Buddy Dot SG

Interesting weekend. On Thursday I had been messing around with my copy of Cakewalk and I found out how to make my MIDI have multiple instruments. Well, finally! So I have some more decent sounding demos. Unfortunately they are just demos, and unfortunately my music won’t be to everybody’s taste, so I don’t know how and why it matters.

The other thing is that one of my jogging buddies came up with the idea of buying and selling calculators. You’re not going to believe this. I was shaking my head when I heard about this idea, but I thought I would go down and hang out with the gang and have some fun.

People who take CFA exams need a specific sort of calculator. We were going to distribute cards to people who were taking those exams. I was taking the afternoon shift, so I was supposed to get there at noon. Of course I was late. But well on the way there, there was this hot teenage chick with great skin tone and tight leg muscles, she was wearing a MILK run t shirt. She got a shirt which was a little tight, so it was rather pleasant to watch the letters “MILK” stretched over her figure. But digressions aside, I was late.

I looked at the card. They were printed cards, like business cards. Probably cost 8c a piece, and I wondered, “you are going to cover the cost of labour, of printing the cards, by selling a few cheap calculators? You are shitting me?” The marketing was wrong: “Recycle your calculator” And it was green. What does being green and recycling have to do with anything? It missed the main point: we want to give you MONEY for your calculator.

Here’s how it works. If you want to sell your calculator, SMS to inform us (if you’re brave enough to risk giving your hp number for spam). Then drop by at one of the pickup points at a date that is printed on the card. If you still remember us by then (the date is in August, because that’s when results are going to be out.) Make the trip down specially for us. Then we’ll give you $15.

I was thinking, “well, we still have to be in those places on the appointed date, right? And we did say we’ll be at the MRT station, but MRT stations are quite large, right?”

One of my friends, K, said that after a while he knew it was going to be a hare brained scheme. I was slightly smarter and I knew right off, but I was curious enough about their “business model” that I just had to go and check it out.

We realised that it was difficult to distribute the cards to the exam candidates. A lot of people who were going into the exam hall, you probably were better off not talking to them. Some of my friends were a little too shy to go approach the CFA candidates. (Yeh? So why do you go into business in the first place?)

When I got there, they told me that they had around 10 boxes of cards to get rid of. I was thinking, why the f did you print that many? Were there so many candidates? Eventually we figured out that there were enough for every car in the parking lot. So when the exam was going on, we went out in the sun (thank goodness it was a cloudy day) and put the cards under any windshield wiper we could find. There were at least 4 other flyer distributors on that day.

I thought at first, why print something on a card when it was so much cheaper to just print it on paper? But I suppose it was sensible to print it on a card so that people can keep it in their wallets if they have the intention to remind themselves what to do with the calculator. Still, the expense was out of proportion to what

After that, we caught up with work and stuff. Finally came the hour of reckoning when the gates were about to open. I caught up with a few of those who left the hall early. I tried to push the card to one, she said no thanks, I don’t want to sell the calculator now. I said, we’re buying in August, after the results are out. Then she said, OK, fine.

I went around, and told them about the deal. Some were amused, some were bemused. I realised something about distributing flyers. If a bunch of people are walking past you, and they’re on their own, they will often refuse to take the flyer from you. I do that often because I can’t stand the clutter over and above what I usually generate on my own. If you catch them when they’re standing in a circle and talking to friends, and if the first person accepts it, the rest of them will accept it too. (Even though deep inside I know they will throw away those expensively printed cards.)

After a while, though, I realised that the message I was sending to people was “I hope that you fail your exams and not need your calculator anymore and send it to us.” I wonder if the people in the morning felt that having that card on them while taking the exam would be some sort of jinx.

It was great for laughs. People were laughing at the idea, and the novelty of it, so it was fun. I’m not the one who came up with the idea so I didn’t mind what people thought of it.

At the end of the day, the mastermind admitted that this idea might not work. I’ve had similar experiences before, where I tried to buy a lot of CDs, and then flip them after ripping them so that the cost I pay for the stuff is the difference between the buying and selling price. But things did not work out like that I got stuck with a whole lot of CDs that I couldn’t get rid of. I think a lot of business schemes fail because we underestimate the inefficiencies in the systems we have created.

I told them about my football gambling scheme. They were sceptical at first, but I still believe that systems are possible. I passed a comment that THAT was a viable business plan. But later I still have to face the hard facts: after all that effort, I’m still only $10 ahead. It’s still not profitable enough. The fact is that you have to be content with a very modest profit, you are highly leveraged, and you have to have the balls to gamble with an amount of money that if the average guy were doing it, you would call him a problem gambler. Anyway I will post up the essay I wrote on this gambling method someday.

Well at least it was an interesting experience. If nothing else, I guess I still have a career as a promising rock star to fall back upon.