The Tissue Paper Ah Mah

Almost every time we walk pass the underground pass between Tangs and Isetan Scott, we would see the old Ah Mah selling packets of tissue papers. Now, we don't go there often. So when we do, we see her, which shows us that she's there quite often. Normally, Mr Goh would give the Ah Mah $2 and take 3 packets of tissue papers with Snow White printed on the packets. We would love to buy everything she sells - Kong Guan biscuits, old clothes, etc. But there's only this much you can do.

I always think that old people should just stay at home, play with their grandchildren, and go travelling with their friends. At least I hope that's what my golden years life would be.

Seeing Ah Mah selling things like that make me sad. Call me old fashion, but I think it is the children's job to look after their old folks. It is something called "the family".

In my opinion, a family is not about the members of the family - who they are, how many members there are, but it's about the love and responsibility between each member. From an academic point of view, identifying a family structure is easy, identifying an "alternative family" is also easy. But if we don't factor in the love and responsibility between family members, that structure remains an empty shell.

I recognise that there are families where their members don't get along. But I think deep down, somehow, there's something that links all members together. In our previous lives, we must have had some sort of connections that we "deserve" each other in this lifetime... (hmmm)

So anyway, I hope the Ah Mah doesn't need to sell tissue papers anymore. Then I don't have to carry around Snow White or Barbie Doll tissue papers.

Make Me Over!

My colleagues and I attended a seminar last week. The seminar featured some high level people, some experienced people in the industry. Everything went well – the topics were good, the profile of the speakers were impressive, until a couple of the speakers showed their presentations.

Now, we acknowledged that it’s difficult to persuade media educators because we tend to be very critical – I mean, we have to, right? Considering that we have been teaching students subjects like “persuasive communication”, naturally we have high expectations.

So anyway, these speakers spoke with powerpoint presentations, and to our horror, the powerpoint were very badly done! Everything that we told our students not to do – such as don’t put too many words on one slide, don’t use yellow background with red text, etc – they did it. We were very tempted to ask for the softcopy to show as bad example for PerCom.

The point is, packaging is very important. The content was great, it’s just that it wasn’t presented in a way where the audience could understand, or could be receptive. Japanese are so successfully in selling their culture because they packaged everything so well! More so if you are in the media industry – it’s a big packaging business…

Then I read The Sunday Times on how this person landed more interviews when he attached a makeover photograph of himself together with his resume. The point was that employers look at the “face value”, literally before they decided to give you a chance to even impress them with your knowledge.

Well, yes, we often say that inner beauty is important. Nowadays, inner beauty must be packaged nicely too.

No wonder I had a hard time landing a job when I first graduated – during my time, there was no such thing as “complete makeover”.