Shentonites

Lunch brings about 3 observations:
- door close buttons
- tissue paper
- flyer handouts

Heading down to the first floor in the lift, it seems that everyone in the lift is part of a fellowship with an implicit understanding. Entry into the lift comes with an entry fee of pressing the door close button. Everyone comes in and unconsciously taps the button, not even looking at it anymore. The door close buttons are so much more worn out than the door open ones everywhere i go in Singapore. Wonder if it's the same everywhere in the world? Some minimalist lift designers eliminate the door close buttons altogether, since the doors close by themselves anyway, and you only really need a door open button to hold the lift for someone coming in. Wonder what the Shenton Way Shentonites would do in that situation.

Another part of the Shentonite culture is of course how they use tissue papers to chope seats at lunch tables. So everyone avoids seats which have tissue paper packets on them because they think someone's already taken that seat. Leung suggests coming early in the morning and distributing tissue paper packets on all the seats to confuse people. There was that story of the person who left his mobile phone at the table to reserve it, only to complain later on that it got stolen.... really.

People who hand out flyers you obviously don't want: What do you do? Do you take the flyers anyway, or do you just avoid them and walk by? (I need to incorporate little mini vote boxes into this blog... wish i was at home) Supporting the flyer industry just seems to effect a transferral of paper from the flyer-giver's hands into the nearest dustbin just beyond, which is sometimes due to how they give things like bust enhancement ads to guys and such. So if you take the flyer, you help the poor suffering youngster earn some money. But if you don't take it and make his job that much harder, he'd think twice about doing the job unless he gets paid more money for his bother. Eventually the idea is that handing out flyers will get more expensive for the companies, and they'd shift towards other forms of advertising, and save trees and bother and waste. Of course, this is assuming that there are no new suckers who come in and hand out flyers at the old wage rate... if the labour supply is infinitely inelastic then the wages will never rise. hmm.

P.S. This darn mail to blog thing doesn't work again.