Incoming Rant Alert.
Finally am able to collect all my thoughts and calm myself down from all the anxiety and stress while going through the biggest moment in my life. But before I begin, I’ll start with thanking our brothers and sisters for doing your best to calm us down as emotions were running extremely high on that day due to all the unnecessary stress and delays caused by the roadblocks for Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon.
Over the last few days, there were already plenty of posts, comments and articles that spoke about how badly executed the event was, so I shall not add on to the comments as I think those posts and articles covered it way better than how I could possibly comment about it.
The objective of this post is more to share about the sort of mental trauma my wife and I experienced (and probably the other couples that got married during the same Saturday in the vicinity). FYI: 30 November 2019 happens to be an extremely good date to be married (for Chinese), based on the feedback given by various hotel management that the demand for that particular weekend is unusually high.
Imagine the following issues that were caused by the marathon roadblocks:
– Only 10-20% of guests managed to reach on time at 7PM
– No alternative route are being updated to hotel. As such when our guests called the hotel for help, the hotel staff couldn’t point them the right way.
– Traffic marshals had no idea what was going on, and was routing our guests all around the area without giving them actual directions to locations
– All my vendors couldn’t arrive in time to do any form of set-up for the wedding, they were to arrive at 4:45PM, but reached at 6:45PM.
– My parents (THE GROOM’S PARENTS) were stuck in the traffic for 3 HOURS. THREE FRIGGIN HOURS.
– One of my uncles and his family, had to miss my wedding as he was stuck in traffic and the traffic wasn’t moving at all.
– All my guests that arrived, had to rush into the venue, feel apologetic for something that was not their fault.
– Looking at my wife cry due to the disappointment that she wasn’t able to pull of everything she planned for over the last 12 months, just 1 hour before the wedding and there’s nothing I can do apart from consoling her.
Just take the above in, put yourselves in the shoes of the bride, groom, and families involved. The sense of helplessness, in an event that took months to plan and readying for, only to be undone by something totally out of your control.
And with this whole issue blowing out of proportion, I can’t help but to notice zero news coverage on Mainstream media (The Straits Times, CNA, etc) for this major fk-up by our “beloved” Land Transport Authority – We Keep Your World Moving (<< the irony) or whoever that decided and approved the decision to close the roads on such a major weekend, with U2 Concert, Anime Festival Asia, Flower Dome having their Christmas Wonderland, on top of the other weddings and that marathon that caused all these.
I do not even know if any sort of compensation, public apology or even kowtowing from you to the people affected, can undo the sort of damage you done to everyone affected; the couples like us, the people that needed urgent healthcare on route to Raffles Hospital, people who were on the way to airports, or other important occasions in different parts of Singapore, people who are heading to work, the businesses that were affected.
I hope that a full in-depth internal review and explanation could be given to the public on as to why such situation was allowed to happen.
Lastly, I apologise for my long rant and any offense I may cause to anyone, and to my guests that attended my wedding despite the crazy traffic, I cannot thank you enough. I just hope as time goes, my wife, our families and I will be able to heal through the sort of damage this event has put us through.
P.S. I do not think Standard Chartered were to be blamed for this, since they are just title sponsors and do not deserved to be dragged in the mud for this.