Singapore is a very expat friendly country. After 10+ years of living in İstanbul, it is almost effortless to survive here. The biggest difficulty I have faced is the cultural difference. I have grown up to believe that I was the eastern guy. Only after living here for a while, I realized that I was western. Without a doubt.

Communication is more indirect and subtle here. Our way of to-the-point talking usually goes overboard, fails to convey your message and you end up where you have started. This was quite frustrating for me at the beginning. I still haven’t mastered the art. But I have come to realize that I am just a guest here, a stranger and therefore I am the one who should learn and to adopt.

I have quoted a dialogue from Outliers below to give you a better idea of what I am writing about:

Kwacang (boss): It's cold and I'm kind of hungry.
(meaning: Why don't you buy a drink or something to eat?)

Mr. Kim (employee): How about having a glass of liquor?
(meaning: I will buy liquor for you)

Kwacang (boss): It's okay. Don't bother.
(meaning: I will accept your offer if you repeat it)

Mr. Kim (employee): You must be hungry. How about going out?
(meaning: I insist upon treating you)

Kwacang (boss): Shall I do so?
(meaning: I accept)

Also there are certain things that will probably catch you off-guard if you are unfamiliar with asian culture. In western world, no sometimes means yes. Here, yes sometimes means no. In fact, for me, yes has just been a polite no more often than not. Possibly because I am such an Ang mo.

Something interesting happened just this morning. When I was riding the elevator the gentleman told me it is floor 3, when it stopped the the third floor. This is kind of like a big gesture here, he saved me from the embarrasment. Because as it usually happens you dash out of the elevator and if it’s not the ground floor you make a fool of yourself. I think this elegance is the defining characteristic of the eastern culture.

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My relationship doesn’t go very far with somebody who is not a man of his word. My close friends are punctual, reliable and they keep their promises. I don’t hang out with snobs, envious, scornful people. But the most important qualities I look for in a friend is being cultivated and refined and open minded. I am attracted to people who has a spark in their eyes. You know, the opposite of being a zombie. I make very strong distinctions on these matters. Everybody wants to have nice friends. I’m a nazi about it. I’d rather not waste any time on shallow people and their silly affairs.

We live in a society where any and all kinds of discrimination is frowned upon. I call this “but he is a good guy” disorder. That but clearly indicates there is something not good about that guy, he is not all-good. Scrape any negative attribute off of people. Are we all equally honest? Are we all self-sacrificing and understanding? And then that guy is actually a very nice person. Very nice my ass.

Discrimination based on gender or color or whatever superficial feature is bad. Even kindergarden children know that. Not discriminating at all is idiotic at best and bad for the society at worst. You have to make a choice between people, you can’t be intimate with everybody. You better not base your choice on stupid criteria like coolness or popularity or, god forbid, assertiveness. This is the exact same mistake we make choosing our rulers… ehm, I mean political representatives.

This is not just about human beings. We need to pick out the good from bad when we are making spending decisions. I have seen Food, Inc. recently and it talks about this (near the end). Corporations hide behind many layers of obscurity and we don’t easily see how they are doing their business. To compound that we, as individuals, think ourselves as too small to matter against big companies. But the truth is the only thing we can do happens to be a very powerful way to send them a message. If a company is evil, don’t buy its product. You can’t do much else anyway, but this one act should be enough.

So, make a choice. Or not. Choice is yours.

Related posts:

1. A Few Words About Singapore, Lah

I have sent XING two messages to cancel my account, I don’t want to be a member.

I would like to take advantage of XING’s unique potential to bring people together, until they cancel my account, to help homeless children and elders.

WTF! This was supposed to be a business related group. If anybody and their aunt will spam all 15k members; thank you, but no, thank you. So I did what any responsible user would do and used the report spam thingy.

Here is what I had hoped to happen; my report is stored somewhere. Other people flags this as well. When a critical number is reached a moderator reviews if the message is really spam and takes the appropriate action.

Here is what happened; an hour later or so I got an e-mail. It said “if you don’t want to receive messages from this person do yak yak yak”. King-size WTF.

1. First of all I had already done that. He should have checked if I did before writing an e-mail.
2. More importantly, he should have checked my profile for a second. It says programmer. So, if I’m a programmer I am supposed to know a thing or two about these computer thingies, right? Clicking, double-clicking, expertise on check boxes and stuff. Telling me how to block a user is the same thing as saying “hey muhuk, you’re an idiot”. Even if we suppose there are such morons¹, you still don’t have to tell it to their face. If you don’t have anything useful to say, don’t say nothing.

As a result, I got pissed of and sent this tweet:

XING Türkiye Support is clueless. Make sure you know who you’re e-mailing + take a moment to check if your advice has already been applied.

This is not the end of the story though. I received an e-mail from XING Community Manager yesterday. It was a very polite message containing the acknowledgement of both issues². Nothing out of the ordinary at first sight. But wait, the message mentioned my tweet. In the very beginning. Actually the first word was “Twitter”. And it was concluded with something along the lines of “keep sharing your comments”.

Well, of course my comments and ideas are worthless. Especially since I’m not a very active XING user. But don’t miss the important point here: XING basically, via it’s community representative, says “you tweeted a negative tweet about us, but we are cool with that”. Why is it so important?

1. They seem to be really cool about that. That means they understand social web. Conventional thinking is “I’d prefer you told this to me directly”, “we could have solved it between you and me”, “why do you shout, you make me look bad”. I have seen supposedly social media aware brands do this. It doesn’t look good. Trying to silence people is a horrible idea.
2. You can win people easily. Beautiful thing about Internet (and online services in particular) is that no party has too much power over the other. You can’t intimidate someone because she doesn’t like your services and writes about it. On the other hand she can’t do much damage³. So instead of freaking out, try to be nice and convert naysayers to evangelists.

Most of the time complaining customers want to know there is someone who can see things from the right perspective. Someone reasonable, agreeable, fair. Most of the time that’s all that is needed to turn “<your brand> sucks” to “sh*t happens, no big deal”. My perception changed from “clueless” to “hmm, I guess that was a misstep of an individual” to “wow, appereantly XING Türkiye knows social web very well”. And all it took was a simple e-mail⁴. It’s not that difficult.

Kudos to XING for being a good web2.0 citizen.⁵

1: I mean programmers who couldn’t figure out how to use a web GUI. People from other professions might not know these and that’s not necessarily their problem.

2: What more could a user/customer hope other than acknowledgement? The message also contained an apology. But, I personally don’t think brands should apologize to their customers. Especially regarding to freemium services.

3: This is true even for big players like TechCrunch.

4: I bet it’s instantiated from a draft, everybody gets more or less the same message. This makes it even cooler though.

5: And special thanks for making me feel like a jerk. Just kidding, feelings are for losers.

Related posts:

1. A Few Words About Singapore, Lah
2. Sign of a Stupid Programmer
3. Was it the imperialism that made the west rich?

Where I live, people judge you largely based on how expensive your cell phone is. It is such a sad fact that your job or how wealthy you are matters even for those who would expect no material favors from you. Not so surprisingly most of those people would speak the opposite of what they are doing.

My reaction to all this vulgarness is that I don’t buy one of those new and expensive phones. I use one until it breaks apart and then get a new one that allows only calling and SMS. Once in a while, rarely, you meet someone who doesn’t care about your accessories.

Related posts:

1. A Few Words About Singapore, Lah