SMRT Employee Jailed For Stealing S$2,250 From Pasir Ris Mrt Station To Fund His Wedding

You might be a cynical son of a gun who thinks weddings are just a scam created by the wedding industry to force people into debt by spending unnecessarily huge amounts of money with the whole purpose of pacifying the other people whom the wedding is not even about.

Or you might be in the majority and think weddings are somehow important. After all, an influencer couple paid S$9.8million for this shit, right?

Isn’t a Crazy Rich Asians style wedding basically what we all deserve to have?

If you’re actually logical, you’d know that your financial situation is such that taking on more debt for a wedding would ruin your life because you’ll continue with your married life heavily in debt and need to scrimp on your daily life.

But… if it’s not debt, how about crime then?

SMRT Employee Steals Cash

Mohamad Rashid Junaidi, 27, had been working as a customer service officer at Pasir Ris train station since 2016.

On 20 May 2019, Rashid reported for work as per normal and was alone at the centre.

And then at 1pm, he left the station and couldn’t be contacted again.

As it turns out, an assistant station manager found the cash register missing S$1,500. A piece of luggage that was found by a passenger and left at the service centre had US$500 (~S$690) and SAR$160 (~S$59.20) missing as well.

Unable to locate Rashid, the assistant station manager had to inform an SMRT service operations manager, who then lodged a police report.

Rashid was later arrested on 7 Jun, and then returned the money one day before pleading guilty.

The sentence was jail for two weeks for one count of theft.

And if you’d been paying attention to my rant in front, this theft was all…

…For His Wedding

Yep. For extra sympathy fuel, Rashid mentioned that he had to take care of his bedridden father, and asked the court to give just a warning or a fine.

In the first place, the sentence of two weeks was pretty lenient. Because he could be potentially jailed for up to three years, or fined, or both.

The prosecution also only asked for two weeks.

But This Isn’t The First Theft For Wedding Expenses

You really have to ask if S$2,250 was enough to risk getting fired and becoming a criminal. Assuming Rashid stopped going to work after the theft, how much salary was he really giving up?

You would also like to know this isn’t the first theft done in the name of wedding expenses. Just last month, a man who worked as a cleaner murdered his supervisor and stole her jewellery to fund his wedding.

You see why I made the rant in the beginning now?

Unpopular Opinion: If Someone Shits On The Floor…

Don’t just punch them in the face and force them to clean the shit.

Understand why they shit on the floor in the first place. Maybe it’s a really severe case of Irritable Bowel Syndrome! Maybe there’s someone feeding laxatives to people!

I’m certainly not saying that crimes should be forgiven. But expecting that punching people in the faces will somehow make Irritable Bowel Syndrome go away isn’t constructive in any sense.

I don’t know, maybe unrealistic expectations from society about weddings and income inequality is the real problem here.

Maybe one day, S$400 weddings will be so socially acceptable that people will stop writing articles on them.