New Hawker Centre Chair Allegedly Slipped & Injured Elderly; Town Council Investigating

GPGT apparently stands for “Got Picture Got Talk” and it is apparently a thing on the Internet.

The latest GPGT to hit us comes from popular layman forum, HardwareZone (HWZ), and it can be found under the thread “Newly renovated Teck Ghee Hawker centre Stool’s seat fall off and injured elderly.”

A Picture Paints a Thousand Words

If you can’t tell, the thread is basically about an elderly man who was purportedly injured at Teck Ghee Hawker Centre after falling off a stool.

The kicker is that Teck Ghee Hawker Centre had apparently just undergone a two months renovation and was only reopened for a grand total of two days before mishap struck.

Here’s the image that puts the [Pi]cture into GPGT.

The image also appears to have been taken off a Facebook user, Tan Paul’s post, which at point of writing had more than 70 comments and 516 shares.

He had captioned the post “After 2mths of renovation, juz 2days, tis is Wat happen, tis pity old man fall off frm e chair!!“.

What Happened?

From the looks of it, the collage consists of two images with one depicting a fallen and elderly-looking man on the floor and someone attending to him, and the other, a close-up of the stool.

Some spots of blood appear to have also stained the ground near the elderly man, while the second image shows a close-up of the base of the fallen stool and the underside of the stool itself, which appear to have dry glue residue on them.

A third image shows the location of the incident.

What We Know will Happen, Of Course

Being the sort of apolitical, neutral, transparent and sensible discussion ground HWZ is known to be, a colourful discussion of the incident quickly ensued.

There were those who were obviously good at geography

And some who were well-versed in Sarcasm with the capital S for Singapore

Some (but rare) showed genuine care for the elderly man

While the word “glue” appeared many times

Naturally, quite a few pointed their fingers and wagged their tongues at the construction companies responsible for the overhaul

While a picture paints a thousand words indeed, none of them came creatively close to the actual words asserted by netizens.

Town Council Has Responded

As usual, the trusty Mothership sailed with more information.

Apparently, Ang Mo Kio Town Council were alerted to the incident and the contractor is currently working to re-check all tables and chairs. Here’s the statement in full:

Ang Mo Kio Town Council was alerted to this incident late last evening. We have not been able to establish the identity of the elderly man but we are doing all we can to reach out to his family members.

All our chairs at the hawker centre have to meet standard safety requirements. We are currently re-checking all the tables and chairs to ensure that they are properly secured. The seats are secured to the metal base using a screw as well as ‘Max Bond’ glue. The contractor has been mobilised on site to rectify and ensure that the table and chairs are secured. They will do so by today. There are close to 600 chairs in this hawker centre.

We are conducting a full investigation into this incident.