laremy.sg

Woke up this morning to this text message that was sent to me at 5:09am:

rmb call me. i scare cannot hear alarm thankies

A translation is as follows:

Please remember to give me a call (at the presumably pre-specified time). I’m worried I might not be able to hear the alarm when it goes off. Thank you.

I don’t know who this person is as I don’t have her/his number in my phone book.

Nevertheless, I responded, saying:

Hi, just to let you know that you sent your wake-up call request to the wrong number.

This was uncharacteristically un-snarky of me; I wanted to add:

Just in case this has any bearing on whether or not you get any in the future. Cheers.

However, it did occur to me that the recipient might’ve been an ex-student – in which case, it would’ve been hard to explain my humour if I needed to do so – hence my decision to err on the side of caution.

Then again, it could’ve been Jun Liang – to which, coincidentally, it’s three years to the day!

Since every mother’s son (and daughter) has been broadcasting his (or her) National Day Message, I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon too.

Here’s my National Day Message to everyone:

Party like it’s 1965 million B.C., people!

Have a happy National Day and never forget things that have shaped the collective memory of our nation, such as:

• Operation Coldstore,
• Operation Spectrum, and
• The Graduate Mothers’ Scheme (no Wikipedia entry on it – why?),

among others.

Last but not least, if you’re spending National Day patriotically by sitting at home surfing the Net, please read The Book Review That Never Was.

I was on the subway on Friday when I saw the advertisement displayed above.

For readers without image support, the tagline is as follows:

Today’s engineers are solving tomorrow’s problems. Are you ready to be one of them?

I took a picture of it and uploaded it to Facebook and Twitpic with the caption “Bet all you B.Eng grads feel pretty proud of yourselves now, huh”, for I thought such a gloriously humorous error had to be shared with everyone.

Unfortunately, some people didn’t get it. What’s worse, some of the people who didn’t get it immediately thought I was mocking engineers.

Let’s look at the tagline of the ad once more:

Today’s engineers are solving tomorrow’s problems. Are you ready to be one of them?

Explanation:

• We know the ad producer’s intention was to ask “Are you ready to be one of [the engineers]?”.
• However, “problems” in the first sentence is also a plural noun.
• Because the word “them” could also refer to “problems”, it’s possible for the second sentence to be read as “Are you ready to be one of [the problems]?”.

In that case, the ad becomes somewhat humorous: is this educational institute actually recruiting people to train them to become problems for engineers to solve?

So I’d rate the copywriting as having failed on this count. However, in terms of advertising, there’s no discernible loss.

Based on the comments I received, only one person made it clear that he understood what I was referring to.

However, the ad isn’t targeting people like us i.e. arts/humanities graduates with little inclination toward an education or a career in engineering or the sciences.

The rest of the comments came from people who majored in engineering, math or science subjects and are also working in related industries.

Their concerns were either to joke about how engineers are in fact ‘fighting fires’ instead of preventing them, or to be defensive about the perceived slight.

Nevertheless, since they didn’t spot the error (or perhaps the error is only a concern to people who are interested in linguistics), I guess the ad will still manage to reach out to its target audience.

Post-script: On hindsight, actually, the biggest failure in terms of communication and humour are actually mine alone.

Sigh. In the future, I shall just stick at doing what I do best i.e. re-tweeting what people are saying about The Weight of Silk on Skin.

Post-post-script: I misread a comment!

A math graduate/teacher just texted me to clarify this interpretation he provided:

This is an ad for BSs and BSc, not BEng. The alternate reading [that B.Ss. and B.Sc. graduates are/will be the bane of engineers] actually makes more sense in light of that fact.

Looking at this pig-ture just gives me so much joy.

Relevant: “That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.” (The Sheep-Pig by Dick King-Smith a.k.a. Babe)

A few days back, a colleague sent the following e-mail to members of the staff:

Colleagues,

The projectors in these rooms are not working well:

…

We have raised the matter to [redacted] to help us resolve the problem as the vendor is not co-operating with us.

I felt like clicking on ‘Reply to All’ and sending this image to everyone:

Unfortunately, I was worried my point would’ve been lost. So I did this instead:

In other news, I’m thinking of setting up a Tumblr called “Things I Wish I Could Say In Public But Can’t Because Of The Need to Be Socially Appropriate”.

For obvious reasons, I can’t provide you with a sampling of the fare that can be on offer. However, if this Tumblr is indeed created, it definitely wasn’t me.

In other, other news: WAR PIGS! (Or their contemporaries, FIRE PIGS!)