Top Ten Things to Do With Your Handphone

by mrbrown@mrbrown.com

(Feel free to distribute for non-profit and non-commercial purposes but keep my byline, email address and URL intact please. Thanks)

I started out writing about things you should NOT do with a handphone, and I thought it only fair that I give you the other side of the story, that is, how to bake real good butter cake. But my wife did not have the time to tell me the recipe so I had to give you the top ten things you CAN do with your handphones. Sorry, I will try to write more socially relevant material in future, like agricultural journals.

1. You can make phone calls.

I cannot stress this enough. Handphones, contrary to popular belief, are not just for showing off, but can also be used to make calls. Unless, of course, one of Singtel's software/switches/doohickeys fails again and brings down the entire nation's cellular and paging network. Then your handphone can only be used as an expensive paperweight or paper clip picker.

The importance of a handphone's ability to make phone calls becomes glaringly obvious when:

a. You have paid a lot of money to the telephone company for this privilege, whether you use the service or not;

b. you need to call your wife who is waiting for a ride from you at Bishan MRT Station in the North while you are stuck in traffic on the ECP in the East, so that she will not set fire to your favourite neckties in anger;

c. you have all three numbers in your handphone number to win the Radio Cash Call.

2. Call 95FM from your car.

If there is one useful thing handphones can do, it is to call Joe and the Flying Dutchman to tell them that the traffic in your car park is really backed up and drivers should avoid driving there. You could also call them to share that joke about how some women can walk into pubs in Boat Quay and acquire an accent in 20 minutes flat (rim shot). Or you could call the station and try to win the goodie bag with those nifty Post-it notes in the "Don't Anyhow Say Hah?" contest. The possibilities are endless.

Of course, some of the time, calling the 95FM guys from your trusty handphone can be frustrating, especially when you are telling this great joke about the Rabbi and the Bookie, and the signal keeps fading in and out. ("And so he s- wh- are you- wear-g- th- hat on your -ick?") That would really make you look like a loser who has nothing better to do than to call radio stations with your handphone to tell bad jokes.

3. Page somebody.

As most people who have tried know, it is not possible to page someone through payphones, unless you are using one of those coffee-shop types, where the number of the payphone is scrawled on the wall, like some bad gangster movie.

Then all you have to do is to page your friend, press "*", dial the number you see on the wall, press "**", and stop everyone who wants to use this public phone from using it for the next half an hour, while you wait for your friend to get off his bus to find a payphone to call you back. By which time, you have either been hacked to death by a triad member who needed to call his leader about an impending rival gang tea dance competition, or you have already left, and your friend gets to talk to the Mee Pok Man.

Also, if the number on the wall is not the payphone's number but the number of some S-League bookie who eats steel nails for lunch and he has Caller-ID, then the best course of action for your friend would be to leave the country and go somewhere safer, like Beirut.

So payphones are not practical for paging. Handphones, on the other hand, are great for this. That is why the phone company charges you the same rate for paging someone as a regular handphone call, even though a page call lasts only 2 milliseconds. If you don't like this arrangement, buddy, tough. You can use that payphone and get chopped into tiny pieces, or pay us our obscene charges. We believe in giving our customers choice. That's the kind of loving phone company we are.

4. Get a dictionary definition.

This is a real life-saver to some people. Ginny, my wife, loves to call me on my handphone to ask me how to spell words like "scintillating" and "photosynthesis" because she needs them for a business letter (as in "We regret to inform you that the scintillating fabric you requested is no longer in stock. This was due to a lack of photosynthesis."). This can get very costly and exorbitant and I have since bought her a dictionary, which is far cheaper and uses less bandwidth. These days, she merely calls me to ask me what I am thinking.

I have gotten calls to ask about the use of gerunds in grammar, the workings of Microsoft Excel and movie screening times. I am a walking treasure house of useless information for my friends and family. I wonder how I manage without the handphone, really. Without it, I will never be able to do all these spiritually relevant tasks, and may be forced to do useless things like getting my work done.

5. Call Singtel's Customer Service Hotline and listen to the nice "On Hold" Music.

It can be a lot of fun to call the hotline and see how long it takes to talk to a human being. Sometimes you even get to listen to some nice elevator muzak. I particularly like that Oriental Kenny G piece where he tries to sound like a Chinese funeral band. It is also a great test for your handphone battery's talk time, as batteries have been known to run out while waiting for a human to answer. And I mean the Big Fat Batteries (BFBs), not the wussy slim type.

Still, in all fairness to them, I am sure they get a lot of calls a day and it is just impossible to answer everyone at once.

Some "On Hold" music are not even "On Hold" BillBored Charts material but direct feeds into Radioland. So if you get really bored, you can pretend to be talking to the Flying Dutchman on his show. And the lady in the "On Hold" recording always tells you how much they value you as a customer blah blah and their operators are still busy blah blah and your fly is open blah blah and don't you have better things to do than to call us and be put on hold you loser you son of a blah.

Still, it would be nice to get some soft drinks while waiting, like when you are queuing for a table at Sizzler and the staff comes out to make you feel like a regular okay guy for queuing up quietly. Maybe a recorded stand-up comic could tell you jokes while they are desperately searching for a live operator to tell you that the extension you are dialing does not exist. At least the wait will not be so harsh.

"Our operators are still busy, and waiting for you to give up waiting, so while you are waiting, would you like to hear some jokes? If yes, press 1, if you wish to listen to Kenny G, press 2, if you wish to have pizza delivered to your home, press 3."

I'd choose pizza because you can get hungry waiting that long.

6. Call 1711 to find out the time and the latest Government Policy.

For the price of a mobile phone call, you can not only get the time told to you in a sweet lady's voice (goodbye watches!), you can also hear the latest slogan of the latest Government campaign. Some of these can be very profound.

Here are some examples:

"Save Water. It is precious."

"Pay your TV license through GIRO."

"Electronic Road Pricing is your Friend."

You understand, of course, that the lady does not sit there 24 hours a day looking at her watch, waiting to tell you the time. Don't be a doofus, they have rotating shifts.

Do not attempt to talk to this nice lady like I did, as a child, long ago, last week. It seems that the lady will tell you the time and the thought of the day even if you don't ask, "Hi, can you please tell me the time and the thought of the day?" Sometimes I wish I got service as good as that when I call tech support lines and the civil service.

Sometimes I wonder what it is like to be a 1711 lady. What is the criteria for getting this job? The ability to talk in slow, clipped sentences? Notice the lack of a grating fake Western accent. That is truly forward thinking. And does she have to record _all_ the times in fifteen-second blocks ("six fifty-two, and fifteen seconds" and so on)? That would mean 24x60x4 or 5760 phrases to record! Staggering numbers!

As you can see, we try to do our best to bring you the kind of thought-provoking commentary that you read above. We want to spark debate and better society in our own little way. That is also why we speak in the third collective voice even though mr brown writes this alone.

And if the 1711 lady makes a mistake, or they decide they want a little more "oomph" in the delivery ("...and this time try saying, 'seven thirty-FIVE and FORty-five seconds', dahling."), does she have to record the last 5755 phrases again?

Also, this 1711 lady, does she feel frustration at her lack of celebrity status? I mean, surely it is frustrating for her to see weathergirls on TV with a lot less talent, personality and audience (although some of them, like the nice one who wrote me a fan email, are really intelligent, nice and witty people with a lot of weather report fans, he adds in a butt-covering moment) getting all the limelight and "Shiver" acting deals, while she languishes in relative obscurity? Surely it is awkward for her, when people ask what she does for a living, to say, "Oh, you know when you dial 1711, and the lady tells you the time? That's me."

I also wonder what kind of career opportunities are open to 1711 ladies. Does she put in her resume, "Told Time"? "Executive Time Teller"? So what is next for her, a job in telemarketing timeshare resorts? A gig as a deejay?

"Thank you for listening to 95.2FM, the weather is clear and sunny, and time is eight twenty-two and forty-five seconds. Flush Your Toilet After Use, It Is The Right Thing To Do. And our next song is..."

You know what would make big money though? Instead of those puerile campaign slogans, let's have steamy messages in those 1711 calls.

"Baby, call me (pant, pant) and I'll give you (pant, pant) a (beep)-ing Good Time (heavy breathing)! The time is six oh-eight and thirty seconds (beep)."

If you get that little scheme going, the call will not have to be free anymore. You could make it 1-900-1711, charge 75 cents per minute and people will still call.

"The All-New Sexy Time Check! You'll be back for Seconds! Call now to Talk Clock!"

7. Play games

I hear now there is a handphone that contains games and an infra-red port that allows the owner to play games with another owner of the same handphone. Oh, that's useful. I myself have often stood around with my handphone thinking, "If only I could play a game with my handphone."

"Excuse me, do you have a Semens, want to play with me?" Yes, that ought to win friends and influence people.

This is what our society needs, people having Death Matches with their handphones. I bet they can call each other to verbally taunt their opponent too, although that might make playing the game somewhat harder, holding it to their ear and all.

I say let's not stop here. Let's go the whole hog and make handphones operate the TV, Car Alarm and LD player. Hey, I have an idea, let's install Karaoke into handphones. We could sing into our handphones and have quickie Karaoke contests in MRT stations. Can you imagine that? A nation of Handphone-Karaoke singers. Better than a nation of share owners. Finally a chance to put all those handphone ringing tunes to good use.

8. Send an SMS Message

There's this neat service that allows you to send short messages on your handphone through a system known as SMS, which stands for, surprisingly, Short Message Service. It involves tapping out a message through the number pad where number "2" is "ABC", "3" is "DEF" and so on. It's all very simple, really. Anyone with a Ph.D. in Quantum Physics and a lot of time can do it. I am presently averaging 2 letters per minute.

I have often saved a lot of time and money typing out meaningful messages to friends like "Ware R U?" and "In Bra Dept". And if they own handphones the size of a Virtual Pet (a Takmagucci), with teensy screens, all they have to do is to simply press the arrow keys a lot to read the whole thing. Easy as pie.

Many a time, friends have left text messages on my handphone, expecting me to reply in a witty and educational way while I am trying to avoid getting killed by psycho drivers. It is great fun to be pecking out a message while driving, so much fun that I do not do it anymore. It is that addictive.

Aside from its sheer simplicity, SMS has a few other minor quirks to be aware of. One, Singtel charges 5 cents for every outgoing message, while M1 does not charge at all. Two, Singtel users can only send messages to and receive messages from other Singtel users. Ditto for M1 users. And 99.93% of handphone users do not know how to read their messages anyway.

So U can C now Y it such a popular feature of de modern HP.

9. Save the world.

If you have not seen The Saint or 007 use their handphones to send email, control BMWs or detonate large pieces of fruit, then you have to get out more. Handphones are now indispensable tools of the Super Spies of the Free World.

I have even seen one handphone TV ad where the executive toting a particular brand of handphone is able to help his panicking company recover from certain financial doom, while on some exotic remote location (where he is busy looking cool and swinging his coat around stylishly). I daresay that it is because of this individual's total mastery of his handphone that the stock markets recovered.

Therein lies a solution for our Asian Economic Crises. We just need to give all our citizens that particular handphone and teach them to swing their coats stylishly in exotic remote locations.

10. Return a page.

Handphones for some people, are only for returning pager calls. Even though handphones were originally invented to negate the need for a pager, so that others could just call directly, for these people, the handphone is only switched on when someone pages or when he pages someone.

The main reason for this is the bizarre Singaporean phenomenon known as "We Will Charge You for Incoming Calls Too". This is not practiced in many countries, where only outgoing cellular calls are charged. Yet, in this lovely place we call home, incoming calls, which we have next to no control over, are charged at the same rate. If we have been good, and the phone company is in a good mood (like they have won some big contract to service Greater Africa), they might give us a _discount_ on the incoming calls. Or maybe a discount on incoming calls originating from MRT stations, unless it is between 5.19pm and 9.04am, in which case the discount only applies to those MRT stations beginning with the letter "U". Other than that, the handphone owner is pretty much screwed.

So it is not uncommon to call someone's handphone, and only get his answering service because his handphone is off to prevent you from calling him directly. Even so, you will still lose your ten cents or more, depending on what phone you used to call his handphone, and he will probably get charged for the incoming call as well, because reaching the answering service is also considered a through call.

This is why pagers still hang mockingly from the belts of handphone owners, and why the telephone company is rich, while we losers are still poor.

This is also why, when Singtel made a laughable attempt to compile a handphone number directory, they got a total of 2 entries, and both belonged to the same guy. Are they crazy? Why would I want to print my handphone number in a book for people to call me on my handphone? Let them page me from the coffee-shop payphone, man. I'm way too busy playing with my Semens.

All fan mail and soft toys may be directed at mrbrown@mrbrown.com

Other writings may be found in the Website "BrownTown" at http://www.mrbrown.com