Survey

Hi Friend,

This will only take a few minutes!

I am doing a thesis on the volume of emails going back and forth over the internet these days and you have been selected as a valuable contributor to the same. Specifically, I hope to obtain some insights on the nature of forwarded emails, their impact on the social, cultural and psychological aspects of human beings and a brief look at their cosmic future.

Please answer all the following questions truthfully. Your confidentiality will be completely safeguarded. We are only interested in the statistics and not the individual responses. Go in sequence... and don't peek!

1) On average, how often do you receive emails that are specifically addressed to you and contain plain text?

(A) Never, but I do love all the cool forwards I get :)
(B) Never, I don't have time for this kinda shit. I have a big backlog of emails to be forwarded within the next 7 minutes else my wish won't come true.
(C) Never, all my friends avoid me, I wonder why.
(D) All of the above.


2) What do you think when there is a forwarded mail in your inbox?

(A) Awww, there are so many people who care about me. I feel loooved. Let me pass on the bundle of joy.
(B) There are so many people I want to impress, so let me forward these jokes and they might just think I am smart.
(C) I don't think.
(D) All of the above.


3) What would you think if we told you that most of the forwarded emails asking for some sort of help are fake?
(A) Oh no! Are you serious? There goes all my social service down the drain! How am I going to face God when the time comes?
(B) That's impossible. They refer to really disastrous events like the WTC bombing or cancer! Now tell me if that's a coincidence.
(C) Refer to (C) of Qn-2.
(D) All of the above.


If you answered anything to any of these questions, you have a 100% probability of being stupid. But hey relax, you know how it works with probability. One can never be sure.

And guess what! Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction! You have just won a souvenir t-shirt custom-made for you at the White House. You may collect it when you go there for your next donation of brains.

Now forward this to....
....2 people and for every email, Red Cross will donate $1 to the tsunami victims in Somalia.
....5 people and you will lose 5 kgs of weight in the next 2 days.
....10 or more people and you will get a brand new working brain within the next 10 minutes.

Neki kar, dariya mein daal

It' s very difficult to not feel like telling your best friend about your 'neki'. You want him/her to appreciate you and say you are a wonderful person and all that. And although I know I should fight the temptation, yesterday was the first time I was actually able to convert that thought into reality. Now if I mention what I did, and somebody happens to read this, then the whole point of this entry is defeated. But I would certainly like to look back at this entry sometime and remember the incident with satisfaction. So I am going to leave little hints about it that will help me remember this years from now (I am very forgetful, in case you didn't know). There was a komalas meal waiting for me in 'chateau le fame' and I was rushing there in a cab. And later when it was all over, the cab driver was upset that I wasted my time on an ungrateful person. This was also the first time I said "ke yi" in a completely conversational way, it came out naturally in fact! Well, it may sound trivial to you, but it's a big step, trust me. When you are learning a language, the turning point is where you stop thinking of yourself as a foreigner and start responding to people in that language. For me, yesterday was such a turning point, and it was confirmed by the fact that I realized it only later. Life is good.

On company loyalty

The other day I was sitting in MOS burger and eating my.. what else, burger.. and guess what? In came 2 young people dressed in McDonald's staff uniform! Now why doesn't that suprise me? Well for starters, I guess they want to cut the calories, and I totally understand that after hearing of the movie "Upsize me" or something like that. But really, for Singapore, that is just a big hypocrisy that I have never understood. First they want to stay slim so they won't eat nice homemade sweets, but they will eat out 8 days a week and that too, deep Kentucky Fried Chicken. I just don't get it (This is my anger speaking for disregarding my mom's lovely homemade food). Anyway, back to the main point. So why were those people in MOS and didn't their employer disapprove?

I can't imagine doing that with my employer. If I were to walk around with a Nokia phone (I work with Motorola) I would get looks even from random strangers. In fact Nokia phone is almost an ice-breaker that causes these random strangers to just come up to me and say "Why are you using Nokia???? By the way, hello! I am so-and-so from who-the-hell-cares department"! Just like that, out of the blue. What am I supposed to do? I don't really owe any explanation to these guys, but I inevitably end up telling a sob story about how my earlier Motorola phone was lost and now I am using Nokia only until I buy a new Motorola. FYI, the story is true. But that's not the point. Why should I get all this, while the guys from McD apparently enjoy their after-work dinners in MOS everyday without any disturbance? Just because a mobile phone is 100s of times more valuable than a meal? Because losing one customer (read: hand-tied employee) means a bigger loss to the phone company than the food industry? And why do I have to bear the blunt for that? I have to spend 300 bucks just to have these strangers back off and take it easy on my privacy!

What if I just stop caring? Next time someone asks me, I will say "Hello! I am using Nokia because that's what I had before I joined Motorola, and I don't feel like spending an extra 300 bucks on something that I am not in need of. And as far as forcing Motorola on me is concerned, please get back to me once you have made Motorola fast enough to react to my key strokes within the same hour!"

So how? Will they fire me? Can they fire me? I am not really into the law n stuff, but if someone tells me you are fired for not using the company's products, I will have something to say. I am doing my job properly - well above "properly" in fact - I am doing the work at 1.5 years of experience that people 3 years into the job still don't do/can't do - I am effectively their bitch, because I am young, a bachelor, eager to make my mark in the industry. They can't fire me after all that! That's really company loyalty, if you ask me.

Someday I would like to debate this with my boss. Am I not afraid? Well, when 'someday' is the key word, there's really no need to get worked up. Meanwhile I have a good mind to go up to these McD employees and put them through the same scrutiny that I had to face! I even caught them on camera, in case someone's interested. How did I get my hands on a camera, you say? Sounds suspiciously made up for the sake of the story?? Well, hullo.. Motorola has camera phones remember?!!