with exports imports business prior to his current position as regional sale manager for MHI in Singapore. From my experience, most people from South Korean and Japan have low level of proficiency in English. However, this guy is different. At the beginning of his presentation, he made an honest confession to us that he comes from commercial background and thus he wasn`t going to talk much about technical issues since he has limited knowledge on that. He was really apologized for that.

And inside the meeting, we had another unit joining us. They came quite late and I guess these guys missed the confession moment from that Japanese guy. At the beginning of the presentation, he was explaining about the products quite well and smoothly. However, the guys who came late started to ask questions. At first, the Sale Manager managed to answer all questions, however as these guys went further questioning things that I think don`t even matter if they don`t have the answers, this Sale Manager looked panic and got messed up.You know, 'skema' Japanese guy when being attacked with questions he doesn`t know the answers, funny reactions started shown on his face.And of course, nonsense and very funny answers came out since he got messed up. Even though we all laughed and seemed to have fun, but deep in my heart, I felt very pity to him. I know how he felt. He must felt embarrassed for not being able to answer those questions since he has limited knowledge on technical issues. But hey, these guys didn`t stop there. They kept attacking and attacking him with questions even though I know they know that this guy might not have the answers and they themselves won`t die if they don`t get the answers. This time around, looked like they wanted to tease him, no longer did they want to know the answers.You know, the situation was like 4 people inside boxing tournament, with not 1 vs 1, rather, it was 3 vs 1 and this single guy was being punched and kicked till his last breath. Maybe i was too exaggerating, but that was what I felt the situation was.

At first, I was laughing with the rest as well when situation got funny. But when they didn`t stop the attack, I think thay have gone beyond the line. They have foregone the manners they supposed to have when meeting with guests,regardless of his religion, so long as he is not attacking muslims. As a Muslim, manners is important in any situation and Islam teaches us the most beautiful way in dealing with people. Inside the meeting, we have shown bad example of Muslim characters in front of this non Muslim guy. Even though he is Sale Manager and we, as a potential buyer,have all the rights to question his products, it should be done in a most gentle way, not in a rude way, let alone embarrassing this innocent guy.It is not right at all. This guy was not looking for fight, he was there just to introduce his business. And yet, they treated him like he was raging war. Really, I didn`t see any justification to react like that in front of this honest and humble guy.

And hey, we said we want to be arrogant...think again..If we study deep into Japanese life, their culture and development is way much much better than Malaysians, and yet we want to feel arrogant towards them? Owh Come on!!