Design and Discrimination

E@L and some of his colleagues were in a meeting all afternoon yesterday with two Head Office bigwigs (head of design, and ex-president) who were there to tell the wonders of what they had been doing all these years to justify their stay at the Fullerton Hotel while the our corporate profits tank. [No, they're not tanking, actually. Stock prices are up 15% in the last three months. You should have bought in 2008, as should have E@L. 300% recovery. Anyway, /digression.]

They only spoke Japanese, but their slides were in English. Nevertheless they read each line, or E@L gathered they did by the tracks of the laser pointer, in Japanese. Then each phrase they had spoken had to be translated for us, and the translator also used a laser pointer to go over each point on the slides carefully. Tedium. Once, the speaker and the translator got a bit lost / confused. They chattered on in Japanese while they perfected the oral translation -- for 4min and 35secs. For the ONE SLIDE - and it was already written there in English. How do I know it was 4:35? One of my colleagues who i thought was taking notes but was actually working on next week's training schedule, timed them. E@L was wondering which of us would get shot when we were the first to stop clapping after one of Stalin’s four hour speeches.

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Turns out these guys weren’t all that boring, deep down. After a tea-break they got into some much more interesting freestyle speeches. AND it turns out one of them could speak English moderately well after all! (There’s 4:35 of my life I’ll never get back.)

They had graduated up to near-god status in the medical ultrasound world from their base experience designing washing machines, all those years ago [Tom Stoppard reference]. This caused a suppressed snigger up the back. Not because there is anything wrong with this company's washing machines, they’re quite good in fact, it’s just washing machines don’t have printers, and neither does our latest ultrasound model.

However the main guy said, interestingly, that he went to design school with the most famous unknown legend you’ve never heard of, Fukuda Tamio, who was the key design consultant whose famous(?) 1993 report to Samsung triggered a major turn around in their industrial philosophy, by pushing for higher emphasis on design for convenience, not just better technology. This was in their mobile phone business - back when they were battling Motorola (remember them) and not Apple.

According to legend, as recounted to E@L yesterday, Samsung Electronic’s President, Lee Kun Hee, read Fukuda-san’s report on a flight from Seoul to Frankfurt and was so charged by it that he called for a meeting of 200 executives from around the world in Frankfurt in just two days time, to discuss its implications and the turn around in thinking it demanded.

“Change everything except your wife and children,” he famously said, in a what we would now call a sexistually [new word!] discriminatory speech, to the jet-lagged execs on that landmark day.

And the rest, E@L’s acquaintances, is history.

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Speaking of discrimination...

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Yeah, so there had been 18 odd people of various ethnicities sitting, fascinated, in the room. A dozen approx at the boardroom table and six less important types (like E@L) up the back in chairs against the wall, passing secret notes and giggling, like at the washing machine and printer hilarity. When the slide said “circuit bore”, it was not a self-disparaging comment on the travelling roadshow lifestyle of the speakers, but a misspelling of “circuit board”. Stop laughing, ow, my jaw hurts, my belly is in cramps from this punitive tsunami of amusement and jocularity.

This morning E@L sees one of those people, a guy from the adjacent office, walk through OUR office on a short-cut to the toilet. Sigh, They do it all the time. One day, someone’ll catch E@L in mid snooze…

E@L asks his cute (but married) Chinese colleagues - who had been sitting next to him at the back wall yesterday - if she knew the name of that senior guy, the Indian man, who E@L sees all the time but could never remember his name since they were first introduced two years ago, who works in the office next door, important, finance maybe, the man sitting to Yai-Wan.

CBMCC: What Indian man?

E@L: You know, the Indian guy. The balding one with glasses. Is it Danesh?

CBMCC: There was no Indian guy there yesterday.

E@L: Of course there was. The guy next to Yai-Wan. [In this instance E@L’s memory was clear - Yai-Wan is also cute.]

CBMCC: That was Takazumi-san.

E@L : No, there was an Indian guy BETWEEN Yai-Wan and Takazumi-san.

CBMCC: There was?

E@L : … You just don't see brown people, do you? They're not real to you. It's like they’re some sort of non-people.

CBMCC: Noooo (laughing)... I didn’t see anyone, because Tim was in the way, that’s why. I really couldn’t see him.

E@L : I KNOW you couldn’t see him! That’s my point! It’s because he’s of the melatonin enriched races isn’t it? Because of the colour of his skin! He might as well not be there. Singapore will have 9million in 2125 and you won’t even see 3million of them! You Chinese are just so… so fucking… so racist!

She was pissing herself laughing at this btw (it's the way E@L tells 'em), couldn't believe she didn't see him, but it was due to where she was sitting. Yeah, right. Like there were thousands of people crowding the room.

E@L: Oh Singaporean, why li dat so racist one?

CBMCC: (hitting at E@L with her tiny fists) Nooooo! It’s not like that!

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Ooooooh, yes it is.


E@L

Open Sez-a-Me!

Necessity being Frank Zappa's backing band, I managed today to find a unique (to me) way to open those fucking annoying hermetically sealed plastic(1) packs that almost everything comes entombed in these days. Of course I am a genius to come up this method and hereby declare that it is patent-pending in the name: "The E@L Alcatraz Clamshell Opening Method". Royalties shall be expected. Remember, piracy is theft. (I saw that on a movie torrented the other night. It was a Japanese movie, language was "the original Polish". I kid you not.) And re: royalties, please be generous, I'll need to pay the Mouse's salary next year.

Meanwhile, who was the fucking idiot who thought that making products completely inaccessible was a good idea? It used to be bad enough when conventional plastic wrapping first hit the streets. Initially it was Mars bars, sugar sachets and condom wrappers. "Just give me a product that don't have to open with your teeth," was my not infrequent complaint in those heady and anonymous years (pre-blogging) when calories, carbohydrates and sex where my main obsessions. Unlike now.

Well, yes, you can try and open one of the new-fangled hard cases with your teeth, but they'd better be the pearly white, razor-sharp choppers of a giant shark if you expect to make any impression (dental joke, haha) on the impenetrable plastic. Anything you do to these bastards without special tools is effort completely wasted, or might only result in the raising of dangerous jagged edges at the small hiatuses (hiatii?) that you might have made into the top of the package with your *useless and inappropriate tool of choice*. Other people (not sharks, I presume) have tried with varying measures of success. The recommended way discussed on Wiki-how is to use a manual can-opener(2). That's fine I guess if you are at home and have one handy. Ruley, ruley sharp scissors or finger-cutters, sorry I mean box cutters, can do it of course but the warnings the Wiki-experts give are valid. It is bloody easy to do yourself damage with these weapons, as well as with those resulting jagged shards. These edges come at you like aforementioned sharks (not shards) when, once you have made a significant enough breach in the casing, you attempt to use manual force (you're a tough guy, a little bit of adamantine plastic is not going to defeat you) to rip the rest of sealing apart. What happens is that the sundered edges do not conform to the anticipated path of release - the tear swizzes from the side of the package through to the middle and the rearing edges rip into your flesh like weasels.

Mothers.

Well I am not at home with my trusty toolkit by my side. I've been in this bloody hotel room for two weeks already and there are another three to go. I do not have access to my sharp scissors, my box-cutters, my fingernail-paring-shaped surgical needles and my silk 02 thread to repair my damaged body parts, nor my manual can-opener and neither my tin-snips. (Don't actually own tin-snips.) Which is good for my continued survival as I am sure Thailand is going to drive me suicidal (how much sex can a man put up with?) soon enough. I am lucky then that you can't just walk up to an apothecary here in Bangkok and ask for whopping amounts of otherwise dangerous prescription-only drugs - such as, for a random example, enough Viagra or Cialis to explode an elephant's trunk.

One thing I DO have, speaking of (not Cialis and not elephant trunks) fingernail parings, is one set of those trusty but dangerous-on-airplanes weapons - my nail-clippers. One of? you ask. Yep, I own two and I now keep this set in my travel bag and have another always in the bathroom at home, because chances are 1 to 100 that I would forgot to pack it otherwise. What am I, stupid? (No! I've already told you I'm a genius! Don't you listen?) Of course sometimes I pack the bathroom one as well and have two in my toilet-bag when I arrive and unpack. Chances are I'll leave one if not both of them there when I check-out.

Hey! Stop raving on you lot... See, look, pay attention.

Here is the E@L method, demonstrated in the photos below.

Step 1. duck into the bathroom and grab your sturdy nail-clippers - the ones you get at The Body Shop for $37 are fine - and take on the impenetrable polycarbonate(?) clamshell casing. Place clippers over the seam at the edge (they *just* fit), bite down a few times really hard, move one clipper's width to either side (to the right if you are left-handed and to the right if you are right-handed) and bite down again, hold firmly, then twist the clippers. You'll hear a crack (eventually) and the first of your chomps into the transparent tomb of whatever you have bought at the IT store is done. Continue (to the right if you are left-handed and to the right if you are right-handed) until one of the ends is completely open, then maybe give another clip around the side to release the corners, and you'll find it (relatively) easy (mind the sharps jagged edges! How many time do I have to warn you?) to rip the packaging apart. Unless you are a girly-girl.

Step 2(ish - might have missed some numbering there): because you failed to heed the multiple warnings re: sharp edges, step quickly to the bathroom again to staunch the blood-flow from the remnants of your digital artery using the cotton wool pads, the ear-drum puncturing devices, and the shower cap. Now go back (Step 3?) and remove whatever it was that you couldn't get to inside the package and use the fucking thing, after all that pain and effort.


You get the idea already don't you? The following photos are completely unnecessary.


Here they are anyway. Not everyone is intuitive as you.


Doneskies! And with hardly any blood loss!

Of course if you don't even have nail-clippers, you'll have to resort to your AK-47.



Once your package is open, please, please go after the guy who invented them and scatter a magazine load around his completely penetrable liver, as a favour to me.

E@L


1: Or is it that ultra-hard carbon stuff that the guys won the Nobel prize for the other week?

2: Addendum: now I think about it, I have tried using my can-opener at home - useless.