I traveled back to Malaysia from Australia to renew my passport, as I was told by the consular office that it would take over three month to have one done from an overseas office.

On Monday, I proudly arrived at the immigration office in Subang, 15 minutes before it opened at 8am. There was already a very long queue outside Terminal 2. Having not dealt with the immigration department for many years, I anticipated that the people must be queuing because they expect to be able to get whatever that needs to be done, done.

After two hours, I noticed that there was an elderly woman in a wheelchair and overheard the family saying that able-bodied or not, they have to queue up as they were told to do so when they appealed.

After four hours of queuing, we noticed that some people were leaving the queue and discovered that there were only a few more queue numbers left for the day. So more than 100 people, including me, who queued for more than four hours had to just quietly return without anything done.

The most unbelievable part of all this is that in the waiting area, a large poster in Bahasa proudly declared that "We will provide World Class Service from 2000".

Surely, the administrators know nothing about what it is to be world class. Please spare Malaysians the illusions of being world class. Let the foreigners believe it from the facade of Twin Towers and KLIA and other monumental objects. But let's be honest with ourselves and the

Malaysian people who are subjected to the abuses of the system.