Yammie's CyberLog | 亚米的生活杂志

A superficial rule

Yammie — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 07:29:34 +0000

SH is unbelievably hot!

For four days last week, the official weather report on TV announced 38 degrees Celsius as the highest temperature. But my all my other sources, including taxi drivers, weibo (微博, similar to Twitter) buddies and a bunch of other acquaintances, told me it was definitely more.

But why would the weatherman lie?

I finally found out that there was this rule about people not having to go to work when the temperature reaches 40 degrees C, similar to the case on earth when there’s a typhoon signal number 8 or black rainstorm being hoisted, you’d be exempted (a very safe excuse too) from all activities requiring you to travel outdoor, including work, because presumably you’d have to commute to work if you don’t live in your office.

So in view of this rule, the official bodies are very cautious about reporting the “true” temperature because this would inevitably stir up a chaotic situation amongst organisations and companies that “obey rules”.

But you know what, as with all other “rules” on Mars, Martians seem to be very easy-going with them. When they told me about this rule, they all showed a “I-coudn’t-care-less-because-it-would-not-happen-anyway” expression on the face and said it with utmost calm, “yes, it was definitely 40 degrees yesterday and yes, the news would never report this temperature”.

I tried to role-play with another earthling about “not having to work” at 38 degrees (oh yeah, I forgot to tell you that this is a new standard by the SH government, just announced recently, challenging the tolerance of the people to the new high!) and see what it’d be like if we take this rule seriously.

Me, “Jays, it’s 38C, no work!”

Jays, “Wow no work! Buddy, let’s go karaoke!” (this is what we do when we see the typhoon 8 signal isn’t it?)

Me, “Boss, it’s 38C and we’re going home, see you tomorrow!”

Nope, doesn’t sound right at all. We’re pretty sure the boss would roll her eyes and think we are a bunch of unprofessional idiots. Oh well, scrub that then.

So the sun keeps shining, air-con keeps running, and work continues. A rule becomes totally superficial. But because this is so superficial, we never get to see the truth behind the weather report.

So … keep guessing on the temperature. You’ll never know!

Martian language 202: The heart is bottomless

Yammie — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 12:19:03 +0000

The thing about language-learning is that, not until you have lived in the country, you would never be able to fully understand what the locals talk about.

That was what happened to me anyway. And I started from the absolute zero.

Perhaps my transformation from being an alien to part of the Martian community was rather interesting, many of my friends have started asking me to share what I learnt form the locals – like phrases and words that people might find useful when they actually converse with a Martian, or slangs and stuff that ordinary text books would not cover. So I’ve decided to do that on my blog and it’ll be much easier to benefit all who are interested in speaking to a Martian in a more “authentic” way.

The first thing that came into my mind was the phrase 心里没底 (xin li mei di) (“the heart feels bottomless”), probably because I’ve been hearing too much of it recently.

A real-life example:

Sherry asks, “Sam, how are you getting on with the preparation for being the host of the event on Saturday?”

Sam replies, “I don’t know. I am rather worried. It’s my first time and I don’t know how I should do this. I don’t think I can do this well and I don’t want to do it.”

Yammie, suddenly walks into the scene and asks, “Sherry, how’s Sam getting on?”

Sherry, “He’s not good. He feels his heart is bottomless.” (他觉得心里没底).

So when you feel that you don’t have much confidence, don’t know what to expect from something, not sure of an outcome, don’t really have a grasp of the situation, not sure what to do to generate an outcome that you can be sure of, you can say, I feel the heart is bottomless. (我觉得心里没底 – wo jue de xin li mei di).

On the contrary, if you want to show people that you know exactly what’s going on and you have the worst case scenario in your mind, you can simply say, “my heart has a bottom”. (我心里有个底 – wo xin li you ge di).

Whenever I hear people telling me that their heart is bottomless, I can always feel the fear for falling into a big deep hole and could never get back up. Like in the old days, people would jump into a well to commit suicide, that kind of thing. Or when people fall in love, it would be hard calculate how “deep” they could fall…

Perhaps the purpose of it all would be to stir emotions and earn the speaker some sympathy?

The blue sky VS people in scruffy blue shirts

Yammie — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 04:08:26 +0000

Beautiful Sky @ Qibao

The sky was exceptionally beautiful yesterday.

It was the day that we did an event at the HuiBao Shopping Mall at Qibao. When the city control suddenly came up and forcefully confiscated our mugs all of all sudden saying that our mugs are “fake”.

I am not sure if they understood what kind of business that we do. We don’t sell mugs, mister, we sell fitness service.

But anyhow, without even listening to what we had to say about “not the mugs but the instructors”, a bunch of guys with scruffy blue shirts and dirty shoes took away a box of mugs and we managed to protect the rest.

And we quickly called the property management people who were supposed to negotiate and get the approval for this event. They came, at warp speed, with a copy of the approved application in their hands. But the city control people said they didn’t believe it, and accused it for being fake. My wise property management girl suddenly got very clever and replied, ‘so how do we know that you guys are not “fake”?’

Cleverness didn’t help much. Their superior who signed off on the application was nowhere to be seen. He was dining somewhere else. So without their superior, the people in scruffy blue shirts could do whatever they wanted with our mug (and maybe more…)

So in the end we totally skipped the promotion, delivered the rest of the mugs and gifts back to the office, and carried on with our “performance”. There was nothing else to confiscate, and we did exactly what we were trying to sell, the great performance by a bunch of talented instructors that attracted a lot of attention and big applause. We managed to get people queuing to sign-up for a trial pass, without the mugs.

Thank you City Control, for telling us to go back to the basics of our business. Oh and by the way, for maximum impact, please remember to iron your shirts next time!

A conversation between two Leos

Yammie — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 03:07:28 +0000

So finally after many nights of hard work, going over changes and pushing for completion, our site is finally launched.

And is not perfect. No, far from what I wanted it to be at the beginning. But since in the teaser phase we set ourselves up with a timer that counted down to the final launch of the site, we had to give our very best to fulfilled what we had promised. There are still a whole load of stuff that I wanted to implement – some are wild ideas that needs exploring, and some are very solid features that we have to make happen in order to achieve the kind of standard that I wanted from this project.

Call me perfectionist. But I am very determined.

Oh and I forgot to mention the extra stuff that my Leo boss had asked me to develop for the site. In fact, quite plenty of them.

I have two bosses, who happen to the the investors of this fitness chain that I am working for. They are a married couple – a Leo husband, an entrepreneur himself operating his own business with a very macro, business-oriented view and an imaginary min, and a Scorpio wife, the CEO of the fitness chain who loves fitness and is a very hands-on, no frills, details oriented person. Two extremes, but I guess a very good match.

The other day I had a very interesting conversation with my Leo boss. My boss likes to talk, and sometimes gets a bit carried away so he could be talking about his imagery creativity for hours. I am a person who suffers seriously from ADD (if you didn’t know about this term, don’t worry I am not sick – ADD = Attention Deficient Disorder, meaning the difficulty to concentrate on something for more than approximately 15 minutes), and I normally would have traveled to Scandinavia and back within this time frame – the conversation with him lasted for exactly 1 hour 45 minutes, with him doing 90% of the talking.

And I tell you, as surprising as it might seem, I remained at the office’s meeting room with him most of the time, (oh in fact probably traveled to Beijing for a bit…) because the what he said was appealing enough to keep me focused.

My Leo boss has a great marketing mind. And to him anything can be – and should be – packaged. With his entrepreneurial thinking and his marketing imagination, he gave me a lot of ideas that totally changed the way that I see my job right now. And he was right. He believed in having marketing drive the business, developing new sources of income, motivating the frontline, delivering a totally different side of the product to lure customers to buy. Some of what he said might be a little unrealistic, but it was full of business sense. And totally (I hate to repeat this term but I cannot find another word to replace) ENTREPRENEURIAL.

I guess it was a moment of enlightenment.

And I guess what motivated me a lot was the fact that what he said proved that some of my thinking was right. WOW.

So I guess there are more stuff on my to-do list now. I just don’t know how I can juggle my time and my resources to make it happen. But I know that I have to. For this project and I have become one already.

What a mission!

I cal tell you not everything is running smoothly. As much as I like my job, there are still a lot of ups and downs as I go through each day. Conflicts, misunderstandings, failures, all could be happening at the same time. But then again, when I thought about all the stuff that I couldn’t have done without this job, I think I can put up with whatever I have to suffer.

To start with… maybe the perfectionist needs to take a step back to re-evaluate what she has and compromises on something that is slightly less than perfect…

Two foward-looking lions...

Gambling on the weather…

Yammie — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:08:33 +0000

Summer in SH sums up to two words only – sweat, rain.

When it’s not raining, it’s baking hot. Temperature gets up to 36 degrees celsius (some told me it could even get up to 40C!). Aircon is never enough except on the metro occasionally. Everywhere I go I sweat. It’s getting harder for me to where anything but vests. Sooner or later I’d have to take off my skin too if that was not a device for perspiration to lower body temperature.

Then the rain comes.

After several steamingly hot days, non-stop rain usually follows.

It’s not like it rains for a bit and stops and rains and stops.

No, it rains without a stop.

Like today, I was in and out of the house quite a bit going for lunch, doing some shopping, going for massage, getting dinner, going to the ATM and local grocery…. I always have to carry my umbrella, no matter how short the distance was.

Quite annoying. It wasn’t the kind of rain that would make you say “oh why bother” and just stay inside. But it was heavy enough that if you hadn’t had your umbrella you’d most probably be soakingly wet after 10 minutes.

And I heard in the news that this rain would last for at least 3 days, accompanied by occasional thunderstorm. How lovely.

Then the cycle repeats itself until what they call the “rain season” is over, which is probably already well past summer by then.

So for people who are planning to come to expo from now till September – you are betting on your luck – sweat or rain?

If I were to build a website…

Yammie — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 15:23:54 +0000

It’s not like I’m trying to prove anything here, but frankly with this job, I’m going to really have to change the norm of the industry.

Like, a boring, “formatted”, informative website.

I was looking at a competitor’s (which, ironically, was my former employer) website that had recently been revamped and I’m very sorry to say, the new look was worst than ever. It was user-unfriendly, looks unfinished, wordy and totally unattractive. It was full of sales messages and and came across as very pushy.

Well it is ok to be pushy when you are trying to get qualifying leads from the web but then again, it really doesn’t mean that if you give me the product information I’ll give you my personal details.

Anyway, what I was trying to do was to find the schedule. (yes, I’m a member, still) and it was a very tough task indeed. You’d have to be very patient and experimental in order to find the class schedule which was buried under country –> club –> and it was a little text link at the very bottom of the page, which you’d have to scroll through quite a number of paragraphs in order to see it.

And why do websites have to be so “formatted” anyway? The navigation, the position of the text, banners and all. I thought we’re in 2010, not 1990.

I had never been really happy with the way fitness clubs are treating the www. When it’s become such a powerful tool of creating interests and keeping customers, most of the sites of the fitness clubs I’m seeing still remain static. When I first met my current employer here, I promised to deliver him a completely different website to showcase the strengths of the club like nobody ever did. (I hope…)

But what I wanted to do is really not so easy to achieve. First it’s the complexity of the things that I wanted to do on the web, i.e., to fully integrate the customer experience offline and online. Secondly, the lack of database support from the current system and the ability to build a more futuristic data management platform is not going to happen in a few month’s time. Thirdly, the wild imagination of mine was in fact, quite hard to make it a reality.

To cut the story short, I met a very capable company in the end to try make my fantasy come true. They had been extraordinarily helpful, trying to accommodate all my little requests to make things work the way that I wanted to. I’d say it was a partnership with chemistry, but I think both of us under-estimated the scope of the project spanned from being overly creative with the whole thing.

We launched a nice teaser, now that we are about to complete phase 1, and we have to delay the launch by 10 days due to some technicality issues with the creative. Phase 1 in a single language is what we call the “basics”, once we get this going we are ready to move onto Phase 2 where the true integration will happen.

And Phase 3 is way beyond our imagination.

I’m so looking forward to bring our site to this world!

A “life” update

Yammie — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:36:19 +0000

Long time no write!

All of a sudden I thought about this site. OMG, it’s really been a while.

And where had I been all this time? Well, I’d been leading a rather hectic life here in SH. Things have changed. I’m now back to the fitness industry, starting all over again.

Working with a team of familiar people, working on a brand that I developed from scratch.

It’s been fun. I am not saying that everything has been going smoothly. There are still a dozen problems to solve, many things to improve, targets to meet…. But then again, nothing great comes easy. I try not to to think about anything negative, because I value the lessons learnt.

Oh and you can’t imagine how much I love this brand. As soon as I got the brief from the owner, I worked on the ideas. Thought through, came up with what I wanted from the brand, and got the right people to execute it. Well it’s not final yet. There are still many things that haven’t been implemented, but I am sure that it will be done, one day.

So from where I was before at SH, I went through one more flat-hunt (I’ll spare you with the details, but it had been quite a miserable process), one more moving, one more battle with the landlord and one more amendments of all addresses. That was… hard!

Very surprised that I managed all that with the kind of workload that I’m taking up. But it had not been too unpleasant – I got a tonne of friends to help out.

That leads me to realise that I’ve actually successfully made SH my home base now. And to some people’s surprise, I really like it here. I like the place and I like my life in SH. You’ll never know what will happen tomorrow, but at least at this point in time, I am very content. (I am very good at blinding myself from other imperfections, haha…)

So anyway, that was quite an update.

And what am I doing right now?

I’m working hard, continue to develop the freshest looking fitness club chain, the best brand experience, and most intensively, the world’s best website for fitness club. Man – this is no joke. It is really going to be the best! And besides that, I am enjoying my life on the weekends, having brunch outdoor under the warm sun (in fact… very warm!) and a good chat with friends and all that. Oh, and managed to workout whenever I can because the studio is just 1 minute walk from my office.

And finally, let me advertise for a bit. I am still blogging, but I try to do it in my new found Chinese skills. Do visit my micro-blog when you feel like seeing some news update from me (in simplified Chinese.. woohoo~).

Apartment-hunting on Mars

Yammie — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 03:43:54 +0000

Happy Easter!

It’s rather unusual to have someone say this to you in Mars. However I thought I’d go ahead and write this anyway. At least it feels like I’m actually celebrating something.

My day was spent checking-out apartments for a friend who’s moving to my city on Mars soon. It was fun, and I think I’m getting really good at this. At least I’m paying attention to the necessary details, asking sensible questions, evaluating on the effect of the Feng Shui and negotiating on the deal. I have only had roughly three years of experience on apartment rental, but somehow I have noticed something. The rental price can actually vary quite a bit depending on the interior of the apartment, ceteris paribus.

I am quite surprise to see that a lot of the local landlords are still letting their apartments run down with the minimal maintenance on both the condition of the apartment and the quality of the furniture and appliances inside. If they were they were thinking that a one-time investment would return a life-time of value then they were most probably wrong. I have seen a difference of 10-20% variation of asking price and the better the interior the faster the apartment’s taken. I guess it’s really to do with the growing expat/foreigner market and the educated young professionals who are into the “Ikea style”.

Talking about the “Ikea style”, some clever landlords noticed this fact and started to advertise their properties with this name tag, hoping to attract better tenants. I was one who was obviously getting the wrong information signal and spent a fair bit of time visiting these apartment mimicking the “Ikea style”. Well, don’t be fooled. Putting everything neutral coloured into an apartment with unmatched textures, styles and patterns and poor quality comes nowhere close to being Ikea-lookalike. Thank you very much.

So the key to apartment-hunting on Mars is to checkout as many as possible and when you see one that you really like with good interior and everything despite asking for a slightly higher price – don’t take too long to think about it – it will be gone very soon. And if you’ve got a deadline to move, you might be stuck with a cheaper flat with a messy interior and ugly furniture to bug you for the next 365 days of your life.

Apart from the "Ikea style", the "Laura Ashely style" is not bad either

Beautiful morning!

Yammie — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 04:15:26 +0000

It’s a beautiful Saturday morning on Mars and I’m sitting in the study of my new home typing this.

It’s really been quite a while since we last saw the sun shining and I seriously can’t remember how many dark and raining days we’d been through during the past few months. And now the trees and the grass outside of the windows look greener than ever. I can even see some red flowers blooming with a few bees bumping around.

Oh Spring is finally coming to Mars. Which is really worth celebrating considering my ground floor apartment always feels like a fridge. I am wondering how I’m going to get through another winter. But I guess you can’t just have it all – nice garden view feeling cold, or watching your neighbours doing their laundry in a warm room – especially when you have a budget to keep.

In case you didn’t notice – I’d been away on an extra long holiday – so long that one can probably only have it once or twice per lifetime (not counting retirement!) I’m very glad that I’m having this break and when I think about getting back to work starting all over again, it doesn’t feel like a drag anymore. Sometimes I guess you just have to stimulate yourself a little in order to appreciate what’s happening in life. Believe it or not, I’m actually quite looking forward to it.

Though I know I’m going to miss waking up naturally at 9am.

And of course going to bed no earlier than 2am!

New home… AGAIN!

Yammie — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:33:28 +0000

I’m BACK!

I know I’ve been bad. But here I am again, because I’ve had a complete mental block about something that totally shut down my creative power in writing.

Now I’ve actually got something to write about… and it’s a new apartment.

Don’t ask me why I need to move – it’s a really long story! But it’s to do with a… huge decision that was associated with the rediscovery of the joy of life (something to that extent).

Anyway, for your information, I’m still on Mars. Something unexpectedly happened and I had to find a new place for my new life. And… magically I did it within one day – the quickest out of all my flat-hunting experiences on Mars.

I cannot find a better term than saying that it was fate.

What’s more, I think (or rather.. I HOPE) I’m getting lucky. My new landlord is very accommodating, and definitely no short of money. Upon my request, he’d already changed the double person sofa bed inside of the study, changed the washing machine to one that has a dryer function, plus added a new SONY 32-inch plasma TV for my bedroom – all to be delivered tomorrow.

Despite the nice landlords, what made me pick this apartment you might have asked. Well…

1. It’s within a nice, homely compound within my target area, more like a family area rather than the kind of “service-apartment” look-alike facility

2. It’s on the ground floor, surrounded by lots of greens. Trees and leaves and flowers. It’s actually a 20-storey high residential building, but they happened to have ground floor apartments too. I’d never lived in one, and I thought the view is so much better than the so-called high-rise.

3. There are two patios, with glass windows that can be opened or closed, with enough space where you can sit in a green house lookalike thing to enjoy a sunny afternoon with a cup of coffee and a good book

4. It’s very spacious – 121.5 Sq M in all, enough room for myself (of course) and my family/guest when they come over to stay

5. It’s probably the most nicely decorated place that I’d checked in the area with this price range. The landlord definitely has good taste!

It sure does have other problems, like a dirty bathroom that I will need my ayi to sort it out tonight. But I guess…. which old flat doesn’t?

And bugs… hopefully I’m not going to get a lot of them, knowing how I HATE having bugs at home (basically because I am scared!)

My new life is about to begin. Hopefully it will be a good one.