Scramble

The online puzzle game Scramble has addicted my mind to its fun with alphabets for quite a while. Every now and then I find myself carried away by this remarkable word game, in which we line up the scrambled letters to from a new word.

Although chances are that I am killing time by juggling with the alphabets, there are occasionally good lessons to learn. Trust me, the word game sparkles with amusing examples of life lesson. Think of the word "trust", and drop the letter t – alas, trust without the t is rust.

It may seem odd to most of us, but in reality we get tempted to ride the roughshod over the feelings of other, getting our own way, finding fault, without even considering the treading upon the other people's pride. All these serve no better purpose than rusting the trust.

Building trust is somewhat difficult, but losing it is simply a piece of cake. When the issue of referring sick patients to the intensive care unit was raised in my hospital this week, for instance, a Pandora's box has been opened. For years, referral of patients was made on the basis of mutual trust. If one is to make a new proposal that intensive care unit referral should only be made by senior consultants – but not the frontline medical doctors caring the sick patients – you can imagine the consequence of this move.

Do I smell a rusty box?