13:52 by FoxTwo
Quirky Singaporeans - Kiam Ganas
Today's rant is partly inspired by a plurk thread here by XinYun. She was talking about calculative people who whine about being shortchanged (or being asked to pay more) a couple of dollars. Yeah these people probably scored distinctions in maths back in school.
In the plurk thread, xinyun was complaining about people who whine about having to pay $2 more than they originally calculated. However I'm going to rant about a few other kinds of people.
First off - those "call me back" people. In Singapore, all 3 mobile phone providers offer post-paid plans which include free incoming calls all day (yes I believe it's unique only to Singapore, or at least, this region of the world). In other words, you pay NOTHING when people call you on the mobile phone. So, they get the cheapest plan available, which may offer nothing more than 50 to 100 minutes worth of "free" outgoing calls.
Now, what irritates me is not really that they call me and tell me to call them back. Well it does irk me a little though. Come on, everybody has free incoming calls. Why should I not enjoy the free incoming calls?
What really irritates me is that these people REFUSE to call out to vendors or support personnel when the shit really hit the fan and we need network/tech/whatever guys onsite NOW. All they do is send SMSes and then they complain about how slow the response to their SMSes are. These guys also refuse to let the company "pay" for the bills because that would mean that now they are supposed to be "available 24 hours a day".
Sorry to break it to you guys, but IT people are, by default, on call 24 hours a day. With or without company paying for the bills. Just because it doesn't happen very often in this company doesn't mean it will never happen, or that if things really get bad, that you won't be called back.
Then there are even those even more extreme people. They charge their phones (and PDAs and MP3 players et al) using company electricity. "Why should I charge at home when charging at company means it's free for me?"
These are also the same people that will complain that the plate of chicken rice costs $3.50 in the city because it's supposed to cost only $2.50 back in the heartlands. By the gods, it's only $1 difference! Whatever you do, don't invite these kind of people out to a group function or something. They will whine about the cost of the bill and will squabble about even the cents portion of the bill.
Which reminds me of a particular incident which happened pretty recently. Something needed to be done on a server offsite, and we didn't have the right parts. We called back to HQ and the guy that answered the call was one of these kiam ganas. When we told him that it was pretty urgent, please take a taxi down, he said no. He would need to submit an expense claim, and it would take a couple of weeks to be processed and reimbursed. Thus, he will take a bus instead because it's cheaper than MRT.
After much cajoling, we told him we will pay for his taxi fare and we'll submit an expense claim for it later, that he agreed to take a taxi down to deliver the item. When he did arrive, the first thing he asked for was the money for his taxi fare, before even handing us the item we needed to fix the problem!
Labels: quirks, Rant, Singapore, Singaporeans
13:11 by FoxTwo
Those Irritating Telemarketers
I was woken up today by a pretty interesting, if not irritating, telemarketer. Lord knows what she's selling, but she prattled on like a machinegun and I swear she never stopped to breathe.... not even once!
You know the type, I'm sure. They never asked if it's a "convenient time" to speak to you. They just ask for your name, then they introduce themselves (nobody ever bothers to remember their names 99% of the time anyway), then they launch into their sales pitch.
From what I can gather (remember, I got woken up by the call), they're peddling some home theatre system do-hickey, and it's supposed to be FREE. Yes, the word "Free" was thrown about very freely in the entire conversation. Remember, she didn't stop to breathe, so that's a lot of "free" words thrown inside.
Then, when she finished her scripted sales pitch, I could finally say "thanks but not interested". The next thing she said was "why? what is the reason? it's free!"
Why? Cuz I'm not interested!
So I asked her back "When you see a dress and then you don't like it, and even if it's free, would you take it?" she said "no". So I said "what's the reason?"
She said "Don't like lor"
My reply - "EXACTLY".
Good thing she gave up. Or else I'd have given her a runaround. After all I'm jobless and I have alot of time to play with people like that hahahah!
Note to all telemarketers out there - PAUSE once in a while. Don't launch into a sales pitch. TALK to the potential customer. Once you start launching into a sales pitch it turns people off almost immediately. As soon as you stop to breathe, the prospect will, 99% of the time, tell you "not interested". Some won't even wait for you to breathe. They'll cut you off mid-sentence.
Labels: quirks, random, Singapore, Singaporeans
15:45 by FoxTwo ... I'm sick of hearing about the escaped Limping Terrorist on the different blogs out there. Also, stop with Edison Chen already, ok? Pictures were leaked, people saw, people have already said whatever they want to say.
So, I hereby change the topic to something totally different.
Ok what's the point then? The point is about the way Singaporeans use English. This time, I'm not going to nit-pick on the spoken version. Instead I'm going to ramble about the written variety.
What triggered this off was that I was told to sign a prepared letter for my impending "ROD", ie end of contract and to officially state my intention not to renew the contract.
After reading just past the "Dear Sir/Madam" part, I gawked.
The very next line was "I hereby tender my....."
First of all, I am no royalty. I am not the President, I am not a commander of any large armed force. I am in no position to make any proclamations. Yes dear readers, "HEREBY" is used by people in positions of authority to issue commands or proclamations. I see so many people writing official company letters using all these weird phrases that should not be used.
Like writing a cover letter for a resume. "I hereby enclose my resume for your perusal"? Gawds. If I were the HR Manager, this guy automatically gets disqualified, without needing to read more.
On a related note, another common mistake I see in written communications is the phrase "cope up with", especially when relating to work or stress. You can only "cope with". However, you "catch up with" things or people though. Yeah I know, English is weird.
Then there's another one - "vent out your frustrations". When you vent, you're already letting everything OUT. So you "vent your frustrations", the "out" is already implied. If you want to "vent out", you're redundant :)
Ok back to the prepared letter I was told to sign this morning. Further along the same line as the "hereby" one, it says "... giving one month notice....".
I paused.
Hey man, I'm serving out my full contract man. I am not "resigning". You guys should know when my contract ends, don't you? Since you're my employer? What, you don't know? So how come you knew when to renew my contract last year without needing a letter?
Further along, the letter ends with "Yours Sincerely,"
I shook my head.
When you're writing official letters, it's "Yours faithfully," and the 2nd word must be in SMALL letters.
Needless to say, I didn't sign the letter. I threw it back to them and told them I didn't understand what they are trying to make me say (by signing it). I will only sign the next "prepared letter" if they get everything right.
They'd better hire a better secretary soon. Daphne might be a good candidate. Too bad she's already got a job.
Labels: quirks, Rant, Singaporeans
14:19 by FoxTwo Ok so I'm gonna get a little picky today.
Sometimes, it just irks me so much that Singaporeans, majority of which are "educated" with English as the first language, can still write and speak so differently.
A long time ago, I wrote this. In a sense, this post is like a "followup" of that entry.
So what has this got to do with the post title?
Well, it's how many Singaporeans pronounce "owe". Yeah I know it's weird, there's no N in the word "owe" yet many people say "own" instead of "owe". Saying "own" to an American is actually to tell him you beat him hands-down at something. This phrase "You got owned!" is very familiar in gaming circles. As a side-note, the phrase recently changed to "You got pwned!", thanks to a popular spelling mistake by Blizzard in the game Warcraft circa 1998 or so.
I had a discussion about this with a friend some time back about Singaporeans and the pronunciation of words. She said, a large portion of the human race is mostly visual, hence they see a word and memorise its pronunciation, instead of using phonetics on the words. It's fine to mispronounce "Lavender" as "lah-ven-der" instead of "laven-der", but saying "own" instead of "owe" is almost hilarious.
This is especially so for Chinese, since the native language is pictorial in nature. People see a Chinese word, and memorise it. Hence, they apply the same principles to the English language. Hence, words like "spanner" is still being pronounced as "spunnah".
Very few people I know pronounce words phonetically. For people like me, I normally don't stumble when I come across a long word which I've not seen before. I just break it down into its phonetic components and pronounce it. Of course, the English language has its own quirks too, like "sabre" is pronounced "say-ber" but "genre" is pronounced "jon-rer". I will always remember and laugh at an incident my drinking buddy told me that happened to him in secondary school.
He said, once he was asked to read a passage by the teacher. Like me, he's a phonetic speller and reader. He came across the word "quay" and pronounced it "kway". When the teacher corrected him, he argued that if it's supposed to be pronounced as "key" then they should have spelt it K-E-Y. LOL! At least the Americans got it right - they called the place "Florida KEYS" and not "Florida QUAYS", in my opinion anyway.
If you've always struggled with the English language, and one of your weaker points is spelling words, I've just given you a clue to help you - learn phonetics. When I was a schoolkid, I prided myself in knowing how to spell words that I've never even seen before, by just listening to how it's pronounced.
That is also my Archille's Heel in the Chinese language too - you cannot apply phonetics to Chinese. For example, nobody could explain to me why "mouth" (口 pronounced as "kou") and "ten" (十 pronounced as "shi") becomes a "field" (田 pronounced as "tian"). Why can't the pronounciation be something like a combination of "kou" and "shi" and end up with something like "kosh"? Yup, you guessed it, I suck at Chinese.
And please, it's "oh" and not "own", ok?
Labels: quirks, random, Rant, Singaporeans
10:10 by FoxTwo Long time ago, some bright spark thought that putting a "mobile TV" on buses would be a neat idea. At the time, the TV had no sound, but advised people to tune to FM89.3 to listen to the audio from the TV.
And it was good. WAS.
Later on, either the same bright spark, or another one, thought that putting speakers into the buses was a good idea, cos "not everybody will have a radio on the bus". Duh! Nowadays you'd be hard-pressed to find a handphone that doesn't have FM Radio as one of its functions, just like you'd hardly be able to find a handphone without a camera.
Then, the explosion of iPods and Zens came. It was cool, it replaced the aging "walkman" and "discman" sets out there. What's not so good is that the bright sparks at the respective companies thought that "music should be shared" and made bloody mini speakers for the devices, and turning it into a "fashion accessory". In one fell swoop, they completely undid the good community service that Sony spent 20 years cultivating - listen to your music with EARPHONES!
Someone should glue those speakers to the bright spark who thought this up and blast the music from the iPod or Zen into their ears at full volume. After all, this is what's happening on our buses and trains now. Stupid teenagers blasting their "music", so kindly "sharing" it with everyone in the bus. Sometimes, I feel like taking out my Teochew Opera MP3s and blasting it back at them.
No I don't like opera. I don't even understand 'em, and I'm Teochew myself. I just converted a couple of my mom's Teochew Opera cassette tapes into MP3s for this purpose, although I haven't actually blasted them yet. I had been controlling myself thus far.
However, this morning really pushed me almost to the edge of me taking out my Teochew Opera and blasting it. The bloody schoolkid was sitting in the middle of the bus and blasting some heavy metal rock music or something (I dunno, since I can't understand a word of whatever the singer was screaming). Besides, his speakers sucked, and the music was highly distorted. He should get better speakers maybe, and perhaps his music might sound better.
As a side note - all your karaoke singers, take note. Singing louder does NOT make you sound better ok? Same goes for sucky music. Making it louder does NOT make it better. It just gives people a headache.
If any bright sparks from iPod or Creative is reading this, please, go smack yourselves silly and pull these damn speakers off the shelves, or stop making them. People who take buses and trains already have to put up with body odour, and being crammed like sardines. We don't need an assault on the auditory front too.
If anyone from TVMobile is reading this, please broadcast your audio solely on 89.3FM ok? Stop pushing the audio stream into the receivers on the buses. Or, maybe SBS should cut all the wires on the speakers.
Labels: quirks, Rant, Singaporeans
15:01 by FoxTwo
Sorry about the quality of the pic, it's taken with digital zoom (inferior to optical zoom) on my handphone camera. Yeah sorry, my real digital camera, the Canon Digital Ixus 60, was more inaccessible than my phone, so I just snapped this pic with the phone camera.
It was raining yesterday. It was cold.
Still there was this bunch of people downstairs at the "garden".
Yup, they are the usual typical kiasu Singaporeans. They're crowding around a BBQ pit, and since they've already paid good money to reserve this pit 3 months in advance, they aren't gonna let a little thing like a thunderstorm get in the way of their family BBQ! No Way Jose!
For what it's worth, whatever they're BBQ-ing smelt nice. With the rain yesterday though, I bet it was a pretty soggy affair.
Labels: quirks, Singapore, Singaporeans
