Posed a rather innocent question Friday to my colleagues if they’d ever considered purchasing their name-domain-names, which was actually an excuse for me to bring up the evil 3 year-old Alex Huang Jae Huang, whose parents have purchased the domain name till 2011. I usually don’t feel like working very hard the last hour of Fridays.
This ended up in a Google searchfest for all our colleagues’ names, including of course myself.
That turned up this blog.
So my colleagues started reading, as my mind raced to recall if I’d ever posted anything derogatory about any one of them. Because I couldn’t remember, I ended up trying to shut down the whole site, but it turns out WordPress, for all its development does not have a dooce-prevention button conveniently positioned in its admin interface. I didn’t have FTP access (damned network security at work blocks FTP access), so I did the only thing I though posible – I deliberately screwed up some site settings in a self-destruct-so-the-enemy-gets-nothing mindset and–voila!–all that happened was CSS went haywire, so not only could my colleagues read what I REALLY thought about them, they could read it completely unstyled–the naked truth, as it were.
(TO ANY OF MY COLLEAGUES READING THIS, I LOVE YOU. I HAVE NOTHING AGAINST ANY ONE OF YOU AT ALL. I LOVE YOU VERY MUCH.)
Turns out I needn’t have bothered, though. My laziness to post in recent months due to my dead-end wonderful new job has saved me the embarrassment of having written anything potentially damaging to my career or hurtful about my colleagues. In fact, my Friendster profile turned out to be more damning, where a “friend” of mine had posted some comment about having sex with me (in context it was supposed to have been funny), and had my small-minded, conservative lovely colleagues looking at me with sanctimonious righteous contempt.
Phew. I REALLY dodged a bullet there, not writing how I really felt.
(as an aside, some of my colleagues were more interested in 3-year-old Alex’s website showcasing stomache-curdling pictures of his youthful cuteness rather than my much-more-intellectually-stimulating blog, which should tell you something about how truly evil he is)
If anything good has come of this little incident, I have learnt how to instigate people into Googling their own names. Just try to start a conversation with “Have you ever tried to register your own name as a domain name?” I shall employ said tactic just before performance review, after writing glowing reviews about my boss – maybe something like this.
Alternatively I could post disgustingly graphic slash fiction about myself and any other colleague whom I might potentially be up against with for a promotion and then leer at them curiously once in a while before questioning them on whether they knew their domain name was free. Their resulting Google search for their own names should result in a request for a transfer to another department pretty quickly.
Or possibly a request for my transfer to another department. The department of mental services.
In any case–blogging about work? Never a good idea. You have to be pretty stupid to do it. Which I can be at times, judging from my actions today.
Went down to Junction 8, my local mall, to support the Banana for yet another one of her singing competitions, this one in particular organised by the Science Club. To raise money for the event, they set a 15% of the judging criteria to be audience participation – in the form of 50-cent votes. This, of course, sparked off the somewhat offbeat competitive streak in me and I ended up spending $60 to get the Banana up to second-most popular singer. We just barely beat a Japanese-wannabe singer whose Hokkien-speaking mother and boyfriend bought votes for, and I couldn’t help but laugh a little as I saw nihon-jin-in-training looking at the Banana and then wistfully at the voting panel, where she was just 5 votes short of being second-we had practiced the dirty trick of last-minute voting to prevent a bidding-war.
It was rather tragic, really. Some of the little schoolgirls there were pooling together spare change to buy votes for their friends. I feel a bit lousy for having crushed their innocent delusions of people-power, but I suppose a university-organised-small-time singing competition is as good a time for them to learn about the pecking-order-of-economic-power in Singapore, of which I thought the results of the votes were pretty representative of:
- First place: rich guy whose parents got him first place (the monied, connected crust of the Singaporean elite)
- Second: the banana, who just happened to have a crazy friend with money to blow (middle-class working professionals)
- Third: Kawaii-Hokkien (The Other not-so-well-educated Chinese)
- Losers: various other minorities and schoolkids (Various minorities and people without certificates-to-prove-usefulness)
So really, I HAD to vote for the Banana, you see, otherwise some schoolgirls might have gone home thinking that they’d managed to make a difference or that together friends could change the world rather than the important life-lesson that they were simply unimportant drones in a largely uncaring society where money was power.
Harsh? I suppose. But important! I am entirely justified in my actions.
And I don’t mind at all having had to spend $60 to spread tough love.
Not at all, not even if the Banana refuses to give me a treat.
Pictures up when I can find time to upload.