If Anything Can Go Wrong, It Will

So Long... Farewell...

2005-04-16T21:57:00.000+08:00

Okay, here's the deal. I see that a few has guess that I already owned my own domain, which is http://www.jaselee.com. Damn, Anand keeps spoiling the broth! Anyways, this account is shared amongst the photogs so we have ample spaces to play around.

I guess that's it over here. Just click over to http://www.jaselee.com and you'll get my latest post...

p/s: Updated - the page will automatically forward to my new page after inactivity of 5 minutes.

Going To Be My Last...

2005-04-15T09:52:00.000+08:00

Well, the job here is like a warzone. People from other department is trying to kill you in anyway they can. These agents under me never seem to see that the outside world is trying to kill them, while me and my partner in crime is working hard to protect them.

What's up with this few days? I've been busy fighting the war on the backend that I was left exhausted washed ashore of some abandoned beach.

I think this is going to be my last post on Blogger. Why? Well let's say that sometime cooking up...

Buddhist Association Photoshoot

2005-04-10T02:49:00.000+08:00

Recently a bunch of us photogs has been invited to go for a photoshoot session with the Buddhist Association of Penang in Botanical Garden. It was led by a master and a lot of apprentices appeared to take shoot the model. Despite of many new learner showed up, a few masters showed up as well, those having professional camera equipment to even a point and shoot.

And that's where the fun starts. It seems that the group are fun bunch of people dedicated to make the photoshoot event a success. The lighting was great, and we're able to make do of many of the model's appearence. The masters do provide some insights about world of photography but hell, do we need that? Alright, I was just joking. I can't help but to stand to listen up to some lecture the masters are providing.

Other than that, the main events are the models themselves. This is the first time that we have 3 models shoot at a go! We tried very hard to juggle between them but it seems the last 2 was taken up by most of the photogs, so a bunch of us are only left with one (picture as above).

For more of the swirling action, here's the link.

More of the recent model shoot? Here's Teetoo, Bonus Chan & Bitbytes9.

My Job Sucks

2005-04-08T15:19:00.000+08:00

This new job is getting more pilling. If my dear reader can check out my post, it seems that I scarcely have the time to even add in a new post. Very sorry on my part, as my skills in time management really sucks and therefore got stuck with a lot of work. Okay, let's get on to this blog.

I was here at work when one of stupid Sales escalated a case. And it goes like this:

1. Customer is having one of our notebook.
2. Customer is having problem read/write to his network.
3. Same thing duplicated, found no problem on our own network
4. A new driver download from the manufacturer seem to fix the problem.

Now, the customer contacted the stupid sales person and she asked me how come there were no drivers update on our side? I checked and found indeed that there is no driver. Told her that we tested the same configuration but found no problem on our part here. Sadly, she still persist on the matter why the new driver is not updated and was frustrated that she contacted her manager to escalate me.

Alright, if she wants to play it that way... let the game begin!

The manager wrote a very long nice intimidating email to the queue manager. After a check, found out the manager also has rejected her case due to the fact that there is no way of us updating the driver if it fits to the normal circumstances. Apparently, the sales woman is trying very hard to please her customer by having one of us being the fall guy.

Escalated to a higher party where our development group are responsible for drivers testing. After asking her a few questions, it seems that the sales woman stopped replying her email...

WOWed By WOW

2005-04-05T08:59:00.000+08:00

Okay, before y'all start thinking what is this shit... WOW is short for World of Warcraft. Yes I admit recently I went over to the dark side and start spending my time on the MMORPG¹. How does it fare? Well, aside from being like many other MMORPG games out there, WOW actually takes the meaning MMORPG to a whole new level.

One interesting about WOW is that it relives from the story from Warcraft III. It has excellent race/class/profession balancing. Why I say this? Imagine you have to play as Warrior or Hunter. Both have totally different ways to handle your character. However after playing for a while, I somehow realize that they are all aimed towards the same goal, but somehow in a rather skewed way to approach them.

Well, that's all for now. Lemme play WOW for now. Think I'll have very less updates for time to come...

¹ MMORPG = Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game

All The Time In The World

2005-04-04T16:33:00.000+08:00

I'm very sorry dear reader but my time doesn't permit me to blog as much these days. You see, being in my working level not only demanding a lot of stress handling but a lot of data handling coupled with a lot management attitude handling.

All these management drones love nothing but data. They have nothing else to fight on but to argue about data. I've given like half of my life to data discussed by the management and how to augment them. And their higher ups even lived solely for data. So, there I was explaining to the manager for my men's incoherent for the taste of word fight in the management meetings.

So how does it fare?

It suck. I prefer the time talking to stupid customer and provide my utmost attention to them. Being in my position doesn't have a lot pros but the cons are overwhelming. At one hand I have agents banging on my cubicle demanding for solution while on the other hand, the management is breathing down my neck demanding why our performance is not par to the standard as indicated in the data.

I got so tired that on the weekend, I want to make sure that NONE of it are work related. I have fun taking photoshoot session recently on the Botanical Garden, organized by some local Buddhist association as some old masters are guiding some young appretice in the ways of photography.

I've got enough experience to grasp their concept but it is always fun to review what you have know by listening to a teacher. However, the best things was there are 3 models for us to shoot and it's very interesting working with them. More pictures coming up later as I need some time to really chill out and ease my stress.

50mm... Here I come!

2005-03-31T01:02:00.000+08:00

Realized these few days I have problem posting/editing my blog over Blogger. Well, in anyway I think Bloggar worked just fine. In anyways, just collected my paycheck and I'm actually eyeing some lenses for my camera.

In the beginning, I cannot decide whether I would like to go for the telephoto zoom or just go for the quality of a picture. After much model shooting and serious consideration, I decided to abandon the telephoto zoom and concentrate on taking better portrait photos. I have put a lot of research into this Nikon 50mm f/1.8 lense.

And to top that off, I need flashes as well, so I'm considering the SB-600 due to the fact that I'm quite low on the cash and that's the only cheapest flash for my Nikon D70.

Alright, I guess that's the equipment I needed for some serious photoshooting. There are some better lense and flashes out there but I don't think I have the money to afford that. However, like what Ken Rockwell always emphasize on, it's always the skill of the photographer that has to frame the picture in his mind, to make it appear into a photograph.

Photoshoot At Botanical Garden

2005-03-28T16:06:00.000+08:00

Recently, we photogs have another photoshoot which was held at the Botanical Garden. We took hold of some secluded area which host some variety of Japanese garden. This time our model is May Ch'ng, which came here with her boyfriend to do her photography session.

She was pretty stiff at first, most probably she don't know what our expectations are. However, after about half-an-hour of shoot, she's beginning to loosen up and that's where our model started to shine very well.

After the session is over, we realized we took very few photographs due to the fact that most of us are controlling our shots. In other words, that means we strive for quality instead of quantity. I'm very proud of the shoot because:

1. I learned a lot about playing FULL MANUAL control.
2. Over casted lighting is excellent for taking outdoor shots. Camera can easily take the sun's spectrum which in turn produced a very accurate color matrix.
3. Get a chance to play with Teetoo's Tamron 70-300mm f/4.5. Quite an excellent product but the bad part of the lense is that it has trouble focusing other than the centre point.

Saw Teetoo's result using the fixed 50mm f/1.8 and it has a huge impact on potrait photography. I just got to get me one of those. Aside from the hardware specification, I'd say that the morning has been uneventful in which we truly enjoy our newfound place to shoot.

Updated: I wasn't able to prepare the link because Blogger's web interface suffered some difficulties and does not allow me to republish my post. Anyway, here's my direct link to the May's gallery.

Can't get enough of her? Try Teetoo & HCLee.

Half-Time Period

2005-03-28T13:30:00.000+08:00

Phew, it's after lunch and I'm glad to have lunch with Tai-Kar-Cheh and an old mate of mine working in the same company. Anyways, after I got back, I received a mail from the Tai Chi Queen stating that our agent need to put in the correct information so that the case can be filled in much faster.

Scream Queen got the email too, so she filled in the detail and sent it to the corresponding agent. After a while, an official mail is out as an instruction to the Technical Support department that the correct format should be filled prior escalating a case to them.

I sometimes wonder why is this necessary considering we already have a journaling system on our database and the escalation team could easily get the serial or case number, run it by the number and get the result. But does the Tai Chi Queen knows how to use them? Of course not! That's why she's getting my agent to do the extra work for her!

Updated: Don't know why this post didn't appear in my blog yesterday despite I've already updated it as Publish Post. In fact, I think Blogger has a few problems of it's own these few days...

It's Friday

2005-03-25T14:07:00.000+08:00

Here's one customer that's been bugging Scream Queen in regards for his touchpad. Now guys, if the system went into a suspend and it resulted an erratic mouse movement, and after a while of moving the mouse to resolve the problem, what do you guys think it's the issue?

This is one small fry customer who's trying to act big trying to intimidate my agents. We know that this is only a software issue but the idiot expected that by buying on of the notebooks, he already owned the moon and the sun.

Since the customer was so persistent and there is no way technical speciality is able to help with the case, we pass this case over to the customer service.

Guess what?

This customer service agent, already known for her Tai Chi¹ action passed the case back to my agent. I was pissed that I sent an updated message, with all the action that we've done and pass the case back to her. What a lazy agent. She thinks just because it has to do with technical, she just pass it back to us without wanting to looking at the case first.

Too bad she went back early. Argh!

¹ Tai Chi is a discipline derived from a martial art in order to activate a person's energy (chi) that makes a person so healthy. However, the nature of Tai Chi is to 'borrow' the attacker's energy and divert it back to the attacker. In a basic routine in our office, a Tai Chi master can try to push back a case back to the escalator.

p/s: Before I forget, the stolen notebook case has a little twist on it. The thief is smart enough to rename another PC to the serial number on the notebook. That's why we've been pinging the wrong machine. A few L2s has already been dispatched on investigating the case but no clues turn up for now.

Freakshow

2005-03-24T19:30:00.000+08:00

God damn I'm have a really bad day.

Brushed Clean
Yesterday I went for a meeting for the manager. Each team has to present to the manager why there are a repeated calls and how come there are even a repeated dispatch despite of every precautions the agent has taken and the management has done. So, when it was my turn to present, I didn't realize I put in all the wrong information. Instead of focusing all the faulty parts that need to be revised, I put all the information about the agent and what to be done about them.

This has caused the manager to question what am I supposed to be doing by focusing on the agent. Since I'm the 2nd level for the technical support department and it's not befitting for me to focus on the agent. I'm supposed to be looking at the components and what has caused the failure.

And I got some real good scolding.

However, I was lucky as the other 2nd level guy wasn't so fortunate as me. He managed to focus on the correct parts, but his action item was to get other department and the customer to coorperate in order to get the result that he wants. So the manager screwed him over, asking how he has control other than the agent which is under him. Unable to answer, the manager proceed to screw him in likes of what I've never ever seen before.

I really pitied the 2nd level guy, after being down, the manager continue to kick and slam him. A quick check on the other manager found that he doesn't have a grasp on English and this has caused a misunderstanding between him and the manager.

Stolen
A brand new shiny notebook was received by Neo in the morning was passed to me. I made some checkup, verify it cosmetically and found no issue with it. I powered up and the information came up without any problem. So I got the serial number and recorded it. Luckily, the system already got it's name, which has the same number as the serial number.

So, I assigned the notebook to my men of charge.

I went back early yesterday because I was pratically sick. Not sick in a way but sick of my men approaching me for even the smallest details. I got pissed off and I decided to get back as fast as possible. Jobe asked for a lift, which I gladly give before I quickly headed back to my home for the sleep.

However, I didn't remember that there is a meeting in the evening but I don't care. Sleep and getting away from the guys are my main priority. So when I got back today, the agent approached me with a really really white face. He told me that the system was stolen because when he returned from the meeting and found the notebook missing.

Incidentally, he went to the meeting leaving the notebook on the table. When he came back, it went missing. A quick check with Neo and he quickly pinged the unit and found it was DETECTED! That means the system is still in our office, just that we need to find it ASAP.

We managed to trace it to a room but it was locked. That's good. We managed to corner some bastards and let's see if tomorrow we can catch the culprit.

Tai Kar Cheh vs. Queen Leader

2005-03-22T22:40:00.000+08:00

Please refer to the character sheet for some insights to the character. Some of the new agents asked me what was it to work 4 years ago when the technical support is still it's in infancy. Just told them that it was pretty messed up with lots of dictators and people with attitude problem all around. The idea of problematic people suddenly pops up a story that happened long ago.

Many of the new technical support agents didn't know the dispute between the two giants prior to their work right now. A few of us that's been with the company knew about the history and how it actually tickles our hearts. You see, when I came in, both Tai Kar Cheh and the Queen Leader are the only females at Technical Support, and I guess from there you can see that they have a little competition between themselves.

There's this one time that both of them were call-taking agents and both of them are still new taking calls from the customer. With a stroke of luck, both of them ended working night shift with an observation from a queue leader.

Now, Tai Kar Cheh received a call from the customer who claims he has a problem with his system. After she managed to resolve the issue, the customer proclaims that he was assisted by another female agents, and it has screwed up his system badly. However, thanking the customer, Tai Kar Cheh quickly closed the call.

After closing the call, she just made a general broadcast that some girl guided the customer unsuccessfully and it has caused him grief. 10 minutes later, she found that Queen Leader broke down and cried. After a while of consoling, the queue leader told Tai Kar Cheh that she hurt Queen Leader's feeling and she should apologize to her.

Tai Kar Cheh, being an upstanding person, asked the queue leader why she should apologize when she didn't hurt anyone's feeling before. If Queen Leader did felt bad about this, then perhaps it was really her mistake! Siapa makan cili, dialah merasa pedas.¹

After being persisted a few times by the working queue leader, she was forced to apologize the Queen Leader. However, Queen Leader still wasn't satisfied with the matter and logged off from the phone system and gave the silent treatment to Tai Kar Cheh. Since Tai Kar Cheh figured that she wasn't at the wrong side, she ignored her until to such a certain extend that she really need to communicate with her officially or work related.

It's funny how it all turns out. Met up with Tai Kar Cheh for dinner recently made me feel how come such person could be promoted to a team leader anyway? Oh what the hell, the management drones never made any good decision anyway. But at least life is good now. Tai Kar Cheh is currently a manager handling 2 teams at once and with her super ambidextous skill, she was able asert control and brought up one of the worse queue to become one of the most successful ones in Asia Pacific.

¹ A saying in Malay where whoever consume chili, he would be the one to felt the hot/spicy taste in his mouth. It goes to say that whoever has made a mistake, that person will feel guilty.

Non-Appreciative Individual

2005-03-21T14:37:00.000+08:00

I finally understand what Lynnee went through when you're trying to lend a hand. There's this guy who have a problem with his computer in our office. Being a nice samaritan, I was approached even by the IT guys in regards of his problem and I tried my best to resolve his situation.

Apparently his system screwed up that it cannot boot to Windows. Even through a special environment known as Safe Mode.

Well, it seems that the current equipment is not enough, so I headed back to my place to pick up an additional notebook, with a bootable CD, 2nd hard drive bay and even some cables just in case. However, upon reaching his place, I don't know what got on to me and I put the whole package onto another colleague's cubicle and took out only the CD.

So I tried my best to resolve the issue, but it seems that this guy was too frustrated and yelled at me for his own loss. Okay, that does it! What I did was I reported to him and the manager that there's no other way to recover his data, took back the CD, took up my package and left the place.

Some people could be so insensitive that we're actually trying our best to help him, but just because they are frustrated, they have to let go on the person that's helping them. And they never seem to grasp the concept that they are the ones in trouble, not us.

I left the place in pride, and let see how this motherf**ker burn just because his emotion is more important than preserving other people's feelings.

Photoshoot At Teetoo's Residence

2005-03-20T07:54:00.000+08:00

Alright, here's one event that we've been waiting for. This time, our model is Fion Cao, a veteran beauty of fashion show, catwalk and other elegant activities that required skilled modeling. She's surprisingly friendly and humble during the shoot and we're able to talk without any fear of remorse *ehem*.

The event is held at Teetoo's residence, as we're trying our hands in indoor shooting. Not much flash is used as we allow a lot of sunlight to cast on our model which surprisingly produces a very natural flow of pictures. Being very professional and creative for photoshoot posting, we've amass a lot of her photos but she forgot that this bunch of blood-thirstied photogs never let go a moment of her alone. Well except during her clothes change, that is.

The challenge during taking the picture is that 6 of us photogs actually competed over some angle over a span of tight spaces. However, some friendly dispute ensures that most of the photogs can get their angle to shoot as well.

I'd have to say that this is the most successful event that we've organized and I'm very proud to say that I really enjoyed working with Fion. Well, we're still looking forward to work with her in time to cone.

For more of her ever graceful beautiful pictures, check out my Fotopic page...

Oh yea, for more other pictures, do check: Teetoo & Bitbytes9

Bastardized Drivers

2005-03-18T08:36:00.000+08:00

Have you ever seen some bastard on the road driving a Mercedes Kompressor, BMW 5.3.1 or even Ford Ranger doing about 30km/h on the speedway road? I have the sudden realization that although these bastards are rich, they're not competent to handle the road. Most of them are not up to par to the driving standards of Penang.

Yea, while we're on the subject, most of these bastard's vehicles do not carry the number plate from Penang. While I agree that you can see less incompetent Penang driver on the road, these outstationers never seem to understand the concept of Penang driving. I believe I can speak for all Penangties that we love our roads and it's very small. So it really pisses us off when we see an outsider comes to our island, drives like a road hog, while crawling on the fast lane.

These people should be monitored and shoved off the road at the sign of a slowdown. And these people always seem to come out during a traffic rush. Why can't they understand that them being there already pollute our traffic to an unbearable constraint, and yet we have to deal with their lack of driving skills on our already fast road.

Very Busy

2005-03-16T16:06:00.000+08:00

God damn this is tough! My current job has me running from one end of the building to the other end because:

1. Our labs are situated at the front side of the building while the place I sit is way at the back.
2. Some of the new agents keep asking me a lot of stupid question. Felt like bashing them on the head and ask them to make their best judgement and learn from their mistake.
3. New agents came in to buddy and it has blocked my pathway to the exit. So instead of taking about 2 minutes to get to the other end, it took me nearly about 3 minutes swaying through the crowds.
4. Tiring have to wake up at 6am.
5. Have to handle things that I do not know. As Neo would have it, I have to make sure I have the image of a leader although I'm a wuss. Hell, I don't need to projection of a leader. I'm already a bad ass bastard bent on destroying everything if I'm pissed!

Okay, now for the fun stuff. I encountered a really irritating sales person that has the IQ of a bullfrog. She's so stupid till she's still wondering what's her current gender.

Stupid Sales Person (SSP): "Hello, okay we have this situation whereby customer is pissed off that they take two months to resolve the issue."
Me: "So, has the problem been resolved?"
SSP: "Yes."
Me: "So, what's the problem?"
SSP: "The customer wants to know how come there are no updated drivers on our website?"
Me: "Hmm, looks like the new driver from the manufacturer is not compatible with some of our other driver. I guess that's why they didn't put it up."
SSP: "That still doesn't explain why this happened."
Me: "I just told you."
SSP: "No, you don't understand me."
Me: "What is there the understand? Does the customer want us to compensate for their down time?"
SSP: "No."
Me: "So what's the problem?"
SSP: "Customer wants to know why the updated driver is not reflected on our website?"
Me: "Like I told you, the manufacturer's driver is not compatible with some of our other drivers, and that's why it's not included in our website."
SSP: "In that case I don't think we understand each other."

You got that right!

Me: "Yes I understand you fine. Just that you cannot understand my method of explanation."
SSP: "In that case who else can help me?"
Me: "Why, the webmaster of course!"
SSP: "Hmm, why didn't I think of this at the beginning?"

I felt like strangling the stupid sales person by the edge of the building before letting her go. Such stupid person shouldn't be allowed to live and should die.

Updated: The webmaster was so pissed off at the chau hai¹ that he sent his worst underlings to handler her. Apparently she was so pissed off at his competency that she will get other channel to handle her case. Let's see how tomorrow goes. Chances are she will jump to her death if were not annoyed by the underlings.

¹ Chau hai is translated as smelly vagina in Cantonese.

Freaking 6AM

2005-03-14T07:16:00.000+08:00

Woke up today after a day's of hectic photoshoot and realized it's freaking 5:50 AM! I AM GOING TO BE LATE! I took a look at my handphone to realize that Fuminari has already left me a miss-call and a message: "Rabbit still down?"¹

I got up real quick, take a quick bath and started my journey. And it's already 6:10 AM. I went through corners, drive dangerously and was really perceived as a crazy maniac having a really bad day.

Got to Fuminari's house exactly at 6:30 AM. Took him up and go to the office and reach it by 6:45 AM. Upon reaching my place, this new manager is already giving the look. Omigosh!

¹ We used The Matrix code to get each other going. The usual standard SMS greeting to wake him was: "Wake up Neo". However, circumstances could come to: "Follow the red rabbit" which red is being for the color of my car while others like if anyone of us being really late, then it would have to be: "Only human".

Botching Up The Sales Performance

2005-03-11T09:10:00.000+08:00

Oh my gosh! Have our dear writer gone mad? Helping the Sales? Nein my dear readers. No matter bad the situation is, I will make sure the Sales have HELL TO PAY before getting us helping the customer for their own fault.

The Sales I'm talking about is referring to a friend who's purchasing a black Motorola E398 in one of the handphone shops in Bukit Jambul Complex. My friend has been reviewing through the model for a long time now but yesterday was a due time for him to get the phone.

So as he paid for the system, I was looking over his shoulder and found the receipt was written:

Headset (no warranty)
MiniSD (no warranty)

So I proceed to ask the sales person:

What if there is a fault on the MiniSD?

The sales person told me there wouldn't be a warranty on that. Then I asked him a second question:

How can you determine that the card here is working?

The sales person cannot answer me. So I asked him to gather all the things together and put it up to make sure it works. The guy gruntled and put the whole thing together. Upon switching on the system, I went directly to the section where phone should detect the MiniSD card. Unfortunately, the card wasn't detected and I showed it to the sales person.

He panicked and tried several times to reseat the card but to no avail. He tried with a different card and even with a different phone but the result came back the same. He sweated and called for his manager. This nice Indian lady came around and try to resolve our problem but it still fails.

Finally they managed to figure out that the MiniSD has to be inserted to a certain position to make it work. When the whole thing was resolved I apologized to the manager on our stand because her sales person cannot provide us with an answer for our rights. She said she understand and glad that she can resolve the issue on us.

Now that's a customer experience that they can boast! Both party, consumer and the sales are having a rational discussion on the issue, trying to resolve the problem at hand before case can be escalated over. Unlike our customers who's totally stupid and barbaric.

Stupid Streamyx Connection

2005-03-10T23:29:00.000+08:00

Recently I have my shares with Streamyx whereby it will slowl go into declining performance. Everyday I would come back, switch on the damn thing and it will connect to the DSL and after a few second, it will disconnect again if there are connection running through.

However, I just want to check it out first before screwing them to make sure I have the base. You know, working in my company has enlightened me of the consumer issue and I will make sure that I have a strong case before screwing them over. An approach to Anand and I found that his friend faced the same issue and he fixed it by tilting the modem to a horizontal posture.

Okay, seems fair enough so I put the modem into the same position. It has been running for 5 days now and it only disconnect only occasionally.

Blogger Comment Too Slow!

2005-03-09T22:19:00.000+08:00

I'm not sure why Blogger's comment is so slow these days. Clicking on it takes a long time to upload at home and even at office. I tried other people's comment but same problem remained.

So I'm forced to put in a comment system that's non-blogger. So I chose Haloscan instead.

Stupendous Bastard

2005-03-09T21:34:00.000+08:00

*WARNING: This article contains some scene that some girls might find shocking. Please take necessary precaution before continue reading.*

After I finished my training today, I was in a hurry to get back to the office because I need to take a leak. After sitting in the training room (the training event is held about a km away from the office) for like about 6 hours drinking and without going to the loo, everyone will expect that my bladder will fill up like balloon. Initially the bladder didn't trigger when I left the training ground but halfway to the office, it suddenly alerted me when my butt touched my cold air-conditioned car.

So as you expect, there's a lot of The Fast & The Furious coupled with Gone In 60 Seconds stunts happening all the way back to my office.

I managed to reach the office in time before my bladder imploded/exploded so I went to the nearest toilet. Opening up the door I seem to see all the toilet bowls are filled and even the pissing stand are filled.

Bloody hell, I got to drag my ass up to the top floor toilet and that's the most excruciating moments in my life. Upon reaching the top, I also found that the bloody bathroom is filled! What the hell is going on? Did someone wanted to pull a prank on me? Then I went to the next to find that it's under maintainence and the janitor is slowly washing the whole toilet.

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

I went to the last one, which I hope is empty. The bad thing is that the whole toilet bowls are filled. Déjà Vu anyone?

As lucky I am, there are 3 pissing bowl but there's one stupid problem there. There's a big tub of lard occupying the middle bowl. For God's sake! There's one rule here which I think many guys (don't worry here girls, your turn will come) here will agree, which is:

1. If you see 3 bowls, take the side. This will allow the next person to piss in peace.
2. We try not to squeeze in two at one time, unless physically there are only 2 pissing bowl.

Now I have to wait like an eternity for that fat idiot to finish off his pissing, which then he took another 1-2 minutes to shake off the excessive urine. Then, this idiot took another 1-2 minutes to slowly zip his pants before he started to head for the sink. Damn idiot. I quickly excrete my load and it never felt so good before.

As I finished, I made a quick jiggle on my light saber and headed to the sink. Guess what? The fat fella is still washing his hand.

p/s: Girls, do you wash you have extensively after a piss? I understand the need to wash if you gals take a dump or something.

Shove This Up Your Arse...

2005-03-08T23:17:00.000+08:00

This morning as I was headed into the training, I had a large pile of hardware on me. Ranging from boombox speaker (the one with satellite speakers from Altec Lansing) to some cord extension and a projector. Imagine how messy it was for me to hold all those stuff in one go so that I can make only one trip to the car so that I can attend the training.

However, my luck was not to be. I got so unlucky that when the elevator door opened, Fat Bitch also came by the way to go down to the ground floor to get some food to add additional weight to her body. Looking at me:

FB: "Wah, so many things to take ar? Is it heavy?"

*Give her a stern look with the action on my face: "What do you think?"*

FB: "I guess it's heavy. Where you're off to?"
Me: "Training..."
FB: "Wow, you're giving training?"
Me: "Nope."
FB: "You're taking the training?"

*Give her another look: "What does it look like?"*

FB: "Hey don't forget ar, you owe me some cases..."
Me: "Owe you some cases? What cases?"
FB: "I've just sent the mail to you..."
Me: "Sorry, no can do. Training..."
FB: "I need to close the Sales you know..."
Me: "So?"
FB: "But someone need to attend to the customer..."
Me: "Call toll free."
FB: "I've talked to the customer, and he wants someone to give him a call."
Me: "No can do. No double standard. Either he call in or we don't take the case."

The elevator door opened. Thank God! Now I have the freedom! Fat Bitch wants a free lunch? FAT CHANCE BITCH!

Place Shifting Suck Ass

2005-03-07T23:08:00.000+08:00

Today I got to shift back to the original place. Why? Because there was a renovation on our cubicle which has shrunk our size to a mini quarter size than ever before. Why? Because we're expanding.

Damn this suck.

Not only the new place is small, I have to walk like another nearly about 100 metre to another wing to shift my place. Luckily they have them trollies. Problem is that the trolley that I got would make squeaking noise when I'm tugging over it. And when the squeaking noise reverberate over the hall, everyone will be staring at me and wondering why would a guy shift his place 3pm in the afternoon.

Problem is that when I'm trolleying over my new place, Violent Girl was staring at me and gave a little laugh. Oh my god the world is going to end. She laughing? Seems like cats are growing horns...

What a cruel world.

And when I finally managed to shift my whole ~~weapons~~ equipments to the new place, Scream Queen came over to me for another escalation that she cannot handle. Argh! However, I was lucky I'm able to secure an outside training so that I can be away from her for these few days. Let her escalate her problem to my partner-in-crime, A. Hehehehe...

Funny Thing At Breakfast

2005-03-06T10:46:00.000+08:00

You know, going to Dim Sum¹ in the morning sparks some very interesting incident today. Here I was sitting on the table with my family when there's this very heavily dressed individual stepped in with his blonde colored hair wearing a very tight t-shirt with air holes in them. Not only looking like gay, his partner also following closely behind him with that seriously feminie walk that makes me want to puke on my plate.

Usually I got no problem with faggots but this time it's really different. It's how this gay fella has a Bluetooth headset stuck to his ear as if he's some big time manager going to receive some super important calls. Perhaps for a pimping action for a gigolo show, I really got no idea.

The thing was that this idiot was talking Cantonese with his partner, with the topic specifically that Penang was a lousy place to live. And here he was talking, saying that Penang is full of Hokkien people and most of them don't speak Cantonese. This idiot is truly looking for trouble.

Then suddenly his phone ring and he picked up... his Nokia 2100... you know, the one WITHOUT BLUETOOTH. He then proceeds to talk in rapid Cantonese and quickly switch off his set, probably wanted to minimize the attention of people looking at him. Then his partner looks up asking where his phone is. And he said it's under repair. Then his faggot friend asked him how come he's wearing the Bluetooth headset.

Guess what did he said?

He said it's for showing off and how these Penang people wouldn't understand anyway. Damn, too bad he didn't directly piss me off else I've probably give him a piece of my mind...

¹ Dim Sum is a Chinese delicacy usually served as a breakfast. It has a variety of bamboo steamed dishes such as siu mai (meat nugget wrapped in a thin soya), poridge, noodles and many others Chinese food.

Some Old Story...

2005-03-05T18:26:00.000+08:00

Recently met up with an old friend, Julian for old time's sake and we had lunch. Previously we took the course but we're at a different college. He's from KDU KL while I studied in KDU Penang but we met over the library one day when he's doing some study fair or something like that in Penang. We chatted and realized we got a lot in common.

Recently he's back to Penang for another business trip and we caught up pretty much every thing since the day I joined my current company and there was a lot of chit chat and talk.

Julian: "So, you have girlfriend yet?"
Me: "Nope."
Julian: "Apasal tak mau?"
Me: "No girls wanted a guy like me."
Julian: "Why not? You seem to look like a perfectly fine gentlemen."
Me: "Well, I'm not sure but most of the girls I meet, well, they tend to stay further to me. Now, for some girls that I'm not interested on, let's say it's the opposite reaction."
Julian: "What a lousy way to go huh?"
Me: "The problem is that those who's close to me tend to already have boyfriend and they keep confiding me in their problems."
Julian: "Aiseh man. Eh, like that jam one up and make them your girlfriend lar..."
Me: "Hah? No lar, I'm not that kind of person..."
Julian: "Hah! And you expect them to be nice like in the movies where you'll meet them, feelings all flying and live happily ever after?"
Me: "No but..."
Julian: "Let's face it bro. These days girls want guys to be bad. They want the badder guy so that they can have that sense of security."
Me: "That bad ar?"
Julian: "That's your problem man. You see, you don't go to pub or any night spots."
Me: "You got that right."
Julian: "That's where your problem is. You're just too... too... how do I put this word...."
Me: "Nice?"
Julian: "No no.... Look, I don't have the words for it. The thing is that you're don't go to night spot or disco or shit like that. And that makes you look weak. You see these girls have some rating running over their heads. If you're the bad type that steals their heart, then that's it. For you case, you need to look tougher. You need to have that bad look so that the girls will dig for you."
Me: "Aiseh man..."
Julian: "I'm serious man. You're not that bad looking. You just look like a bookworm. Trust me on this. Jam up a little baddie there and go clubbing. You can't go wrong with that."
Me: "I'm not comfortable in that kind of outlook man. I'm not against clubbing or something but somehow I happen to be a person who have no interest in night spots or something."
Julian: "Aw man, you want me to intro some chicks to you bro?"
Me: "Er......"

A Different Beat

2005-03-04T19:08:00.000+08:00

No, nothing Boyzone about this one but rather a look on a different work style in the same place. Let's see some of the advantage of my new position:

1. No need to log in to take calls. No need to log in means I can just stay away from my seat and linger around the office all day long. Linger around neaning I can lepak¹ all day long and still look like I'm working.
2. A relaxing mood. The agent will already taken the heat will confide to you for advice. After given advice with a few troubleshooting steps, you can get back to your place to do your stuff. Great huh?
3. Greater influence. I can get my place shifted, offer valuable ideas and various other information from my capacity to change the queue a little although some subtle differences would mean I will never have direct control. Go figures because I have to share the same responsible with A, my partner-in-crime which is a Queue Leader who handle daily operation handling of the queue.

Okay, every good point will come with a bad point.

1. There will always be a bad seed in the queue. Usually I'm the one to handle them. Damn.
2. The amount of escalations is enormous! I sometimes can hardly keep my hands on all of them. Usually I still have to get my men to participate in the escalation to ease of my burden.
3. I have to work with various people out of my department to ensure that our service level is meeting customer expectation.
4. And I have to write a lot of crappy marketspeak²

¹ Lepak = Loiter in Malay

² Marketspeak is invented by some idiots in marketing who doesn't posses enough intelligent for them to explain. They then used a different approach of euphemism to make sure the message is spread across with little understanding and yet, makes the receiver doubt whether the message received is correct. Example: "Maximixing effort to produce optimal performance for our engineering concern" or "Reduce resources while providing large aperture for technical department for room of improvement".

Photoshoot At Boon Siew Beach

2005-03-03T23:15:00.000+08:00

Recently we have another photoshoot at Boon Siew beach where our newest addition is model Vivian Ooi. Standing for about 5' 8", she has some sly look but shy. However, after a couple of lighten up session, she loosen up a bit and by the end of the photoshoot, she was totally comfortable with us and we worked with her without any hiccups except for some mosquito bites.

Our only obstable that time was some old men that never ever seen a photoshoot before. All of them tried very hard to get a first class action of our photography skills. However, the bad point is that they seem more interested in our subject rather than our equipments.

Cheh!

Weather was good that day as the sky was ~~Outkast~~ over cast and there fore there's a lot of mild light that makes photography session much more easier than playing around against silhouette light source from Woon Eng's photoshoot...

Oh before I forget, here's the desired link.

And if you guys still cannot get enough of her, here's some from Teetoo, Bitbytes9 & HCLee.

Never Underestimate Them

2005-03-02T16:57:00.000+08:00

Here's some really funny story at work. There's this petite cute girl who was sitting near to our department. I don't know what she does and I don't care but the only thing that attracts me is that she's really really cute. Now, one day I went for a coffee machine in our internal pantry and she was already there. She dropped in a coin and then press for a cup of coffee. However, there's a problem. The machine went crazy and didn't churn out the coffee as needed. She twisted RETURN COIN lever but it doesn't work. Guess what she did next?

Nope, she didn't turn to me for help.

Instead she bang and kicked the coffee machine as hard as possible. Still not getting back her coin, she cursed for the last time before giving another hard kick on the machine before leaving.

I was stunned looking at her. She took off and slam the door behind her. Talking about petite, how are these girls becoming so violent? Have these people really reduced of their moral value to the lowest of the lowest? Well, to hell with her. Everytime I pass her place, I tried very hard not to look at her...

Busy Weekends

2005-02-28T14:42:00.000+08:00

These days I've been having a very busy weekend. In terms of taking photography and having time to myself, I find that the friends portion has taken a lot of toll, which I really like because we seem to have so many things to discuss. Ranging from empty talk to serious planning, we have it all and we seem never to have exhausted of any creativity to plan for the next shot.

To me, it seems liberating as I find I'm enjoying myself.

Last week it seems that I've been going through a few fashion shows to model shoot. Don't fret dear readers, I'll upload her photos as soon as I get the time! Other than that, I have been less at home and my parents were growing concern of my absence. I did assured them that I'm alright that I found some really fun friends to talk to.

And I Don't Want To Be Alone...

2005-02-25T07:35:00.000+08:00

Today I'm going to office alone. Usually I'll pick up Fuminari on the way but he's taking leave for another photoshoot at Gurney Plaza for some celebrities in a opening of a store or something.

ARGH! I'M SO JEALOUS!

I have to spend my day at meetings, useless conference and most lousy things to do some case checkup on our internal database. It's so boring that I might actually consider sneaking out of the office and join Fuminari at the shoot!

5th day now. Without stupid customer to talk to. Felt like the world is such a lousier place. That's how humans are isn't it? First we reject, then we accept, and lastly we adore it. Come to think of it again, I think I rather stay away from customers although the job is boring.

So why the hell am I complaining for?

Busy Like Hell

2005-02-24T18:22:00.000+08:00

Fourth day on the job and it still taste like hell. Although I'm not dealing with stupid customers anymore but I have to waste a lot of time doing:

1. Taking the bullet for my men's if they screwed up
2. Keep generating reports on various issues
3. Clearing Quality Team's mess
4. And many other misc stuff

At end of the day I'm already exhausted from all my job doing. Sometimes I went to snake¹ around because the job is so demanding. I usually hang out at Fuminari's place since his place got lots of babes opposite his cubicle (the beautiful babes from Sales are situated just opposite). Although my place do have lots of babes too but they're more scattered and I have problem tracking them.

And with the job so much, I have not much time trying to catch them with my eyes.

So basically that's it for now. Think I won't have anything much to blog for now. Think I have to find some stupid case so that I can talk to some stupid customer. God, how I missed those days...

¹ Snake = taking a time off without a prior permission. Also known as weasling...

Photoshoot At The Spice Garden

2005-02-23T09:09:00.000+08:00

Recently I went for another photoshoot at the Spice Garden. This time the participation was low due to the time inconvenience and late updates from the organizer. However the experience is worth it because our model is Woon Eng! Spotting at only 18 year of age, she really have the patience to slowly pose to our pace. Hey, what can I say, I'm already an old man!

Okay okay, a quarter century and one isn't that old but hey, it's my mind and it ain't yours.

I was surprised at the variety of plants featured in Spice Garden. It has good landscape features with lots and lots of plants ranging from flowers to tree. It has a small muzeum, cafe and a magnificent view from atop to the beachfront. However, that's only the basic since we're paying for like RM 1. The RM 13 would have more view and I guess we'll be running out of breath trying to take all the landscape features.

However, since the model is already so petite and pretty, I guess the landscape doesn't make much different anymore. The shoot ranges from the cafe, to the brick steps, muzeum and then back forth. Most of the photographers took advantage of the scenery but we encounter some lighting problem since the shade is partially silhouetted by the sun.

The best thing is that nothing could stop a bunch of rampaging shutter bug¹!

More of her pictures at my photo page. Still cannot get enough of her? Try Bitbytes9, Teetoo & HCLee.

¹ Shutter Bug = a maniac with the passion for pressing the camera shutter button.

Still Halfway To Go

2005-02-22T09:50:00.000+08:00

A few mates has came around and asked me of the photos of the model we last shot. All that I can say.... patience prevails.

There are so much things and yet so little time.

I got too many things at hand, so I'm pratically very busy with my new job and there are a few fashion show going on this week that I find my hands full of these events. So... have patience dear reader. I make sure you guys get enough of good dosage of this new pretty and cute model!

If you still wanted to catch a glimpse of the model, I've managed to post one promotional picture of her in a sister-website, Bulb Fiction.

I'm So Wasted

2005-02-20T15:22:00.000+08:00

Last night went for a model photoshoot (worry not dear readers, her photos will be uploaded soon as soon as I get enough of shut eye) and then hang out at Teetoo's residence for some picture review. Initially wanted to get back early as possible for today's Treasure Hunt event. However, it all went to hell when I stumble upon Teetoo's comic collection. Everything within the yesteryear's collection such as Gen 13 & X-Files was seen due to the fact he has the same interest as I am.

Damn! This is going to deprive me of my sleep.

Went over through his collection. He sure got lots of 'em. And as if that's not enough, I saw a bunch of his DVD collections as well. Cannot tahan¹ anymore that I took a few of his valuables like To Die For, Jawbreaker & Wayne's World Collection (contain Wayne's World I & II).

Double damn! I'm going to have hell to pay for my sleep.

Staggered back to home after dropping Fuminari at 1 am. Told him: "See you tomorrow" and then I was stunned for a while. The treasure hunt is going to start another 5 hours later. So changed my farewell greeting to: "See you later." Went back found it was already 2 am. Slept for a while before my HP's alarm blared and I got up for the hunt.

Went to Fumi's house, picked him and went for the hunt. Tried to play through the hunt but all my mind was blank about the whole thing. Guess the lack of sleep dulls my mind. I'm only able to solve the simple puzzles while others which require a little more thinking keeps evading my thoughts.

So when the announcement were made, we never even make it to the top ten (there was about 41 team participating). And halfway during the presentation, I think I took a sleep for a while. After the event ended, I even slept in the car during the way back to the office.

Later will go out to meet up with Teetoo. Let's see what surprise I'll encounter later for today...

¹ Tahan = stand in Malay.

Shifting Places

2005-02-19T13:04:00.000+08:00

Argh, I hate changing my place! Right now being in the new post, I have to change place so that I can be nearer to my men of charge. Argh! And that's not enough, I'm being placed in front of a manager. Heck any of them are fine but the significant thing is that I have to gather all my belongings, move it from one end of the building to another. To add the salt to the wound, I ended up going up and down for more than 5 times. Damn tired!

And in 2 hours time I'll have a model photoshoot...

And in another 15 hours I'll have a treasure hunt event with Fuminari & Jobe...

Still Lots Of Stupid Customers

2005-02-18T12:22:00.000+08:00

Today would mark the last day I would ever take calls for Technical Support. Monday onwards I'll be moving up to a background area where I will doing a lot of technical evaluation. Yep, it's a dirty job but someone's just gotta do it (boos at the background).

Seriously, previously when I was a call taking agent, I thought this job would be so easy and all the seniors that are in this position can relax due to the fact that they don't communicate much with the customers.

However, for this week, my perception on this new job function has changed. There are a lot of potential problem in this job. For once if you make a wrong move, the whole other department could have your throat for that. Your evaluation and technical expertise is put to the limit. You need to attend various boring meetings where the outcome is hoping diligently that your men could have the luck today for doing a better job.

And being the last day today, I still have to answer a lot of stupid calls. Ranging from headless chicken customers, to demanding ones, let's see how these idiots wanted to play. In any rate, let's get on with the show...

Me: "Thank you for calling Technical Support..."
Customer: "Listen to me carefully. I want your engineer NOW!"
Me: "Okay, may I know what product you're refering to?"
Customer: "What do you mean?"
Me: "Well, we sold a lot of products in the market, ranging from servers, desktop, notebooks even down to PDAs & projectors."
Customer: "I don't care. I just want your engineer to look into this."
Me: "I understand sir. But even engineer have their specialty. Some would be an expert in servers and some in desktop."
Customer: "So you cannot help me?"
Me: "I can if you would tell me what's your product?"
Customer: "I don't know my product."
Me: "Hmmm..."
Customer: "You're not very helpful. I'm going to complain you. Can I have your name?"
Me: "Here goes...."
Customer: "And you employee number?"
Me: "Here goes..."

Phone slammed. Let's see what kind of complain the idiot can conjure. I hope this guy can do better than giving my names for a product he didn't know. For all I care, he might have just purchased our competitor product and is calling us for support... Next!

Me: "Thank you for calling Technical Support..."
Customer: "Hallo? Hallo?"

if customer = "stupid" then dummy_mode=on;

Me: "How can I help you sir?"
Customer: "How do you connect through this wireless thingy?
Me: "Okay, you just... " (given the steps)
Customer: "Oh... how come still cannot connect?"
Me: "Well, perhaps you need set your security. Can you check whether it's correct?"
Customer: "I cannot see my settings now."
Me: "How is that so?"
Customer: "The system is not with me..."

Another customer worthy of us to slam his face down into a blender.

Fold Under Pressure

2005-02-17T10:11:00.000+08:00

One thing, I don’t know why
It doesn’t even matter how hard you try
Keep that in mind / I designed this rhyme
To explain in due time
All I know, time is a valuable thing
Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings
Watch it count down to the end of the day
The clock ticks life away
It’s so unreal

I think I owe my dear reader an apology. Yesterday's blog was hardly discerning and I guess you guys must be scratching your head about am I talking about. Perhaps only a few like Ashotiwoth, Fuminari & Funkydeco might actually know what I'm talking about.

Didn’t look out below
Watch the time go right out the window
Trying to hold on / but didn’t even know
Wasted it all just to watch you go
I kept everything inside and even though I tried, it all fell apart
What it meant to me, will eventually be a memory, of a time when I tried so hard

As all of you would know, working in my environment involves in a lot of email reading due to the fact:

1. The people we're dealing is not sitting near us
2. Proof to show to management drones that we're indeed doing our job.

And got so far
But in the end
It doesn't even matter
I had to fall
To lose it all
But in the end
It doesn't even matter

However, once in a while, some donkey Sales person would go around and try to get the best sales from our corporate customers. And because of that, they made wild claims that some tech support is able to do which we weren't.

Now, if this Sales person is only selling to a regular home user customer with a very low volume purchase, we would have ditch the idiot without a second thought. However, being a large corporate that generate revenues of millions, we have to take note and cover the Sales person's ass, even though it's not our freaking job.

And that's where the mail comes in.

One thing / I don’t know why
It doesn’t even matter how hard you try
Keep that in mind / I designed this rhyme
To remind myself how
I tried so hard
In spite of the way you were mocking me
Acting like I was part of your property
Remembering all the times you fought with me
I’m surprised it got so (far)
Things aren’t the way they were before
You wouldn’t even recognize me anymore
Not that you knew me back then
But it all comes back to me

Usually, any rechargable batteries would have a very limited warranty. Unless you have special arrangement, all batteries will be covered only for 1 year. And this is where our Sales excels at: promising customer more than 1 year battery warranty. Under this special arrangement, Technical Support would have to absorb under it's own fund.

In the end

And that's where the headache comes in. I have to talk to so many parties, ranging from financial people to management drones and even up to manufacturing people to make sure we can deliver this plan to them. In accordance the previous plan, this deal has been closed off previously but the customer decided to buy more and wanted 'more' from this deal.

You kept everything inside and even though I tried / it all fell apart
What it meant to me / will eventually / be a memory / of a time when I
I tried so hard
And got so far
But in the end
It doesn’t even matter
I had to fall
To lose it all
But in the end
It doesn’t even matter

As you guys would know, Sales as greedy as it is, wanted the customer so badly so they agreed upon this issue, and that's where they drag Technical Support down with this decision. They never understand that in order to make this whole thing work, it involves a lot of parties to obtain their conscent.

Being as what it is, that's why Sales are still Sales and Technical Support are still Technical Support and two will never mix that well.

I've put my trust in you
Pushed as far as I can go
For all this
There’s only one thing you should know
I've put my trust in you
Pushed as far as I can go
For all this
There’s only one thing you should know
I tried so hard
And got so far
But in the end
It doesn’t even matter
I had to fall
To lose it all
But in the end
It doesn’t even matter

Great Scott It's A Disaster!

2005-02-16T13:28:00.000+08:00

Today I came back after been a while off work and I take a look at my mail box. Surprisingly it reached up to 150 mails. Mein gott.

So I read and segregate my mail. You just gotta segregate them as there are loads of bullshit from the mail ranging from something like case followup, product updates and even up to stupid advertistment like enlarging your penis. Wondered how a SPAM can get past our company's mail is out of my boundaries.

After I reorganized the whole mail, I realized I still have another 50-something mail to process. These are valid mails and really in need of my disposition to resolve the issue. Some of them just need my review and others plainly need my presence so that I can do the job.

Luckily enough, most of my new guys are quite well versed with the support policy so I don't have problem with them. Now the only problems are with Sales with their loony expectation to the customer. And I'm stuck here in the room updating of our stance over some battery issue to a few of our largest customers.

Boring!!!

CNY Gambling

2005-02-12T00:04:00.000+08:00

What do Chinese do in Chinese New Year. Some visit their family and friends while MANY OF THEM will be gambling. Depending on the crowds, most of them will play baccarat or Siam Ban Lak¹ while some will play Chor Tai Tee². I was on a losing side but I find myself lucky that I didn't lose as much as the next player. Some cousins lost more than RM20 in a single seating of a game!

Some of my friends went into mahjong but I didn't have the chance to play with them. Mahjongs are quite an interesting game to pass the time but most of my family member just don't go well with mahjong. There are some instances that they will play rummy. Still I have no idea of the game but I do know that it involves using the two deck and try to throw your card as much as possible.

Just goes to show, if you're aren't gambling during CNY, chances are, you aren't Chinese.

¹ Baccarat or Siam Ban Lak is relatively a simple game with a lot of twist such as Blackjack. The objective of the game is to score the higher than the dealer, therefore, sometimes perhaps in some instances get a double or triple the amount placed due to some special rule card.

² Chor Tai Tee or also know as Big Two is a famous game heralded from Hong Kong. It plays much like Poker with exception that the game must be played by 4 player (3 player can suffice but the rounding between players isn't much fun as 4 people playing it). The rule of the game is that value 2 (highest 2, lowest 3) in the card is the highest, continued by the suit. In that case, the suit follows Poker, where Spade is bigger than Hearts, which in turn bigger than Club and then lastly, Diamond. Objective of the game is simple: throw out as many cards as possible, but you must always top up the player before you. The player with the most & valued card is considered a loser and therefore must reshuffle the deck and deal to the rest of the players. Players can throw a single card, two card piece, 3 card piece up to Poker variations. Player who follow suit must keep topping up the value of the previous player. Once no one can top up the player, he/she can put in a new variation, which in turn starts a whole new turn.

CNY Eve

2005-02-08T07:50:00.000+08:00

Ah... CNY¹, a plight of every Chinese where they're to celebrate on a reunion dinner. Usually family members from near and far will come back to their parents for a reunion dinner. In most cases, most family be heading back to my grandparent's home for such occassion. Once there, they'll be seeing most of their family members and started to interact about their lives.

Usually on CNY eve, the family would have some dinner first, and then midnight prayer where there will be some offering such as candles and tea praying for good omen to come. Previously, before the government banned firecrackers, there used to be a lighting of 'ang phow'².

And the next day on CNY, married couples will usually give 'ang pow'³ to the unmarried family members, specifically children and young adults. Under a middle working class family, usually 'ang pow' will differ between RM2 to RM50, depending on location. The value of ang pow is usually proportional to the location. A rural area will have less while large house with high renovation will earn a higher value in a pack.

And CNY will never be complete without gambling. Yes, there is a saying that if you do not gamble, you're not a chinese. Family members will usually engage in a social interaction by gambling. Be it mahjong, a deck of cards or even chinese dominoes, the sight of gambling in a family is not to be missed. Young adults will usually try to get as much money as possible.

At the end of the 2 day CNY, family members will then check their collection from the Ang Pow collection and gambling wins to check for their total revenue for the New Year. Some even will go extremely far by gambling till the 15th (Chap Goh Meh⁴).

₁ CNY = Chinese New Year

₂ Ang Phow = literally translated as red firecracker, a small 3-6 inch that has been tied to branch out from the main fuse. After lighting up the fuse on the bottom, the fuse will carry magnesium fire to each individual firecrackers which result in a lengthy explosive sound to welcome the New Year.

₃ Ang Pow = red packet that usually carries some money for luck.

₄ Chap Goh Meh = 15th day in the Chinese lunar calendar where it signifies single women to throw oranges to the lake/river to signify their luck to get a good husband.

Sony PSP In Malaysia

2005-02-07T13:48:00.000+08:00

Yahoo! Finally PSP arrived in Malaysia. Although it's not official, but at least it's better than never. Okay, let's get down the drill. PSP enthusiasts might know that there are two version bundled:

Basic Pack: PSP, charger & battery
Value Pack: PSP, charger, 32 MB memory stick duo, remote control headphones, cleaning cloth & UMD demo

Problem is that they don't see the Basic Pack unit here in Malaysia. Perhaps later but not right now. So, all I ever see is the Value Pack unit.

And in the US, it's only going for USD $249 (RM 946.2) but however the unit arrived here cost RM 1699! That makes it nearly twice the price! In Japan, it cost about 19,800 yen (RM 720). Since I checked the set and the whole manual seem to come in Japanese, I can safely assume that this is a Japanese version.

Why the increase of price? The guy couldn't answer me. The price is hardly justifiable for paying extra additional RM 700 for such a device. Moreover, Nintendo DS cost only about USD $149 (RM 566) and they're marking up to RM 799. It's not so bad considering you're paying about RM 200 for such a revolution piece of portable console.

The guy in the shop asked me to get the PSP. Told him I might consider it because previously that's about the same price I paid for my Playstation 2. I think I'll wait till the end of this year for my bonus, and let's hope so by then it'll go down for less than RM 1000.

Crazy Monday

2005-02-07T11:02:00.000+08:00

Monday is a nightmare. It always is and it always will. Funkydeco and his team have seen their shares of nightmare and seem to be cornered by various cases ranging from really stupid ones to those really have a bad back-end process. Since he's the member of the new team, I let him handle the stupid ones while I handle the back-end process.

So what makes it so back of the end process that it managed to screw most of our process? Oh well, let's say with the existence of a few stupid people really throw our pendulum way out of proportion. Not only that, because of that our customer's problem are not solved within the promised next business day and it has caused a lot of our delay.

And the problem never seem to originate from one source. In the heat, our own internal people from the back-end are supposed to upload the new information to our database so that it will reflect the new information. Guess what? These people didn't do their job as needed and it has caused further degeneration of the century.

Fuminari too having a headache of his own as he need to coach the new guy while the agents are all in turmoil between learning new stuff and handling incoming problems hurled at them. So I tried my best to give this team the best, because me and Fuminari has been building this team for 2 years and it's hard for me to digest if it crumbles down on the new team.

Creativity Killed By Customer

2005-02-03T17:33:00.000+08:00

Today I've got so much idea to develope all-in-one form to be used in my internal company environment. The structure is so complex but at yet it's easy to navigate even for the dummiest user and it features a lot of functional help and clear-cut information. This tool is able to provide a medium liason between the Sales and Technical Support.

The observing party such as managers and directors will have special log in to view the case as whole and he/she would have great access in which they can view even the simpliest detail. And not only that, it would be easy for Sales to check their cases simply by looking at their NT login name and the information would be revealed to them in a blink of an eye.

This service will be powered by the latest MYSQL database and I have personally make sure that all the information will be stored in a reliable and yet powerful server.

As I was beginning my coding of the masterpiece, an idiot called in, wondering how to configure his wireless without any prior IT knowledge. Therefore, I'm stuck to explain to him how everything works and the idiot's brain cell doesn't seem to comprehend the surge of overwhelming information. As a result, he closed the call after an hour picking my brain.

I got back to the code, and I realized I cannot continue my work at all. It's like my consciousness has been stripped to a level where I cannot comprehend something advanced such as programming. That means I'VE BEEN STUPIFIED BY THE CUSTOMER! I got to leave this queue quick else more of this shit will turn me into a zombie taking waves and waves of stupified calls.

Rimi Natsukawa

2005-02-03T13:56:00.000+08:00

Recently Fuminari borrowed me this album Teida by Rimi Natsukawa. Initially I didn't know much about her until I heard the track Shima Uta which featured some ancient Japanese tune and Rimi's delicate voice seem to match the song with perfect composition. I was surprised. I listened to more of her track and one of them, Asato Ya seem to be another hit.

After I've been repeating most of the tracks, and I'd say she's the Japanese version of Enya. Hailed from Okinawa, Japan this 30-something songstress also loves to gather perfumes (this is translated from Babelfish so I guess she must liked to gather various brands of perfumes). Can't say much as the rest are jumbled. Think I still need Fuminari to translate most of the Kanji to English.

Reference: Rimi Natsukawa Official Website

Canon 20D Vs. Nikon D70

2005-02-02T15:38:00.000+08:00

Both are the heavyweights of the entry-level digital SLR¹ and both have its pros and cons. I don't think I have the rights and experience to lament which is good and which is not. Perhaps my dear readers can actually read through the review as provided by the below URL and gives it some justification.

Canon 20D vs. Nikon D70 Review Test

Thanks Mike for bringing this to my attention. I never realized that there are so many things that I left out when I'm comtemplating for the Nikon D70 purchase. However, I realized it was by pure luck as I purchased the camera that really suited me even though I never read through this particular review.

However, I can't help it but to notice two advices provided by the writer in terms of photography that I think should be shared to everyone reading this blog.

1. Image quality differences are a function of your skill in fine tuning each camera's adjustments and not the quality of each camera
2. The visible differences are in how you can adjust the different cameras, which becomes an issue of trying each camera and seeing if you can get your desired look with the adjustments provided.

Like I told Mike, it takes skill and not the tool that gives the result...

¹ Still don't know what is it? Please go read my previous post to know all about it...

I've Never Felt Like This Since...

2005-02-02T14:05:00.000+08:00

Today, Funkydeco and a few new guys are dropped into the real queue so they're taking the live calls from our customer. Seeing their eagerness, it seems that they have a lot of fun doing it. Me and Fuminari are placed to a less active role in terms of interacting with the customers. However both of us still play a large role to guide and give experience to the new agents to support our products.

Okay, don't worry dear readers, no rambling about stupid customers today.

Most probably the stupid cases will either come from management drones, or somewhere from our internal employee. Or perhaps some stinking Sales people. Talking about this reminded me of the fat bitch of Sales. We just replaced the system for the customer and he is awaiting for someone to collect back the faulty unit. Guess who he called?

Yes, he called Sales and the fat bitch listened to his problem and then proceed to dump his problem on us. I was looking at the case and then called her:

Me: "Can you tell me how am I going to help the customer?"
FB (Fat Bitch): "Just call him la."
Me: "You didn't listen to me. How can I help customer?"
FB: "Just call him and ask la?"
Me: "Seems like customer wanted to return the unit."
FB: "Yaaa..."
Me: "Do you think we drive all the way to Singapore to pick up customer's unit?"
FB: "Er, no. I thought you handled this also..."
Me: "Well you thought wrong."
FB: "So how ar?"
Me: "How? Of all the people in here, you asked me how?"
FB: "I thought you're the one handling it mar..."

See? This is the problem with Sales. They are so cooked up only to sell the customer that they never bothered to find out the correct number to call. All they care is about their fat paycheck and their incentive by the end of the month. I'm not going to let her live a luxury life. Especially if she keeps dumping problem to us that is non related to our job.

Me: "Have you checked with your boss on the procedure?"
FB: "They asked me to call you!"
Me: "Are you sure? What's the name of your boss?"
FB: "Er... hang on. Maybe let me check again and give you a call back."

Waiting the whole morning till the afternoon. The fat bitch never call back.

It's A Real Product?

2005-02-01T15:01:00.000+08:00

I was surprised when initially this picture (or some equivalent) was circulated through the mail. As you know, most of them were photoshopped to make believe to a certain extend that the device does exist. So I practically ignored the mail until I stumbled upon this particular webpage where they review this existing technology.

Sound surprised?

Not quite, after been working in Technical Support for 4 years, nothing surprises me anymore. However, the fact remained that this is an existing unit that is going to come around within this year. Who knows, your neighbour might already owned them already!

For more info, you can check out the following Link

Some Overzealous PR People

2005-02-01T10:46:00.000+08:00

I'm having some headache because some PR¹ people released our new LCD TV for the media for review. Now, Technical Support don't do this normally but when the media faced some issue in regards of their TV, guess who they call.

Right. Technical Support is a provider of linguished faith. We are the team that will turn water to wine and bring back the dead to life.

So I called up the customer and found that Singapore (yes, this media review is for the Singaporean market) has a special box TV that will decode those paid-per-view channels. The problem right now is our LCD TV is unable to receive the decoder display. If the decoder box was removed from the configuration, the TV works like a charm.

Now what does that tell you? LCD TV has a compatibility problem with the decoder box. We know very well of our LCD TV's configuration and it doesn't actually take a genius to figure out that there are more to the decoder box than the TV. However, these PR people are so worried that they pressure me to take a proactive action to investigate about this decoder box.

Like I have so much free time.

First of all, I don't live in Singapore. And if given the chance, I wouldn't want to live in Singapore. It's a hell hole place that spawned kiasuism in the first place. The shopping malls are fine and the girls are great but you think you really want to live in a regimented society? Thing is if I don't live there, why would I own one of their decoder box in the first place?

Second, our product are designed for RAW antenna to co-axial pictures. It's not meant for those special decoding that all TV is able to receive. In short, it's very small (19" widescreen) and is not meant to be placed in the hall. With a small LCD TV, you're supposed to put it in your kitchen or your bedroom where you can use your computer and a basic free-to-air channel to the TV.

And after I submit my findings to the PR people, guess what happened.

They came back and asked me how come I don't know how to configure the decoder box to the customer. After stating that I'm in fact staying in Malaysia, and more fact that I'm staying way up north, which is Penang, away from those losers, they still asked me how come I'm not familiar with the decoder box.

Some people are extremely dumb that I guess they've donated their brain to science before they start using it.

When finally the idea of ME UNABLE TO CONFIGURE DECODER BOX got into their head, they asked how come we release the product to Singapore knowing well that 80% of the population will use the decoder box for their paid TV? I told her I'm merely from Technical Support. Still she insist how come it was released to the public? Go figure. Seems that this woman is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot.

Told her that we're not the one responsible for release. She should check with the marketing people that did the survey and testing. Still not understanding my statement, I told her to check with the people that initiated the release of the product to the public, NOT US TECHNICAL SUPPORT.

Finally she took a hint and released the call. No wonder there are so many stupid customers around.

¹ PR stands for Public Relation. These are the people that will try to advertise our product like no tomorrow.

Photoshoot At The Beach

2005-01-31T17:25:00.000+08:00

Just a few days ago I was already all psyched up all about the photoshoot on the last Sunday. Being in a jovial mood, I was taken aback and really distance myself to the pressure of work. Why? Because we are allowed to vote which model we want to shoot! I took my pick and wait eagerly to the day. When Friday came, one of the organizer SMS me about the photoshoot and our main model was infected with dengue.

No... THIS CANNOT BE TRUE!!!

But as I scrolled down the SMS, I realized they're looking for another substitute model. Yes! My will being was rejuvenated again. So I replied the SMS for the other model. It came back with a negative reply. None of the initial two models will be there. There'll be a third unannounced model. Still being psyched up, I replied the organizer: "THE SHOW MUST GO ON" and leave at that. I put my trust and faith to the organizer to look for one really good model for us to shoot.

Saturday morning came and then Teetoo emailed us with an attachment of dreaded ugly looking person. I slumped back to the chair after seeing the photo. I'm beginning to doubt the photoshoot. I told myself, a photographer will take any picture and make it into a good composition, no matter how bad or not-camera-friendly the subject is.

The day came and Fuminari was telling everyone to lower their expectation, it will hurt less once we see the model. Another thing that really set our standards lower is that our organizer told her that the new model has a very cute voice. This sounds suspicious because in our call centre line, a woman with cute or sexy are usually the ones that has an opposite outlook.

However, everything changes when we see the model face to face. She has a very cute face coupled with attractive assets. She does a lot of pose and we're all captivated by it. She's a natural photoshoot model and it seems that if you miss a shot, chances are, you're not going to see it again. We have various fun moving from location to location and she changed about 4 times, with some combination of some free floating fabric.

It was great, and we learned a lot of great deal from the shoot. Coloring was great & the sky was in our favour (that means no Tsunami!). We wrap everything up about lunch and went over to Teetoo's place for a review of our day's work.

Know what's the best part of the deal is? The model that they're supposed to sent wasn't the same one as agreed. That means they has made a mistake and provided us with an alternative model that is fun, happy, energetic and hyperactive for us to horne our photography skills.

Alright. Enough of my rambling. If you haven't figure out by now, here's the link to her photo...

Still not enough of her? Try: Jack, Bitbytes9, Teetoo, & HCLee

Full Spectrum Warrior

2005-01-29T16:47:00.000+08:00

Initially when I saw the screenshot for Full Spectrum Warrior, my first impression is that some game company is making a FPS¹ game based on Black Hawk Down movie. After I went through some independent reviews and statements, I realized the game wasn't a FPS game at all but rather a look at the tactical side of the American Army specifically trained on urban combat. Just like what you've seen on the movie.

However, the different side of the game is that it allows player to control two 4-man team, Alpha & Bravo. Players are required to use the environment, taking cover, laying covering fire and beat the enemies at their own territories. The interesting part was that unless you plan your men's movement properly, you'll end up with 4 or more body bags shipped back to America.

The game gives you arsenals such as M249 SAW, M4 Carbine, M203 attached grenade launcher and grenades. In addition, player will have access to smoke grenade which is imperative if there are some situation where covering fire just doesn't cut it. Another interesting note is that players is able to call artillery shots, so once a situation becomes grim when an armour (tanks) is blocking, the artillery will do short work out of the soldiers.

The AI in the game is quite superb, whereby if covering fire is not laid, the enemy can escape if they see your men advancing to their position. Your men too knows how to take cover if they walked into the wrong position. If no cover could be found, they'll prone to the ground to hold position.

Since the game is presented in 3D, from a slightly elevated position of your men (3rd person view), it can easily be mistaken for a FPS game. However, by having this format, players are still limited to the sights of their men rather than having a bird's eye view like other games.

My review? A thumbs up. Get this game if American Army is your cup of tea and wanted to learn about their experience & tactics. Just hope in the future they can use this same engine for a SWAT-like game such as Rainbow Six.

¹ No no, FPS does not mean Frames Per Second but rather First Person Shooter. Popularized by Wolfenstein 3D during the late 1980s, it allows user to immerse into a virtual world where they can move as if they're there themselves.

Some People (non-customers) Are Simply Stupid!

2005-01-28T10:59:00.000+08:00

This morning received an email from an inside employee in regards for his faulty unit. As I dwelve deeper into the mail, I realized this fella has a faulty unit, damaged by flood during one of his visits to the eastern peninsula in Malaysia. I went through the attached information and find that he didn't purchase a special warranty to cover for Act of God.

So in my mail, I stated in a neutral way that I didn't see the special warranty brought.

And guess what happened.

This idiot came back, rudely writing his email stating that he is unaware of the special warranty. Now if that doesn't work, what do he do? Throw the thing into the dustbin?

How dare this idiot be so rude to us! After all, it was only my preliminary email and I was already shot for replying to him. After I collected my thoughts, I was thinking this guy must be bullshitting. There is no way he doesn't know of our contract. How so?

1. He said he is unaware of the warranty.
2. He threatened he would throw the unit to the dustbin

This indicates that the idiot do know of our warranty. If he doesn't know, how come he threatened to throw the unit into the dustbin? He must have slightly know about the warranty. If he does not, he would have asked about the warranty detail and ask for the cost of repair. It's a miracle for what little logic will benefit you.

Also worked with out Customer Sevice to comprehend this issue. Read this right, CUSTOMER SERVICE. So, I emailed him in detail about the warranty and I still can't believe that there are such idiots working in my company.

Fat Bitch Wants Sales

2005-01-27T13:27:00.000+08:00

I woke up from my sickness feeling refreshed. Ever wonder that everytime you wake up from a hangover or serious sickness, your head feels light and you somehow have the ability to think at a higher level?

Obviously my enlighten state didn't stay long when this particular fat bitch at Sales keep getting us to call the customer. She wanted the sales so bad that the customer actually considering to purchase 100 units of our high-end PDA from her. So, being desperate for the Sales, she actually asked us to call the customer. Me and Fuminari kept our cool and told her that we have lots of work to do. The reason why we wouldn't want to help the Sales is as follows:

1. Do we get compensation for helping them? After all, they drive new car every month is hardly justifiable by pushing their problem to us.
2. Everytime there are little things even down to specification, they shove it down to Technical Support's throat. We have specifically tell her NOT TO DO TRANSFER but to provide our toll free line to the customer. Does she heed to our advice? No. So, screw it, we ain't charity around these parts.
3. Customer has not even purchased the unit yet! Obviously she wanted the commission so bad that was desperate for the sale. I'm willing to bet once the customer has closed the deal, she'll just shove customer off if there are any concern.

Screw it, if she wanted the sales, she would have to learn to treat us better in the past. And she's the one always run for cover when the shit hits the fan. I guess it's time we put her up to hold the shit once and for all.

Sick Today

2005-01-26T17:26:00.000+08:00

I don't know what's wrong with me today. It started out so fine that when I went to work, I even joked with fellow colleagues about today's customer but when reached about 10am this morning, every suddenly became bad. My headache was throbbing and my neck was stiff. It even hurt to turn my neck.

I tried to hold on to the end of the day but the sickness has taken its toll. It was so unbearable that I was forced to take half a day's off. Got my permission from Queen Leader and I cabut¹ quickly and quietly from the office. When I got home, some idiot bitch cut out from the junction and I was forced to stop. Jolted myself out and point my middle finger to her. Got home about 12:45pm and slept until 5pm. However before I slept, I took a snapshot of my room. Just to show how grim I am on my condition.

So right now I just got up. Everything is fine except there is still a slight tingling sensation on my head. No, I'm not Spiderman, but it's rather distracting. Quickly publish up this blog and I'm going to get me some game to play just to get this pain away.

¹ Cabut means escape in Malay.

My Reason For My Being

2005-01-25T16:23:00.000+08:00

Recently, I just purchased a Nikon D70 camera to facilitate my curiosity into the camera world. You see, all my life, I have eat, breath and shit text. There is nothing more important to me than reading a piece of text. Thus this catering for my such long blog. And along the line, no matter how much words I put into it, I realized that a picture is always worth a thousand words. No matter how much emotion and variety I inject to a text composition, it will never rival next to a picture.

Don't get me wrong dear readers. Although I still love text but I have the curiosity of a cat about the world of photography. Fuminari and Teetoo has been lamenting all about photography and I couldn't help but to figure what is it so exciting about photography world.

Previously my father owned a film camera before (I don't remember the brand as it was purchase in the 1970s where you have to roll the film after all the 36 shots are exposed to the shutter) and I have some prior experience in the subject. Although there are many other good models out there, primarily Canon 300D & Olympus E-300, the reason I choose Nikon D70 is because of it's weight. Believe it or not, I've used enough of my father's camera and I'm very accustomated to its weight. I tried many others in the market and they're either pretty light or doesn't have the speed of consistent picture snapping.

I admit I love doing my research through the internet and I never missed any websites or forums pertaining on getting the correct picture composition. However going through the whole thing actually has put a strain to my head as I tried to incorporate what I read. However, on my last photo shoot, I realized that I still have a long way to go. Those things that I read through the internet barely grazed on the surface of the photography world. It is not something you can read as a theory and apply to it. Photography require a strict discipline, an open mind and a lot of creativity just to boot.

Most of the people who owned a Digital SLR¹ camera used to own at least a point and shoot camera before. This allow them to get some experience before moving into a more serious streamlined photography. However, I guess I'm taking the leap of faith by directly jumping into a DSLR. So how does it fare? I dare say after I experience my first photo shoot, the results of my photography... left a lot to be desired.

I realized I'm still a long way on my journey of photography. At least this would be a challenging world where a split second is all there is for a window of opportunity. Unlike text, photographs to freeze a time forever for observer to enjoy it's composition, style and most importantly, the content. A text may be immortalized on papers or electronics but a picture will stick to a person's mind far more longer than a text.

¹ SLR = Single-Lense Reflex: Basically, the lense gets the image & reflects that exact image to you through a mirror to the picture capture circuit. Standard point and shoot digital cameras uses video signal to make an adjustment. In short, DSLR is much like your old cameras, and preview is not reflected on the LCD, but instead through the viewfinder. This causes the photographer to get no prior adjustment except for his hand coordination skills and knowledge to take a good picture. However, since it's mostly manual work, a DSLR has a high quality picture capture instead of the standard digital cameras.

Photoshoot At The Botanical Garden

2005-01-24T15:06:00.000+08:00

Recently I went for a photo shoot with the gang and had a very fun time photographing the model and I have the chance to horne my photography skills to the next level. I was surprised, because during the last photoshoot, another model bailed out at the last minute. However, the model, Danielle did arrived and was showed a lot of professionalism at her work.

The skies were shady on that day and most of my shots were SHOT TO HELL! Most of them were dark and luckily there is a miracle graphic manipulation tool called Adobe Photoshop. However, this still doesn't explain lousy color composition. That means I still have lots of things to learn in digital photography.

As for her personality, Danielle is easy to work with. The gang of 9 practically photographed at anything she does! It took us about 3 hours, changing location and even her dress so that we can have a little diversity in our shoot. At the end it was great. I learned a lot of digital photography that I have never heard of. It's a surprised how technology advances these days.

For more of Danielle's gallery, click here!

Can't get enough of her? Try a few other photographer's gallery such as: Teetoo, HCLee, Bitbytes9, Jack, & Fuminari.

There Goes My Butt

2005-01-20T09:38:00.000+08:00

Hey, I don't want my butt grazed by these psychos! Just hope the store don't post those gay/homo flyer distributor around the area...

Even The Sales Are Stupid!

2005-01-19T13:30:00.000+08:00

Now, stupid Sales breeds stupid customer. There is no doubt in that. There's this Sales trying to make a big buck, handled the customer so intently that a little mishappen has caused her a lot of frustration...

Sales: "Okay, we've tried the two and it doesn't work. What else?"
Me: "Hmm, I think we can replace the unit."
Sales: "What? That's the best you can do?"
Me: "Well, what else you need of me?"
Sales: "All the things you teach me can be read from the manual!"
Me: "Exactly."
Sales: "Then what are you there for?"
Me: "To help the customer."
Sales: "Don't you have anything more technical than that?"
Me: "What do you expect? Get the customer to open the cover and solder some connection?"
Sales: "No..."
Me: "Or get them to remove the chassis and do a little EEPROM programming?"
Sales: "No..."
Me: "Then what you expect me to do?"

The Sales kept quiet. And she close the line. These Sales person has high expectation which I guess they convey to our customer which has caused us a lot of trouble. And obviously this idiot bitch is getting loads of money from this deal. And by us giving our technical expertise, do we get our share of the money? Don't think so.

So told the bitch to get off my line and get her to deal with other people.

Dumb As They Come

2005-01-19T13:15:00.000+08:00

I don't know how to start this off but a lot of our customers never seem to understand the product support level. All their primitive mind think is: if I buy from the store, I must go back from the store. What kind of mentality is this? And most of them think if they have the problem, they should just dump it on the company they bought it from.

Me: "Thank you for calling Technical Support"
Customer: "Hallo? I have a faulty Targus port..."
Me: "Oh okay, have you troublesho.."
Customer: "Listen! I want replacement for this!"
Me: "Alright, er but we do not have the parts to replace you..."
Customer: "Then what should I do?"
Me: "You can call Targus..."
Customer: "But I buy from you what..."
Me: "Yes I understand that but we do not have the parts..."
Customer: "Then what should I do?"
Me: "Call Targus. I have the number here..."
Customer: "What? I buy from you and you expect me to call them?"
Me: "Yea..."
Customer: "Aren't you the Technical Support?"
Me: "Yes..."
Customer: "Then how come you cannot replace the part for this?"

I cannot believe this worman can beat the rest of the 1,000,000 sperm...

Me: "Look, the fact is that we may sell you the other branded stuff, but we do not have the replacement for change. And you are in fact calling to the Technical Support for our branded products!"
Customer: "Yea but still I was told to call this number!"
Me: "Can I have the person's name?"
Customer: "I cannot remember..."

This is usually what always happened. Some idiots from Sales or other department blindly give our support number not knowing whether it's the correct number or not. Usually when customer realized they've called the wrong number, they'll be the one shouting at the end. I really wish I could get the fella's name and hang him/her upside down and burn 'em. Just like St. Peter.

Me: "In any rate, I think you should call the Sales and spell out your concern. I believe they'll deny you of this, which that is why I asked you to call to Targus directly."
Customer: (frustrated) "Okay in that case, nevermind!"

Phone slammed and another victory for Technical Support. Why this customer never understand the consumer term of usage. The manual will state clearly on number to call. Just like an idiot buying a stereo installed from the car manufacturer and wanted to claim the warranty from them...

Idiots. Just simply a stubborn idiot who refused to take the instruction. Another stubborn idiot who wanted an easy life by dumping her problem to other people. I make sure that the stupid bitch will have no such luxury since she never even bother to listen to the rationality of her situation.

How Nerdy I Am?

2005-01-18T20:29:00.000+08:00

Just goes to show how nerdy I am... *sigh*

Tiberium Tree

2005-01-18T13:37:00.000+08:00

Hmm, this does look like something fallen out of the star and planted itself right in our own backyard! With it's eerish texture and odd placed mounts, I'd say it's something alien. Perhaps even a mutated Tiberium tree. Yes! Those who have played Command & Conquer will know what it's all about.

Nothing to fear, dear readers for that's still a perfect tree that's been growing normally at a normal rate. Don't believe me? Check this out.

What Are These People Up To?

2005-01-17T18:53:00.000+08:00

Sometimes I wonder what the driver was thinking by installing such a large spoiler on his car. Come to think of it, it DOES SPOIL the car's image. I know that these fellas took the idea from Formula One (F1) but somehow they never understand the significant usage in F1. The reason it was placed at the first place is to have an inverted Bernoulli Effect¹.

By having an inverted wingspan, the stability of a car is proportional to the speed. Therefore, when making a maneuver, the car can actually make a remarkable tight turn around the corner.

The same concept was taken from the F1 but somehow the idea wasn't placed for a practical usage but somewhat was used for more ornamental looks of a car. And thus, back to our main topics, the joker above installed a really really large spoiler. So, what does he actually archieve other than drawing attention to people beside him? Some of my creative friends thought of spraying the spoiler with lewd remark. Others are more aggressive comes out with an idea to 'reinvert' the spoiler, so theoretically when the car goes fast enough, it will lift the car.

¹ Bernoulli Effect states that by having air to pass through a surface (large surface on top while small surface on the bottom) will cause low pressure to accumulate on the top surface, therefore creating a lift. An inverted Bernoulli Effect will reverse the effect and used widely in race cars especially F1.

Funny Warning

2005-01-17T10:05:00.000+08:00

Just went through some manual and found a very funny warning. Just goes to show what the manual makers are really expecting from their half-wit customers. And the product manual comes from a reputable company with quite a high end product that require technical skill to understand.

If you cannot read the above picture, it says:

When operating the diopter adjustment control with your eye to the viewfinder, be careful not to put your finger or fingernails in your eye.

I guess stupid people are everywhere.

Haley Cole: "I see stupid people..."

Long Winded Customer

2005-01-14T13:37:00.000+08:00

Some customers are just plain stupid while some are just pain in the ass (PITA). Recently this bastard called in and took nearly about 1 1/2 hour of my time, lamenting about his stuff. You see, this idiot found the software is working slowly on his PDA while the same software runs normally on his friend's PDA. A quick investigation reveals his colleague is an old XScale 400Mhz system with Pocket PC 2003 while this idiot's system has XScale 624 Mhz with Pocket PC 2003 Second Edition.

Now, the customer and I were talking about Betaplayer and the bastard seems to know what I'm talking about. He even consent that it's true the same software can run better on the older system but not on the new ones because they are not written for the code. And yet this idiot still told me he is not satisfied.

Why can't this bloody bugger understand that he hates the hardware because there are no softwares written for it as yet? And yet, this long winded bastard will keep telling he's expecting more of our product and how our product sucks this and that. Felt like giving the car analogy to him again but I know being a long-winded bastard, I'd probably lose my wind halfway before I could tire him...

Early Morning Glory

2005-01-14T07:45:00.000+08:00

I have to come early in order NOT TO GET CAUGHT IN THE STUPID JAM! Have you Penangties realize that the road to Intel/Agilent will get congested between 0700 and 0830? Have the companies in the area change the working time to an earlier state? Or it has just become the norm? In anyways, I really cannot stand the traffic. Just imagine a straight road without any hassle and you'd get caught because some idiots just wanted to go work as well.

Another stupid thing that they have made is that the coastal highway road is expanded near the congested area. Take a look at the picture above. You think this will reduce the traffic. To my estimation based on the calculation of logic and the behaviors of Penang driver, I say this will increase the traffic. Why?

First, drivers who are driving coming from the bottom will try to squeeze in the expanded path. However, some idiots who wanted to turn in left will either cut through the line and will try to squeeze through since there are extra space. Another reason why it wouldn't work is that drivers driving straight won't just take the small extended road. They'd rather go with the big road.

I have a good idea. If the government would want to reduce the traffic, expand the whole coastal highway. However, if they wanted to put on a cost saving, then change the entire road to a one way street. Remember, the whole industrial free trade zone is a large area surrounded by large road. So why not convert these ring roads as a one way street? That way we can be sure the system can disperse the traffic fast enough as the vehicles are coming in.

ID-ten-T Problem

2005-01-13T13:02:00.000+08:00

Why do I always get some really really stupid customer that never use common sense to do things?

Me: "Thank you for calling Technical Support..."
Customer: "Hallo Hallo?"

There was noise at the background. Obviously this idiot was at lunch.

Me: "Yes, how can I help you?"
Customer: "I don't know how to synch my... my PDA... " *slurp*

WTF... is this imbecile drinking?

Customer: "*crunching sound* mmmmm I hav... mmmm mmmmm PDA mmmm mmmm"

Definately the idiot is having lunch now. How is he going to talk properly when there is food in his mouth? And I really look down on his mother, doesn't she teach her son not to talk when eating? And I have to put up such crap to the idiot.

Me: "Sir, can you please call back after you have the lunch?"
Customer: *munching* "Why?
Me: "Because I hardly can hear and understand you with all the ruckuss running behind!"
Customer: *slurping* "Oh okay..."

Don't you wish you get to throw this idiot to an incoming harvester?

Sometimes They Tell Stupid Things

2005-01-12T16:28:00.000+08:00

Queen Leader came stomping to my and Fuminari's cubicle and reported that we performed badly on our charts. She then lay out the whole nine yards and asked us to provide GOLD service to the customer.

Now, what the HELL is a GOLD service?

According to Queen Leader's definition, is that to resolve customer's issue in one call, with such impact that it will give an excellent customer experience.

Wouldn't that contradict some problem when we provide the greatest service rendered to mankind, that we will encourage customer to call again? And don't forget these idiots are really stupid people with eagerness of a child, so when they received their new product, they keep calling us without stop. When we closed the call and asked them: "Is there anything else?" that they'll say no. However, 5 minutes later, they'll call back with another issue.

Another problem occured when our lousy performance is because our low call rate. Now, when we're having a low call rate, stuffed together with taking other department's call has caused our overall performance to plummet because we have a lower tolerance threshold on our matrices. Therefore, we got lousier performance by helping other people.

Now, tell me again, how do we provide GOLD service when all we get is lousy performance by helping other queue?

Idiot Of The Day

2005-01-11T13:21:00.000+08:00

Some idiotic customers would never learn to use their common sense.

Me: "Thank you for calling Technical Support."
Customer: "Hi, I have a desktop."
Me: "Er, you're aware that you have to push option 2 when you dial to the toll free?"
Customer: "Yes, but no one answered my call."
Me: "Uh huh..." (waited for a long silence)
Customer: "Can you transfer me to them?"
Me: "I don't have the option." (waiting for a long silence again)
Customer: "I tried to call but it was cut off."

What a load of croak shit!

Me: "Well, you still have to call them back perhaps after 3?"
Customer: "I tried for about an hour already."

Why can't this bastard realized that he WILL GET NOTHING if he called the wrong line? Oh I remember now, this bastard is our customer. And being a customer, they're stupid & ignorant as always.

Me: "Well, try after 3. Do you realize that these people have to go for lunch too?"

Then it went quiet again. Since he is playing the quiet game, I'll play it too.

Customer: "But I keep getting disconnected."
Me: "Well, perhaps you'll try another phone?"
Customer: "Can't you help me?"
Me: "Unless you own a PDAs & Projectors..."
Customer: "Okay nevermind then..."

I somehow wondered about the Singaporean education. Why's the point driving up their education till their students went suicidal when all they ever produce are idiots over the phone? Even with such high standard of education, they never even try online support, left alone having some good listening skills over the telephone?

And most of the problem is that these imbecile housewives will call with their computer system, stating their sons are somewhere else and not with the computer, and they would just dump their problem, not knowing that they're pushing the wrong option. And they expect everything will be prepared for them.

No Lunch

2005-01-10T11:05:00.000+08:00

Okay, today there's a lot of calls from customer. Especially on Mondays. Ever wonder why this happened? Are the customers so desperate to a point that they must have computer problems every Saturdays & Sundays? Well, I guess that's the problem when we sell the lowest price around. Every Tom, Dick and Harry wants to own a piece and guess their intelligence and mentalities are not prepared for what's installed for them. All they know is that if there is a problem, the heavenly Technical Support would just blow the problem away.

Yeah right. Blow me.

So we have this a management drone who's doing the phone management of our telephony. He/She will be the one shuffling agent between queues so that it the affected queue won't suffer if there is a call spike. And guess what. Since everybody is busy except for me and Fuminari, they decided to take him off the queue to support the notebooks. I didn't say this is back but on a Monday, some idiot will just call in without knowing what's his system and with me alone in the queue, I'll be drowned when the idiots decided to call.

And the management drone doesn't seem to know what this would do to our queue. If such things were to happen (it has happened before), all we do is to have a lower performance by the end of the day. And these idiots never realize that a sinking tugboat can do nothing to help a sinking oil tanker.

Just go figures. Therefore, I gotta take my lunch in the office. Jeeze!

Octopussy At It's Worst

2005-01-07T14:40:00.000+08:00

Today me and Fuminari decided to lunch in because he has a lot of escalation to settle and I have nothing else better to do than to bath in a 100 degree Celsius baking sun going out for lunch. So, we both decided to lunch in. What a loyal employee, giving 110% to the company! *booing at the background*

Basically we both ordered chicken rice. However, the tar-pau¹ fellow came back with an additional rice packet. So, I decided to take them as I was still hungry. Fuminari, on the other hand received a nasi lemak² gift from his 'girlfriend'.

However, in due course, Fuminari wasn't the biggest fan when it comes to cuttlefish, and the nasi lemak is full with anchovies and cuttlefish. And at the same time, the whole thing has a very perculiar smell which I thought maybe is the cuttlefish that is giving the bad smell. So I took it from him and gulped down with my chicken rice.

Initially it was alright but all of a sudden, the smell of the cuttlefish seems to fill my throat. It felt sickening to the stomach to a point where I nearly puked. Fuminari realized my condition asked me to get a cup of coffee to put away the smell. I quickly got up but a damn customer called in just before I could put the phone on hold! Curse that customer! I quickly brush away the customer and went for our pantry. I ordered a thick black coffee and started to put the cup near to my nose.

Luck is on my side that I didn't puke first. After staying for about half an hour, the smell dies down after I put the coffee smell to my nose long enough. I even gulped down to coffee to make sure the coffee aroma wash the cuttlefish smell away. That's one cuttlefish that I won't be eating for a long time to come...

¹ Tar-Pau is basically a take-away food purchase

² Nasi Lemak is a made from a combination of rice & coconut milk. This will produce a very heavy aroma of the rice and it's tasty when it eaten with anchovies & sambal³

³ Sambal is made from prawn paste, spices & chili meshed up together to produce a strong smelled paste and it's used to eat along with rice. Usually it's called Sambal Belacan, where Belacan is a prawn paste.

The Stupidest Customer I've Ever Found

2005-01-07T10:30:00.000+08:00

I've been a tech support for 4 years and this is the first time I've encountered someone so stupid. I'm not surprised but I was given the chance to evaluate our customer, this idiot lady is the most stupidest bitch I've ever found.

Me: "Thank you for calling technical support."
Customer: "I have a problem printing."

Sounds suspicious.

Me: "May I know the model of the computer?"
Customer: "I don't know."
Me: "Okay, what can you see in front of the computer panel?"
Customer: "Tsunami."
Me: "That's not our brand."
Customer: "Yes, that's not your brand. I only have your monitor."
Me: "Then do you have a monitor problem?"
Customer: "No, I have a problem printing."
Me: "Is it our printer?"
Customer: "No, that's a Canon."
Me: "Then why are you calling our line?"
Customer: "I used to own your computer."
Me: "Are you using them now?"
Customer: "No."
Me: "So?"

Somehow this idiotic bitch still doesn't understand.

Customer: "I just have a problem printing."
Me: "Yes, then you either have to call the person that has sold or setup the computer for you."
Customer: "Look, I don't care what brand is it. I just want my printing fixed."
Me: "How would I know how to troubleshoot? We're only trained in our products."
Customer: "Then I'll buy your computer!"
Me: "Then do you have the serial number?"
Customer: "No. Look, I just had a problem with my BMW. So when I have a problem, I just changed to Mercedes."

Alright, I love it when customer put their situation in to car analogy.

Me: "Okay, since you put it that way, if you have a problem with your BMW, do you go for an authorized Mercedes mechanics?"
Customer: "No, it's not the same."
Me: "It is the same!"
Customer: "Cars and computers are not the same!"
Me: "But you put it that way first."
Customer: "Why can't you help me?"
Me: "Because you are calling to the PDA & Projector support!"
Customer: "What's that?"
Me: "You know we're supporting the projectors..."
Customer: "Yeah but what's a projector?"
Me: "Projector, something that projects a display to the screen?"
Customer: "It's not a computer?"
Me: "No!"
Customer: "Then can't you help me?"
Me: "I would if I know how to troubleshoot a printer problem. And moreover, that's not our computer."
Customer: "How come you don't know?"

I wish I could drop a nuke on this rich bitch's ass. Somehow these rich assholes are so cooked up with their rich lifestyle that they don't enjoy those simple things anymore like computers. These low-IQ bastards has been living lavishly that they tend to show off every opportunity they have. So, how do I deal with these rich bastards? I make their life a living hell. And especially if they are stupid, I'll enjoy it even more.

Me: "Because I'm not trained for it."
Customer: "Then what do you know?"
Me: "Support our own product, specifically PDA & Projectors."
Customer: "So where do I call for this?"
Me: "Why don't you call the Sales?"

Line dropped. Think the idiot has enough of her stupidity for the day. I sure do hope that she have a bad omen in store for her in the future. Such bitch shouldn't have an easy life, since she have no qualm on making a useful thought on other people's life.

IT Monkeys Are At It Again!

2005-01-07T09:15:00.000+08:00

Alright, came in early in the morning and tried to connect to our internal company messenger. It cannot be connected. It gives the error because the 'Service is temporarily unavailable'. Hell, more problems from the monkey who's handling our network.

Then my twin¹ from US then forwarded an email from our IT monkeys saying that my system is infected with a virus. And guess what, they asked me to do a patch! Checked and found my desktop is running Windows XP SP1 (which is prepared by the IT monkeys by the way) and they have the audacity to send a mail like this.

After patching the system, I thought the problem has been fixed. Found out my Anti Virus is not running. Argh, now I have to waste my time calling them up to ask them about Anti Virus. And the idiot helpdesk on the other line said: "I'll get someone to attend to you." Go figures. And they dare to say they can support our customers better than us.

Checked on our internal messenger. Still not working. Go figures.

¹ He is considered so because we have the same login name. Though we have to use different emails but our login continues to be the same. And because of that, many people, ranging from IT monkeys to management drones always have trouble of checking the credential in the global directory and therefore, they always sent the mail to the wrong guy.

DivX Stuff

2005-01-06T13:16:00.000+08:00

Okay, this is not meant for the public audience but rather of a reminder to myself on what to check on during a conversion of any movies to DivX.

Filters (in order):
1. Deinterlace (mode: blend)
2. Crop
3. Resize (size & method adjust accordingly)

Make sure resize follows the DivX standard of 16 multiplier. E.g:

1. 720 x 480 -> 640 x ...
2. Formula: 720 / 640 = 480 / Z
3. Algebraic transfer: Z = 480 * 640 / 720 = 426.667
4. Check the nearest 16 multiplier: 416 (10 pixel) > 426.667 > 432 (6 pixel)
5. 720 x 480 -> 640 x 432 (we take the smallest pixel difference)

DivX Configuration:
1. Encode Performance: Slow
2. Bitrate: 1022 (for small screen devices) / 2044 (for notebooks or desktops)
3. Off for all: Psychovisual Enhancement, Enable Crop & Enable Resize
4. Source Preprocessing: ~~Light~~ none
5. Interlacing: Progressive Source
6. Scene change threshold: 50%
7. Max Keyframe interval: 300
8. Quantization type: H.263

Must have links:
VirtualDub
DivX

Please Find A Better Excuse To Lie

2005-01-05T16:51:00.000+08:00

Somehow from where I'm working, there's always some new things the customer will cook up to bother Technical Support. Here I was sitting the whole afternoon with Fuminari. As usual, the calls will flood in and we're full on our hands. Now, this idiotic customer called to our Sales line and complained that he cannot get through to our tech support line and is, in fact, quite angry.

I mean what are the odds?

If the idiot wanted to lie, all he has to do is to find a better excuse. And if you do make a lie, make sure it sticks and it makes perfect sense. Nothing like "NO ONE TAKE MY CALLS" when both of us are sitting our ass off playing games. Trash the Sales up, ask her to get the customer to call our line again, make sure she provided the correct number and option.

My Bid For Charity Didn't Go As Planned

2005-01-05T14:27:00.000+08:00

Like what I went through yesterday, this ASSistant seem to have trouble of comprehending a situation. How so? Since I developed and managed to get the online form running, there are a lof of queries like: "How big is XXL?" or "Can I get the picture?". Since I'm just the guy configuring the server at the back end, don't you think getting this information is supposed to be taken up by a person who ordered the T-Shirt at the first place? I guessed wrong.

It seems that the ASSistant doesn't understand my request over the email. Somehow I doubt it's my language or my grammar as I only typed in these simple sentences:

"May we have the T-Shirt picture for the website reference and the actual size (in inches or cm) for all the 5 sizes (S, M, L, XL, XXL)?"

She came over to my place and asked me what do I really want? So I told her that many employees wanted the picture up so that they know how the T-Shirt would look like, and at the same time, provide them the size of the T-Shirt so that they can roughly estimate their size.

Guess, what she did.

The ASSistant emailed to the manager: "I cannot understand what Jase wants. Perhaps you can communicate with him and let me know how we going to proceed with this."

And I thought our customers are bad enough.

Doing My Bid For Charity

2005-01-04T13:43:00.000+08:00

Okay here am I working my ass off in the morning answering to hordes of customers (I guess Sales must have made an impact again) when one of the old project manager walked up to me.

Manager: "Dude, really need your help."
Me: "What up?"
Manager: "We need a fast coder, someone with your capabilities."
Me: "Anyone you have in mind?"
Manager: "Yeah, you!"

Hmm, looks like these guys actually might be serious for this once.

Me: "Okay, so what you need for the project?"
Manager: "Orait, we need an online order form. Something like purchasing book over Ebay but the collection will manually be done by our administrator. This is used for us to sell T-Shirt & bookmarks and the fund collected will be used to aid the tsunami victims."
Me: "Sounds fair. What is my time limit?"
Manager: "Eight hours."
Me: "You got yourself a deal. What you need on the online form?"
Manager: "We're selling t-shirts and bookmarks."
Me: "Now remember this, a deal is always a deal."
Manager: "Deal!"

So I've coded the online form whole morning and I finally finished it, coupled with lots of filter, help, description and even the nifty little check out button. Once my eight hours are up, I presented the project to the manager. The manager approved of the project. However, there's his idiot assistant which came around and told me they're not selling bookmark anymore.

This has caused a problem because to make a job fast, I choose to hardcode my project. A softcode project will take longer to complete but it'll be a hassle-free if they choose to do modification on the content.

Well, how can that be? Yours truly is a master coder and actually I have ways to have a shortcut on the process. However, since the idiot ~~ASShole~~ ASSistant actually blindly started this project without a proper through check, I'll give her a real problem just to boot.

So back to the manager...

Me: "Well, if you want me to make this whole changes, it would take another 8 hours."
Manager: "Eh, cannot make it faster ar?"
Me: "I don't have the resources."
Manager's Assistant: "But since you have the original code, you can rewrite the whole thing faster mar!"
Me: "Perhaps you care to write the code?"

The ASSistant kept quiet during the whole discussion. Apparently she's the one responsible for the procurement of the T-Shirts and bookmarks. She already knew that the bookmark sale was off even before the manager approached me for this project. Since she didn't update me during the project initiation, I'll make sure she will have a hard time dealing with me.

Caught This Bloody Liar Part II

2005-01-03T13:51:00.000+08:00

Liar liar pants on fire! As my previous post indicated, that this idiot has received a new unit and true enough the problem is duplicated on the new unit. What does this tell you? That means our PDA unit is working as designed!

However, being a kiasu¹ person from kiasu land², this idiot actually went to our Customer Service and escalated this case and expected to receive a brand new upgraded unit for his trouble. Not willing to loose out, this idiot even asked for extra accessories. Our in-house escalation team agent came over to my place and asked about the case.

I showed her all there is about this case and even demo'ed the thing in front for her. Since there are no arguement on the technical side of the unit, she'll be bringing some hellfire to the customer's claim. I guess he's trying very hard to con the Customer Service now, not knowing they're working very close with Technical Support for technical advice.

Some people are just greedy and I won't give in to that. Somehow some of our greedy customer never seem to get the concept: "You get what you paid for."

¹ Kiasu is derived from the Hokkien word meaning "Scared to lose"

² Kiasu Land is where all the kiasu people comes from. And the most highly concentrated kiasu people are located in Singapore.

Some Characters Review

2005-01-02T20:12:00.000+08:00

Alright, I think I might need to update this post in the future. What I have here is the people that will be featured in my blog. Some of them are my colleagues and some might be even be a zany crewmember that we might grow to love. Who knows what lurk in the minds of these well gifted individual (or not!)? Well, let's get on with the show.

Fuminari
He's my best friend in the whole wide world. *UWEK* *PUKE*. Sorry dudes, just that we used to be ex-team mates. Why? Well, because previously we both are the only ones supporting PDA & Projector for Malaysian & Singaporean customer. Being a good friend, we shared a lot of passion (NO NO, NOT GAY AGAIN! IT DOES SOUND GAY ISN'T IT?) like camera (yes, he put a spell on me that couldn't be removed), Playstation 2, computers, gadgets, & many other stuff. Yes, he's the official J-Freak and he was not known as that for nothing! He has extensive knowledge on the Japanese customs, cultures, language and even down to their writings! And you guess it, that's where he gets this nickname of his: Fuminari is actually the Japanese equivalent of his Chinese name!
Website: Fotopages & Fotopic

Ashotiwoth (sometimes credited as Anand)
He's a special guy with a special talent. Yes, he can speak a perfect Penang Hokkien and southern Thai. Yes, this bilingual colleague and friend is great to work with and shared a lot of similar passion with the rest of the gang. Just by being able to speak Thai, he's charged to support the Thai customer and has been working closely with his current queue leader, Tai Khar Cheh (a mob's Big Sister).
Website: Ashotiwoth.com

Tee Too
He's a friend of Fuminari, and they knew each other from their weekly bowling sessions. He works in some architect company and he a lot creative ideas. Take a look at his album gallery and how he managed to compose so much creative shots! Truly one of the great masters in our small group of friends. We still have a lot to learn from him! However having such an intellectual persona, he's a very down to earth guy and you never expect it when he can just whip out an idea that will blast you away...
Website: Pbase & Fotopages

Ms. Ong / Mrs. Khoo
He's actually one of our prominent Tech Support guru who believes in Star Wars, Star Trek, South Park & Linux. Being a supporter of the rebellion, this walking guru is a testament of a real geek at work. And the best thing was, this guy has a 20/20 vision that doesn't require him to wear any spectacles. However having a perfect skin and a 'beautiful' face, we keep referring 'him' as 'her' during our conversation. And since he got married to a woman with the maiden name Khoo, we decided to update his name to Mrs. Khoo. Another way to address him is Mdm. Ong. Well go figures!

Tai Khar Cheh (Big Sister)
Well, she and I used to work under The Dog's 'excellent' team. Somewhere during the line of work, after I escaped from The Dog's clutches, I found her leaving his team as well. She knew the constraint of the Dog's bad manners and she has excellent leadership skills. That's why she was known as Tai Khar Cheh in our office for she really get up close and personal when doing her job. Currently Ashotiwoth's working under her, which I consider that lucky devil has a huge chance of succeeding in his queue. Being born in the year of the Boar, she has a very resilient attitude and tends to go ballistic. Also known as suah-tu (wild boar in Hokkien) to a close group of friends/colleagues.

Queen Leader
She is my ex-queue leader relied heavily on her manager. I've never seen a person so determined to get this position with her clueless attitude. However, her excellent stomping and nitpicking skills earned the attention of most of the people working alongside her. After working with her a while, I realized she wasn't the one that can handle the pressure in Technical Support. Don't get me wrong but she tends to lose herself when that problem occured.

Neo
Neo got his nickname from the movie The Matrix. Boasting an efficient Level 2 team with excellent track record of his justifying skills, he is the one that can say NO and caused every situation to stop dead on its track. He's the one that has unlimited Superman-like power that will shake the foundation of any individual or department that is trying to screw his subordinates. Believe it or not, he's the only person in the whole company to drives a Jaguar, which makes him quite a highly reputated character in the organization.

The Dog
A testament of a greedy person with self centered personality, The Dog would like bother other people with his 'initiative' projects and loves to take the credit. Being an evil person as he is, he happened to be an ex-Queue Leader to Ms. Ong / Mrs. Khoo, Tai Khar Cheh & me. We used to be his favorite target to vent off his anger. Somewhere during the line, I was the first to leave his hellish team, Ms. Ong / Mrs. Khoo went for a higher technical post while Tai Khar Cheh handled our Thai team. Right now, he is his own team and unable to find anyone for him to command, he goes around sniffing out people's mistake and tries very hard to find work because if there is an evaluation, he'd find his performance review fits no more than a page of paper.

ASSistant
This Indonesian ~~maid~~ administrator came to work with her brain was actually left at home. You can see her work pattern shifted erratically without any prior notice. Since her doesn't have any active neural pathways, you'll find her asking stupid question, do stupid things and even being even a stupid person. I wonder why they could find such person to work as an administrator was beyond me. Who knows, perhaps she takes cheap wages?

Fat Bitch
Have you seen anyone who just love the money but hates the trouble? Fat bitch is such a person that she will win as many customer with her tele-persona but once the shit hits the fan, she'll run and pull Technical Support as a cover. Truly a very irritating bitch, she will keep throwing even small details such as specification under the pretense that "she doesn't know" and "she isn't a technical person". I don't suppose that once she becomes a car salesman, she would still be clueless on horse power and stuff like that...

Scream Queen
Scream Queen is one such person that loves the attention of the opposite sex. She loves talking and communicating and I've never seen anyone who's more of an attention-whore than her. Well, everyone has their weak point. Aside from that, she was a Scream Queen. Even Jamie Lee Curtis past titled were stripped clean off by this girl. She can scream till the hall breaks into pieces. Overall, she jumpy and a little childish but so far everything was forgiven because she's basically still a child at heart.

A, Partner-In-Crime
Okay, I'm working very closely with A, who's the Team Leader monitoring the queue. Although I have my share of responsibility with him, my objective isn't shared closely with him. While he has lots of management things coming at him, I'm still within the confines of the technical side so I'm basically still a free agent albeit still was tied down to some of the matrices the agents are measured. Oh well, still new to my company, he's very light hearted and try to take everything in a more relaxed pace.

A Whole Lot Of New Stuffs

2005-01-02T18:06:00.000+08:00

Well, it's 2005 and usually we got a lot of new goals that we wish to attain. Fortunately for me, those new goals came right to my step.

Job Scope Change
There are some work scope shift adjustments. I'll be working on a slightly changed basis supporting a few different customers. Fuminari will be the senior of the PDA & Projector Support accompanied by many fresh faces. I'm gonna miss that guy but I believe with the different work definition, we can finally do outside activities together! No no, nothing GAY! What I meant was like lunch, those photoshoot activities and heck, we can even take the same day for our annual leaves!

Just go by means that we're not constrained by our responsibility anymore. For those who didn't follow much on our stories, Fuminari and me are the only person in our company that support PDA & Projectors and because of that, when he does take an annual leave, I would have to work because there can never be two of us taking leave at the same time! Sepang Race Queens, here we come!

New Computer
In fact, a few days ago, I was so busy that I was unable to post a few blogs because of a new computer I received. According to our Process Engineer (he's the guy that shuffles the backend and upgrading our standard computer equipment), my processor was the lowest amongst my team member (being only a Pentium III 550 Mhz or so). Been testing this baby for the last 3 days and was quite impressed with its speed. Featuring a Pentium 4 2.66 Ghz and 512 MB worth of memory, my whole workload seem to be lifted and it felt like I'm flying instead of crawling when updating our customer records.

However, Ms. Ong / Mrs. Khoo told me that I'll be getting a new notebook as well, so I might go easy on the computer. Asked him why can't I keep the notebook I have now? It's a workstation notebook with Quadro 4 Go graphics card and a Pentium 4 M processor! It relatively gives me a really good performance and I have no wish to use other new sissified notebooks. But, rules and rules and I'm forced to accept the new notebooks in the future instead of keeping the desktop. *sigh*

Camera Galore
Finally sold my stock option after being kept in the company for God knows how long. Sold it for cash and decided it is time to get me a good digital camera. It's been too long that I lament about the Panasonic FZ20 (I love the zoom feature) but since I've got some extra cash, I was thinking why not go for the extra mile? Then suddenly the Digital SLR¹ camera thought came into my mind. What's the best camera there is within my budget?

Fuminari suggested instead of staying on a prosumer point-and-shoot and faced with a lot of stock shortage problem², he initially advised me to get a Canon 300D (also known as Digital Rebel in the States or Digital Kiss in Japan) because it's only a few RM³ hundred extra from the Panasonic FZ20. After checking the camera details from the shop, we found that the relatively cheap priced DSLR⁴ actually comes with a shortcoming: it doesn't come with a battery pack! With the whole package, it comes with extra RM 450, which roughly matched the price on the street! And if I add another few hundred, I might actually get a Nikon D70!

¹ SLR = Single-Lense Reflex: Basically, the lense gets the image & reflects that exact image to you through a mirror to the picture capture circuit. Standard point and shoot digital cameras uses video signal to make an adjustment. In short, DSLR is much like your old cameras, and preview is not reflected on the LCD, but instead through the viewfinder. This causes the photographer to get no prior adjustment except for his hand coordination skills and knowledge to take a good picture. However, since it's mostly manual work, a DSLR has a high quality picture capture instead of the standard digital cameras.

² At this time and date of writing, Panasonic FZ20 has a notorious stock shortage problem in Malaysia. Sure the product was great but all the stocks have to pass through Hong Kong, and because it's a hot-cake, we have only few units left to be sold in Malaysia.

³ RM = Ringgit Malaysia, which is the currency of our monetary in Malaysia. Exchange rate goes roughly about USD 1 to RM 3.8.

⁴ DSLR = Digital SLR. Duh!

A Happy New Year

2005-01-01T14:25:00.000+08:00

Yeah, I received many greetings from SMS to email even down to a simple call. Yes it's a new year and we all have new resolutions. As for me, I usually answer with a simple wish and some even I SMS/email to them to refer to this blog.

Sorry as most of my friends called me up exactly at 12 for the New Year. Sorry guys and girls, I'm not kissing anyone at home. Most probably what I did was kissing my pillow as I had an exhausting day because Fuminari took the day off and still showed up at work! Anyway the reason he did that was because of the Performance Review we got to write and the deadline was by 31st December 2004!

Managed to write up a lot of market-speak gimmick like:
1. Deliver performance with little escalation impact
2. Maximizing resource and analyzing various avenues for performance goal
3. Total input to generate positive customer experience

Yeah, those management drone love those type of language. Wonder what would they do without us tech writing all those shit for them?

Support & Movies

2004-12-29T11:21:00.000+08:00

Christmas just passed & New Year is approaching. And there never seem to be a short supply of customers that called in. Especially the stupid ones.

Me: "Thank you for calling Technical Support."
Customer: "I want to know how much is the desktop machine you advertised in the newspaper."
Me: "Eh? Sir, you're calling to the Technical Support."
Customer: "Oh, you don't do Sales?"
Me: "No, for that you have to call to the Sales team to check on the price."
Customer: "Oh..." (wait for about 10 seconds) "So you don't know the price?"

It's a surprise how many of these people we encounter during my tenure course on becoming the technical support guy. And most of them will even corner you with a question like:

Customer: "What do you mean you don't know how to run Adobe Photoshop?"

Or

Customer: "I don't care. You sell me this computer and you must teach me to use Mathlab¹!"

Fuminari lend me this show titled Lolita. A little disturbing movie, detailing an old guy attacted to a 14 year old girl. He then procees to marry his mother just to get close to her. After watching the show, I was appalled. I just don't know what to say about the movie. If you guys loved those type of disturbing movies like Boogie Nights, then most probably this show is well suited for you.

Then some customer called to chase on the part that he received was defective. Checked and find that I cannot dispatch the part for the customer. After much more in-depth investigation, I found that our back-end idiot didn't update the database, and it has caused us a lot of problem. I shot a mail to them and that rattled them for a while.

¹ Mathlab is a program used by engineer to do advanced mathematical calculation to check the circuits in an electronics components. The problem is that usually the people using Mathlab is an engineer and engineers are supposed not to have problem using the program itself.

Caught This Bloody Liar

2004-12-27T17:12:00.000+08:00

Just encountered some lying customer today. I can't exactly explain

Me: "Thank you for calling Technical Support..."
Customer: "Hi, I have this PDA unit..."
Me: "Okay, what seem to be the problem?"
Customer: "I have this problem with the reddish on the font when I'm selecting..."
Me: "Hmm, seem to be a ClearType font and it has something to do with the resolution..."
Customer: "Eh, don't bullshit me lar. I'm a technical person myself and I know this has nothing to do with that."

What a load of crap! I had the unit in front of me and when we disable the thing, it resolved the problem immediately. And this idiot dare to say he's a technical person. I suspect that this idiot is trying to swindle a new unit. And this idiot actually have the nerve to say I'm bullshitting him. I know by the tone of his voice that this idiot is a liar and from the troubleshooting step it states that customer should be seeing the samething.

Me: "Are you sure? Because I have a unit here that says otherwise."
Customer: "Okay, then what should I do?"
Me: "Just disable the ClearType font."
Customer: "I disabled it and it doesn't work."

And he twisted his words just like that. We know this is a trait of a liar.

Me: "Are you sure you've disabled the ClearType?"
Customer: "Yes I did. And I never have that problem with iPaqs!"

Here customer comes telling us on how other brands are better than ours. I got a friend working in Compaq and he said there are just as much customer reporting that our brands are better than theirs when they're talking to them.

Oh crap, this bloody Singaporean idiot just ruined my beautiful day.

Two Balls

2004-12-27T13:43:00.000+08:00

No, nothing naughty with the title above, but rather I just brought a rather two interesting balls that you can swirl around your hand. It's called the Chinese health ball. It's interesting to note that while the ball might look like an oversized guli¹, it's actually fun to manipulate the balls while maintaining one's health. This is because in Chinese traditional health care, the movement of the fingers and the base of your foot have effects on your health.

This is what I got from the small print on the box:

Instruction for Cloisonne Health Ball. With more than 700 years history, the Health Ball dates back to the Ming Dynasty. The two balls can produce nice sound of high and low respectively when Play in the palm, which help to remove diseases. Its health-caring function comes from the ideal of traditional Chinese medicine: that fingers are closely connected with ones health. Through fingers movement, the function of ones brain and internal organs can be strengthened, so as to help blood circulation and to remove the fatigue. It is good for ones health and make long-lived.

Interesting isn't it? Our health is connected well on our hands and legs. Wonder what will happen to those people that were amputated?

¹ Guli is a glass round marble that we used to play when we're small. It's kind of like collecting rubber bands. You bet the game with rubber bands and while the ante is on stake, you need to use your skills to win the game and claim your opponent's rubber band.

Quake IV

2004-12-27T08:30:00.000+08:00

Hell, I'm not going to lament about the earthquake and the following tsunamis that struck Penang. I've checked through many of them and I guess I don't have to add to the confusion of this matter. Suffice to say I have my share of earth-shaking moments during the morning after I gulped down the coffee and I asked my mother whether she added some 'extra' stuff into it.

So what gives? I was enjoying the whole morning to myself when a few of my friends called to see if I experienced the quake. Told them yes and some of them even asked me to get out of the house. Only sissies run!

Then I went over to my auntie's stay in one of the Penang beach hotel and the whole conversation is none other than quakes & tsunamis. Even they're sitting at the balcony while watching how the waves change to a violent one to sweep over beach.

Got tired over it and watched TV. Most of the channel in TV showed breaking news about the catastrophe. Aw, shit, what's so interesting over a small quake? We still got our lifes ain't it? So just drop the freaking subject and let's run our lives for god's sake!

A Friend's Distress

2004-12-24T09:05:00.000+08:00

Aih, the lack of post for yesterday was unaccountable but I was really busy the whole day. You see, everything all happened at once and luckily I can multi process the whole thing at once.

1. A lot of new agents came over to my place for short training and on-hand experience in talking to the customer (reverse-buddy system). I have to guide them and train them in the arts of listening & observation.
2. My auntie arrived from Australia for a day's stay but I was unable to receive them. I've taken all my annual leave to take care of my father that I do not have any leaves left in my account. Luckily there are some other cousins who can take my auntie around.
3. Hekaunic came over for his Palm & software thingy so went over all those computer stuff with him until late at night in which I don't have time to talk to my auntie, uncle & cousin. *sorry mate!*

Okay, here comes the highlight for the day...

4. A friend of mine, M has troubles of her own. Apparently one of her so-called 'friend' advised her that she should refrain from mixing & talking around because it would spoil her image within the company. I was thinking WTF? This guy obviously has a motive for asking her to change her life. And I doubt the motive is for her own good.

What kind of a friend who would want to deter another friend from mixing around? If she's mixing the wrong crowd then I would agree but so far all the crowd she's mixing seems to be a good one. Hey, being 4 years inside my company gives me the insight of estimating the crowds.

Let's look at this case logically. What are the posible reasons that 'friend' would want her to change her image?

A. The 'friend' is interested her: he should be the one to change, not her.
B. A Friendly advice: this is not a good motive for a 'friendly' advice.
C. For the image of the company: I doubt so.

Let's say Option A would be the case. Now, what could he gain if she were to change her lifestyle? Well the only explanation that I could think is that he will have less competition. Mixing less means he would have more of her instead of less of her. A cheap lame guy would try something like that. I'm not saying that his friend is a cheap lame guy but I have to admit that's a cheap trick.

Another explanation would be that he's insecure. Guys faced that all the time. They want the girls. They want them contained in their little sphere of influence that they jumped to the girls the second there is an opening. Many of my friends had used this tactics and that's why I’m sorry to say that I know this all a little too well. No, yours truly will never use such a cheap trick to get the ladies! *booing in the background*

So I advised M to think of what she wants and adjust accordingly. However, I told her what I think that this 'friend' is giving a false pretense and many of her other friends are supporting her current image, that is being joyous and outgoing. She should just be herself, because in a circle of friends, different people somehow makes relation more interesting. If everyone follows his advice and everyone would be like him, and there are no more diversity in the social interaction.

A Bastardized Customer

2004-12-22T16:19:00.000+08:00

Sometimes I wonder why I'm even working in this line. Today marked a very bad day when an idiot wanted attention so badly that he called to our Toll Free Line and demanded why the manual was providing too little information. He was complaining and I took his call. He was checking with a few information and closed the call. Seem pretty normal for our f**k-uped customers.

Guess what the idiot did.

He send a mail to our Sales and complain that I said something that I did not. Since the idiot was so screwed up in the head, he actually made up some conversation between me and him that doesn't exist. Not only that, the ruckuss has caused Queen Leader stomping again at my cubicle demanding what the issue is.

Apparently the bastard felt like I told him he was not good enough to use our product. Well, I'm not sure what is this retards problem but I felt I should really be giving a piece of my mind. He made other complains like:

1. Useless Owner's Manual
2. Not getting the correct number to call to our Toll Free Line
3. I guess he ran out of idea so he accused me of giving him a bad customer experience

Some of the Sales are just too afraid and they apologize to the customer in the first place. So what? I checked the information and found customer just purchased only a PDA and he was making a ruckuss. Imagine this scenario, a Sale of RM 1800 and customer measly complain. Is it worth all there is? I'd change my stance if customer have purchase 5 PDAs. I've supported customers with 100 (RM 6000 x 100) notebooks and I don't see them making any noise. If there is a problem, most of them will approached with civilized manner instead of making a barbaric statement by stabbing people at the back.

I found that most of the customer that make complains are the customer who make small purchases. And most of the time, it's always small complaints that will mess the top management drones. I somehow do not believe this idiot is capable of doing damage to the company reputation. Even if he did, you think other people would care to listen? I'm willing to bet if he post this up to an online forum, he'll be screwed by the forum moderators/posters of his little 'mishap'.

What I'm trying to say if there is an issue with the thin manual, then most probably there'll be more than one customer that will be making the complaints. So far, we have only one here who wanted the attention so badly. So, do the math. I don't think this idiot can go that far with this kind of attitude.

The Forgotten

2004-12-22T13:55:00.000+08:00

Yesterday went for a movie with a friend and we watched this new movie titled The Forgotten. Initially I thought what would Julianne Moore be doing since most of her older shows are not making hits in the box office. After a while into the movie, I realized that the show has an eerie feeling to it. Eerie in a way that you felt something is about to happen but didn't.

It tells the story of a mother, Telly (Julianne Moore) who lost a child in a plane crash. Slowly the story evolved and it make it seem as if she only imagined that she has a child in the first place. Suffice to say, this makes an interesting plot until she found some clue that all this has been a cover-up.

And the shock totally came to me when she was arguing with a newfound ally Ash in the car when suddenly a car came from the sideway and knocked them out of the road! The scene is totally shocking and it came out of nowhere! And not only that when she was chased, you realized that something or someone is following her but it's not really human.

Only a few complaints:
- A lady lieutenant/NSA Agent has been 'abducted' in front of her doesn't make a comeback
- How can a court-ordered accountant studied in the Quest Air office knows of the running fugitive? They're not even wanted for manhunt!
- NSA (National Security Agency) agents are supposed to be highly trained and they seem to have a live-update from the eyes in the sky. How come one could still be captured by Ash?

For those who have watched Dark City or The 13th Floor, most probably movie-goers would like this sci-fi mystery as well.

YF-21 Variable Fighter

2004-12-21T23:45:00.000+08:00

Yes, it is literally reflected on the title, Fuminari have just came back from his KL trip recently and he managed to find some of the Yamato's Macross Plus toys in a few stores. I paid him in advanced and he managed to secure me a YF-21! Sorry, don't have camera for the moment so the pictures are taken from Macross World.

Reupdated: 22-Dec-2004 09:46 - Apparently I was mistaken as my unit is a Fast Pack. You can read it more at this post. Therefore the color of the YF-21 is purple with a slight blue tint, unlike the photo displayed as below.

Here's the YF-21 in Fighter Mode

Here's the YF-21 in Gerwalk Mode

Here's the YF-21 in Battloid Mode

My verdict? The toy is surprisingly light for its construction. A near inspection indicated that the only metal part of the toy was the leg. The rest of the constructions are made from plastic. However, transforming the model is a little tricky as there are a few movable gears in the central joint between the leg, hand and torso which could cause confusion for a newbie. The manual is totally in Japanese but it has great illustration on how to do the proper transformation. However, I still think it would be great if they could put in some English instruction as well as this will greatly help those who cannot understand/read Japanese. This is because there are some instructions that you need to make sense from the picture.

There is still some positive point since the plastic parts have more resistance from scratches, unlike YF-19, another model which Fuminari have bought me a while back. The YF-19 is a little heavier with metal die-cast construction mostly on the torso, legs & arm. However, the transformation isn't as tricky as YF-21 but somehow the fighter mode is a little disappointing because YF-19 used to be the coolest plane in Macross Plus!

Here's the YF-19 in Fighter Mode

Here's the YF-19 in Gerwalk Mode

Here's the YF-19 in Battloid Mode

Since the YF-19 has more steel construction, it has a problem on the paint which can be easily scrapped off! Same thing as reported by Macross World, it seems more like the way it's designed. A little disappointed with the paint job there but hey, you can't have everything!

Overall, YF-21 is quite a good quality toy and could withstand about 5-6 transformation, which is pretty good for me. As for Fighter-design-wise, I'd still prefer to go for a VF-11, which Fuminari is currently owning now. Perhaps once I managed to scrap more cash, I'll try to complete my collection of the 3 planes.

* Official website for Yamato Toys is http://www.yamato-toys.com/
* Official website for Macross is http://www.www.macross.co.jp/
* Credits: Pictures are taken from Macrossworld Toys
* Statistics & history of the Macross variable fighters development can be found at Steel Falcon.

Linux Dependencies

2004-12-21T13:39:00.000+08:00

Yes! After I've been configuring Fedora Core 3 like mad, finally I managed to resolved many of it's dependencies¹. However after managing the wireless to connect properly through our internal PPTP network, I still cannot get some packet to get to my computer.

*sigh* I was thinking what's wrong with the unit.

Ms. Ong/Mrs. Khoo had a different idea of running Linux. Apparently he liked something simple and has much more tools to run, so he opted to get Mandrake Linux running on his notebook. I don't know why but somehow I prefer Fedora Linux all the way since Red Hat made the inception.

I do admit Mandrake Linux has easy to use RPM and if a users of Mandrake went through what I went, most probably they'd be spared of the agonizing headache of installing dependencies. However, what's the fun of running Linux when everything is presented to you?

¹ Dependencies are Linux's answer to DLL files. You see, for example to install a security program in Linux, you have to install the compiler software. Before you install the compiler software, you need to install the source to create the executable file. Before you need to compile the executable file, you need to have the encryption software, and before you can install the encryption software, you need to have a proper library for the algorithm. Suffice to say you need to go through a lot of layers of installation before you're able to make a single program run.

Speakerphone Abuse

2004-12-21T11:29:00.000+08:00

There's always a problem when the customer is using the speakerphone. Some customer would call us and the sound will always echoed across the customer's room and it's hard to actually hear what customer has been saying.

And some idiots just don't seem to take the hint that you have problem understanding them even though after a while you've repeated the same question that you cannot hear him. And the worst part is that some idiots actually use the speakerphone with his spouse/children/friend that when both of them talked, the whole line of communication goes haywire through my headset.

Here's one example in a call

Customer #1: "There is a problem with the motherboard..."
Customer #2: "Here's the mouse..."
Customer #1: "We need the service..."
Customer #2: "When the engineer will..."

And the whole conversation went echoed that I have problem trying to comprehend the situation. Heck, given the noice and intensity level, even a genius would have problem determining who's who. So, what do I do?

Me: "I seem to have problem hearing you. Perhaps you could switch off the speakerphone?"

And almost immediately they'll just close the speakerphone and you'll realized how easy it is to talk to these customers.

Me: "There, that sounds better. So how can I help you?"

Nutty Nuts

2004-12-20T14:19:00.000+08:00

Our team is getting bigger. Oh yes, while our team supporting specialized PDAs & Projectors is getting bigger, me and Fuminari realized that getting a new guy isn't what we had in mind. However, being as we are, the management drones insist on throwing a new guy to our team.

This new guy is a PFY¹ and he seem to be eager on jumping on the bandwagon. There's a lot of question and I answered them as best I could. However, there will come a time where they will falter which I have no intention of seeing. How is that so? One of them asked me...

PFY: "How come you don't transfer the customer? Why you asked them to redial again?"
Me: "It's not the convenience but a matter of principle."
PFY: "How so?"
Me: "You see customers are like children."
PFY: "Okay..."
Me: "And like children, you need to enforce discipline in them."
PFY: "Won't they escalate?"
Me: "Yes, they do, but that's why we handle them a little more delicately..."
PFY: "And by getting them to call the other toll free is a good way?"
Me: "Yes. Let's for example we spoil them by transferring the call. And let's say one day the other queue is facing some call waits, what do you think customer would do?"
PFY: "Call us?"
Me: "That's right. So, we need to cut off their immediate approach. Though they may be sulky but at least they won't bother us with meaningless problems any longer..."

Sometimes I see a PFY and I wondered how much enthusiasm I had during my youth. Ah... those were the days. I've told them that when they chose me and Fuminari to head this team, we're pretty new and we have paved most of the processes and what they need to do is just to walk down the road.

¹ PFY is a reference I found from Fainswift which acronym for Pimpled Faced Youth.

The Invasion of Stupid Customers

2004-12-20T10:56:00.000+08:00

Another weekend has passed. Christmas is coming and a lot of my old friends who's in KL keep asking me to go to KL to celebrate Christmas with them. Not to say I want to but I hate the traffic in KL. I'll go if it's Chinese New Year but the thought of going there in Christmas just freaked me out.

*RING! RING!*

Speak of the Devil. Just when I got the time for myself some customers would just have to call to our Toll Free.

Me: "Thank you for calling Technical Support..."
Customer: "Er... hallo? I've purchased your PDA..."
Me: "Yes?"
Customer: "May I know when it will arrive?"
Me: "Sir, you're ARE calling to the TECHNICAL SUPPORT."
Customer: "What do you do ar?"
Me: "Well, TECHNICAL SUPPORT handles technical issue on customer difficulties."
Customer: "So you cannot help me ar?"

Well, some people just want help and never understand the statement that has been presented to them.

Me: "Well, did your Sales agent update you on the date of delivery?"
Customer: "I don't know."

I guess this moron idiot is the type that will never read the fine print of an agreement. In any rate, we do not have the information so the only thing that I can do is to send him back to his Sales agent.

Me: "Perhaps you can call back to your Sales agent..."
Customer: "What's the number ar?"
Me: "Well, previously what number you have dialled?"
Customer: "I don't know."

See what I said being a moron?

Desperate Bastard

2004-12-17T09:23:00.000+08:00

Today I came in to support our ANZ customers and I was here quite early. Now as soon as the clock ticked 9, our system will automatically route my support to the Malaysia & Singapore. Imagine to my surprise that when I see the clock 08:59:59 when the phone started ringing.

Me: "Thank you fo..."
Customer: "Hallo? Hallo? Technical support yea?"
Me: "Yes?"
Customer: "I got a problem with my PDA. Hallo? Hallo?"
Me: "Can I have the serial number first?"
Customer: "Er... wait ar.... Where got?"
Me: "Well it's on...."
Customer: "Oh ya got it! Got it! Hallo? Hallo?"
Me: "I'm still here."
Customer: "Here is it... xxxxxxx"

Bloody stupid customer. I reckon that this moron don't call us for a social chit chat.

Customer: "Hallo? Hallo?"
Me: "Don't worry, I'm still here!"

What's wrong with this idiot these days?

Customer: "Ah okay, I cannot get pass this screen lar..."
Me: "What does the screen say?"
Customer: "Tap and hold at the Doctor's appointment at 9 pm and click Copy."
Me: "So?"
Customer: "What do I do ar?"

Felt like taking a large cutter and cascrate this idiot!

Smart Ass Idiot

2004-12-16T10:34:00.000+08:00

This one customer just failed to understand that he is a smart ass. Let me show you one fine example here today.

Me: "Thank you for..."
Customer: "Hallo? PDA support ya?"
Me: "Yes..."
Customer: "You don't seem to be happy talking to me!"

WTF! I mean what the hell is wrong with the conversation above? I haven't start my greeting and this idiot already cut in and made some stupid complaint.

Me: "I assumed that you would want to talk first, so I'm just listening."
Customer: "You don't seem to be happy on doing that."
Me: "Okay, so what you want me to do?"
Customer: "How rude. You don't even introduce yourself first!"

WTF again! If he didn't interrupt me on the first place he wouldn't land in this trouble. Obviously this idiot is unaware of the complication that he caused.

Me: "Okay, I'm Jase. How can I help you?"
Customer: "That's more like it. Okay, I have a problem with my PDA. You see, I purchased the PDA from Singapore and I KNOW you have problem replacing it in Malaysia."
Me: "Okay."
Customer: "Hello? Hello? How come got no response? Just acknowledge what I'm saying!"

Bloody stupid idiot! If he has a problem hearing he shouldn't be blaming others for his inabilities! I just wish I could throw him in front of a speeding car.

Me: "YES!"
Customer: "So now it's broken again and I would like you to replace it to me in Malaysia."
Me: "Sir, I believe we do not have such parts there..."
Customer: "It's just the matter of logistic what..."
Me: "Yes, I understand that, that's why we didn't sell it in Malaysia at the first place."
Customer: "Are you telling me if I buy your PDA from Japan and it will not be replaced here?"
Me: "Exactly."

He's already knew that since he purchase the unit from Singapore. After investigating into the case, found that our Sales actually suggested to the customer to BUY the unit from SINGAPORE and then ship it back to Malaysia. Since he wants the stuff that is not authorized in Malaysia, I guess he should know that all this will be coming back at him.

I guess this idiot never ever heard of the verse: "Berani makan berani tanggung."¹

¹ Berani makan berani tanggung translated from Bahasa Melayu as "Dare to eat, dare to face the consequences"

First Blood

2004-12-15T17:47:00.000+08:00

Today marked the first day the customer called in for our printer support. Yes, finally we're releasing our own branded printer and guess what's the problem with the first call...

Me: "Thank you for calling Technical Support..."
Customer: "Er, hello? I got your printer here..."
Me: "Yes, what can I do you for?"
Customer: "Okay... I seem to have a problem installing the software..."

Bloody hell. If customer had said that the printer exploded right in front of her cat, it would make my life easier (hardware are easier to troubleshoot that software).

Me: "So, what's the problem?"
Customer: "I have problem installing the driver..."

OH NO! Of all the thing, reinstalling driver seem to be the hardest thing to do especially dealing with novice customers even if the problem happened on Windows XP!

Me: "Just pop in the CD, and it should pop out the auto start menu..."
Customer: "That's the problem. It didn't show me the menu."
Me: "Okay, how about going into My Computer and run setup.exe from the CD?"
Customer: "Well, I don't seem to be able to see anything inside it..."
Me: "Huh?"
Customer: "It's funny you know, when I go in there, everything was blank..."

Oh god, don't tell me I have to troubleshoot for the desktop as well...

Me: "Have you tried with another different CD?"
Customer: "Oh yes, my son's Garfield worked just fine..."

Thank god the troubleshooting doesn't go as far as I expected. Just dropped in the mail to our manufacturing department to get the CD replaced.

Me: "Okay ma'am, it seem that the printer CD is faulty. Don't worry, we'll mail it to you in a few days time. Please be patient."
Customer: "Oh hey, thanks!"
Me: "You're welcome..."

We're All Well Done

2004-12-14T16:13:00.000+08:00

Today there's an emergency fire drill in my company and guess what? Technical Support are not to leave the premises because we are supposed to be supporting the darned customers. Okay, so how it goes? Some guy went through the drill came back and asked us how it's going? So basically we answered: "We're well done."

Reminded me a few years ago when I was supporting this one stupid Singaporean customer. Please be reminded that there's a loud alarm blaring across the technical support cubicles and the customer finally took notice of it after talking for about 10 minutes.

Customer: "So what's that sound?"
Me: "Oh well, there's a fire in the building..."
Customer: "Oh okay... So back to my problem..."

Bloody son of a bitch! I hoped the bloody Singaporean die in agonizing burn! Other colleague that's supporting the ANZ found that the customer was caring that they asked our agent to get out of the building and call them after all are settled down. No wonder they're branded as kiasu¹....

¹ Kiasu means 'scared to lose' in Hokkien. Basically Singaporeans are branded as such because of their culture. They just have to grab the largest bite so it's not uncommon for Singaporeans to call our Toll Free only to demand for engineer just because they don't know how to switch on their computer!

Stupid Species

2004-12-14T15:11:00.000+08:00

No, I'm not talking about Natasha Henstridge's Species but rather a pathetic creature in existance called THE CUSTOMER.

Apparently customers has a wonderful life cycle where they will generate multitude of income to own the most sophisticated available computers in the world and they have little creativity to running them. In fact, they have to keep their parasitic nature by pestering another creature Tech Support to help them out.

They have a very unusual hunting ritual that they will flood the Tech Support calls every now and then. The group will always hunt in packs, so when there is one customer that calls in, there will always more. So far our researcher has no idea on their communication mode but it seems that they will synchronize their attacks every well upon that a few packs of them can easily overwhelm the Tech Support.

It's a wonder how these two creatures can co-exist together. The Tech Support creatures are independent but the customer somehow has ways to make Tech Support into slavery. Unfortunately a dealing with customer usually will shorten Tech Support's lifespan and most of them will suffer heart attack on an early age.

As for their mating ritual, the customer will actually lay low and this will reduce the burden of Tech Support for a while. However this effect is not permanent, this is a well deserved rest for Tech Support before these customers are back with their frenzied attack along with their offsprings.

So how are customers contained so that they won't cause the extinction of Tech Support? No one knows for sure? From the report, the numbers of Tech Support are declining badly that they're barely enough to survive to a mature age. Let's hope nature has a way to balance out the chain...

Crappy Idiotic Sales

2004-12-13T13:13:00.000+08:00

Alright, now I realized that our Sales was trying to hard to obtain their objective that they actually forgot how to address the after service agreement to the customer. As dear reader would know, in order to support a particular product, a special serial number is needed and these numbers will only appear in our server, desktop, notebook, PDA & projector system.

Problem is that they're so desperate to get a sale that they managed to convince customer to purchase JUST the monitor, without any base system. Therefore, when customer called in, there was no serial number and we cannot help the customer.

Now the main issue is that after our sales has sold the monitor to the customer, they never actually establish a process on how to get it replace if customer encounters an issue. So since they're so eager to get the money without any consequences, I'll let the problem ride and let the customer claw back to the sales for these 'inefficient process'.

Guess what's the 'inefficient process' is?

That's right. Call Technical Support. We're the godly team that will imbue customer to heal their problems miraculously & we're the same team that will revive the sick and dead electronic products back to life while they themselves shared greedily their well made money. The Sales are the one that can drive new car every month while we Technical Support are being plummeted away by customer's idiocacy. They're the one that can get all the flashy free gifts in one of their training convention while we have to search the information through the web.

This time we're going to give back the problem to them. Every time customer called in with only a monitor, me & Fuminari will tell the customer of our special serial number predicament and let them escalate it back to the Sales. Let's see how they earn their 'well-earned wealth' this time...

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

2004-12-13T10:54:00.000+08:00

Just played Prince of Persia: Warrior Within and I've got only one good comment: F**k!

I've been a loyal supporter of Prince of Persia since Jordan Mechner came by and developed it for the PC numerous years ago. He then came out with Prince of Persia 2 which we all cherished greatly when it was released. Then, those idiots released Prince of Persia 3D, which is an embarrassment to the whole gaming community.

However, when Prince of Persia: Sands of Time was released, I remained skeptical whether this will make it as a good game. Some of you might have read my post in regards of the issue and I'd say that it was a really good game transitioning from the 2D platform to a 3D adventure. Not only it has immersed players with terrific game play and graphics but somehow it has lived up to the name because the production involved Jordan Mechner.

Now, they released a sequel and it gave me a good impression for the first 5 minutes. Further into the game has revealed that there are some invisible stone that will block your path. Okay, that is still forgivable because the graphics are so stunning. They've even got a bug with some slowdown issue but it's still okay on my page. The breaking point was when I defeated the boss (Empress of Time) for the first time and the darn game kicked me to the beginning of the game with no way of leaving the map.

I did a checkup on the forums and found that many people have reported the same bug and I was quite lucky as I didn't encounter a majority of them. Some of the worse scenario was when the player saved at a point will get turned into a different character when the game is loaded. Others will get the player stuck with no way of getting back. Too bad the game developer has used the same engine to power the game with no consent of smoking out the bugs.

After I went through all the complains in the forum, I think I would lay off the game for a while. They said that Ubisoft (game publisher) will release a patch for the PC version. I mean OF COURSE they will release a patch for the PC version, how the hell they're going to patch a Playstation 2 version? Jeeze, I was left thinking to those owners who bought the original Prince of Persia: Warrior Within for the PS2, XBox or even Gamecube. How they're going to receive a patch for such a great potential game?

So for you out there in Malaysia thinking of buying the console game. DON'T! Get the PC version instead; at least you'll have a chance to get to patch the damn game!

Flak Anti-Air Guns All Ready!

2004-12-13T09:56:00.000+08:00

How would you feel when you come into the office, logged on to find that are numerous calls that has nothing to do with you? The only option that you can think of is that the caller is stupid, retarded & brain damaged that they don't seem to get it when you told them they've dialed the wrong number? What about them shouting, ranting, begging & pleading when they are clueless that they got the wrong guy to listen?

So here am I getting all this shit in the morning. I guess Sales must have made an impact last week and they've been selling to lots of products to customers, which only befits because there are so many desperate that cannot live another day without calling in to our Toll Free line. Imagine to my surprise that one of them called when the idiot purchased a desktop and shipped it to his son in UK.

Another idiot went to purchase our PDA in Singapore because it's not available in Malaysia. So, when there is a replacement, he has to send it back to Singapore for replacement. This idiot actually ranted why we don't have the parts in Malaysia. Hey, that's why we're not selling them in Malaysia at the first place...

So imagine I shot down about 15 customers on the first hour... that would make them call in averagely 4 minutes. Imagine that! Every 4 minutes, an idiot will call in to the wrong option.

The Lenglui In The Terminal

2004-12-10T23:52:00.000+08:00

I just recently just bought the movie The Terminal and there was a girl who always come and go to fill in the life of the protagonist. As I was looking at her, a sudden surge reminded me of a long lost memory that I used to enjoy. It was... Catherine Zeta Jones!

But IT CANNOT BE! This woman seem very young & sexy, usually these characters are taken by Ashley Judd and Bridget Moynahan but somehow she had a very distinct image that made me unable to recognize her immediately.

I was surprised at her comeback. She did a few shows but nothing as outstanding as The Mask of Zorro. Even a friend of mine cannot recognized her immediately when he saw the movie.

The movie centres on Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), who got stuck on US soil because a war broke out on Hungaria and he was a man without a country. Getting stuck on the International Travel Lounge, we follow his his adventures around as he made friends & found the love of his life, Amelia Warren (Catherine Zeta Jones).

So how was the movie? It was great. A few of my friends said they hated the show because it was all talk and no action. I think my dear readers know my taste in movies:

1. Great plot
2. Character development
3. Witty script

My verdict? It was great. If you enjoy the likes of Pulp Fiction & The Usual Suspect, then I can say you'll probably enjoy this movie a lot.