Tuesday, July 01, 2008

The Pineapple Times 2nd Edition

You must be surprised to see the 2nd edition of "The Pineapple Times" publish so quickly. Since I am writing a newspaper, of course I have to publish it daily. I know all of you are dying to pay for the newspaper, so this is what you can do to pay online:
1. Take your credit or debit card
2. Eject your CD-ROM (yes I mean your computer cd-rom)
3. Put your card on the CD-ROM
4. Close your CD-ROM
5. A pop up screen should appear
6. If it doesn't, start from step 1 again.

Ok read the sections that interest you... It will help you in your life... Really...


The Pineapple Times

Train of Thoughts
As the headline suggest, I usually have thoughts when I am in the train. Not that I don't think when I am static, in fact I have lots of ideas about work when I sit stationary on the toilet bowl. So this section is about random thoughts.

My lecturer told me she couldn't understand how someone can get up late in the day especially after 12 noon. She thought that people who has this practice must be lazy. Then slowly as she got older, she realised;

"Everyone is made differently..."

She said that some people work better in the day, some better at night. This statement is especially useful when you are irritated by someone's action or are baffled by their senseless motivations at work... Tell yourself "Everyone is made differently..."

Some people are idiots and some are not...

Correspondent: Pineapple Tat


Money Matters
Yesterday Mr Fly told me that he is going to buy stocks in a company that produces steels. I asked him whether it is a commodity, he replied that it should be since its made from iron ore.

Talking about commodities, they are things like coffee beans, tea leaves, soya beans etc. Remember if you were to buy for example soya beans. You are suppose to sell it within certain timeline (usually a month I think). And if you forgot about it, you will receive a call from the port asking you to collect your container load of soya beans. So most importantly, if you were to buy commodities, buy something that you LIKE, like coffee beans. Even you forget to sell, at least you have a lifetime supply of coffee.

Correspondent: Pineapple Tat


Marketers Are Liars
As you know (if you don't know), I am in marketing. There are those trade publications like Marketing-interactive and The Marketer. I reckon I should start my own marketing column called "Marketers Are Liars". We are not really liars, we are just story tellers. We all like to sell a good story and then of course you will buy from us.

As you know (if you don't know again), I am managing direct marketing channels and one of them is SMS. You know those SMS you receive Adv ......... To unsub, reply .
Yah... You could be receiving those that I sent.

Anyway there will be people who unsubscribe to SMS notifications during each campaign. As unsubscribing is automated, you actually have to reply as indicated in the SMS to unsubscribe. If not the system cannot identify your SMS and unsubscribe you. (yes the system is not that intelligent yet)

So part of my job is to manually unsubscribe people from the SMS list in the event they spell wrongly 'unsub' like 'unscb'. Some people are polite to actually type a full sentence to indicate their intentions like "Please unsubscribe me from you list. Thank you." or "Unsubscribe. Thks." These are genuine mistakes, so I have to manually remove them as the system cannot recognise such instructions.

I actually receive an unsubscribe request in this format and in this case the unsubscribe command is 'X'. Here is one classic SMS:
F**k you man! I dont give a f**k care about your f**king contest! X!

Ok as you can see from the above SMS, obviously the system won't unsubscribe the number...

Anyway I am thinking of sending an SMS response (using the system of course) to that person's number in the below format,

"This is an automated reply. Your SMS has been forwarded to the police. They will be calling you shortly."

This should be quite cool...

Correspondent: Pineapple Tat