BELLAMYBUDIMAN

I am fortunate enough to be selected as one of the fellows in Paragon 100, an event held by the Foundation for Youth Social and Entrepreneurship (FYSE) that aims for the development of Asia’s young entrepreneurs. I hope this venture could bring a lot of opportunities, not just for me, but to others as well. Let’s see how this goes!

I’ve been longing to write about this since early this year, and in fact this is a thing that I wanted to write about, but always forgot in the process. Tetraphobia is the fear of number 4, a superstition found mostly in East Asian cultures such as China (d’oh), Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. And what’s so important about it that I should dedicate a single article just to discuss this? Because I think this superstition is stupid. Not that I don’t respect the variety of cultures, but I still think that it’s stupid, especially in this technologically modern culture.

Now wait, before every each of my friends who are a Chinese descent and actually believe in this thing explode, crapped pants out and have hate mails sent to me, I have my legit reasons. First, I’m a Chinese descent as well, so by all means, I have every right to give an opinion in this matter. Second, superstitions are just bogus, and there’s no scientific base or even fact behind it (to whom it may concern, it doesn’t mean that I’m an atheist, since religion is also based on beliefs rather than science), and in fact at this point, I think the Bigfoot or Yeti have better chances to be found than to prove that superstitious is actually real. Third, I’m going to say this to Chinese Christians who actually believe in this, in my Christian point-of-view, this would just make your Christian believes utterly pointless. There is no point in the Bible that we are ordered to avoid the number 4. God gave us the Ten Commandments. To Christians who are believers, shouldn’t you be considering the Nine Commandments instead? I can’t imagine how that’s gonna turn out to be.

In the simplest scientific point of view, avoiding the number 4 in a series of numbers is just plain strange. Take 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or example. It’s pointless, it’s not even a single scientific sequence by any means. Is it a Prime sequence? Fibonacci? No, nothing. It’s just a set of numbers written without the number 4.

I’ve seen numerous, and I mean numerous idiotic attempts on avoiding this number. Buildings built by most Chinese conglomerates for instance. They hardly have the 4th floor. They could have Floor 1, 2, 3, 3A, and 5, but no 4th floor, no 14th floor, no 24th floor, and so on. They skipped a great deal of floors that have the number 4 on it. So in a Chinese-owned 100-story building, actually it could only have 81 floors. Yes, do your math. UPH Building A and Grand Indonesia are examples of these buildings.

Another example is First Media channels. If you are a subscriber, try taking your time browsing through the channels there. I can assure you that there will be no 4′s whatsoever.

But that is nothing, one of my partner’s client avoids calling him because his cellphone number contains a 4. What the hell?

So having said that, is it true that the number 4 is really that bad? If it is really that deadly, let us take a moment and take a look at some cases:

• Nobody will buy tables or chairs, unless they have only 3 legs or less, or 5 legs or more.
• Nobody will eat beef or pork, since cows and pigs have 4 legs.
• Nobody will have cars, since they have 4 tires and Daihatsu will be selling gazillions of Daihatsu Midgets.
• Audis will break down, get punctured tires, or hit by a train every single time because it has 4 rings on its logo.
• The United States will break down the moment they declared independence.
• Nobody will have windows, doors, floor tiles, beds, closets, TVs, picture frames, and every imaginable object that is required by a house.
• Nobody will buy PowerPC G4-powered Macs or Intel Pentium IV-powered PCs.
• Nobody will buy telephones, cellphones, fax machines, or even calculators because they have the number 4 written right on their keypads.
• Star Wars: Episode IV won’t be titled “A New Hope”, instead it will be called “A No-Hope”.
• The Fantastic Four would never win on any battle and the Baxter building will collapse because of that humongous 4 on top of it.
• Parents will probably ditch or kill their 4th child, or their children who were born on the 4th day, on the 4th month, on the year that has a 4 on it, on the 4th hour, on the 4th minute, and on the 4th second. Imagine if someone was born on April 4th, 2004 at 04:04:04, then he’ll be the shittiest human alive.
• And that means nobody can have more than 3 kids, since they keep ditching the 4th even if they want to have the 5th. And when they have the 5th after they ditched the 4th, that will leave them with only… 4 children! Damn it! Then they will have to ditch the now 4th child and start all over again.
• Furthermore, actually, you can only have 1 child since having 2 would make your nuclear family a 4-person family. You know what? Maybe China was right all along…
• In fact, nobody will go to work after the third time they did that, and IN FACT, nobody will do anything after they’ve done the same thing three times! The world will then stall, and the universe will explode and collapse upon you.

Wow, it must be tough to be living in the world today… The paradox is even harder to predict than calculating time travel.

Sometime ago, I got a forwarded mail along with some posts on certain mailing lists, stated that by forwarding to 20 people or more, we might get our own iPhone 3G or 120GB iPod Classic. Here’s what the mail said:

Pelanggan yang terhormat,
Kami beritahukan kepada seluruh pelanggan bahwa perusahaan kami, Apple Corporation yang berkantor pusat di Cupertino, California US membuka kantor pemasaran di Jakarta, Indonesia
Produk yang kami pasarkan adalah Hand Phone tipe iPhone3G yang dilengkapi dengan teknologi GPS, Wi-Fi, bluetooth, video-audio, camera-photo, 16GB flash drive capacity, dll.

Details produk kami silakan kunjungi: http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html
Untuk peluncuran perdana di Indonesia, kami akan memberikan secara gratis produk terbaru HP iPhone3G yang dilengkapi features seperti diatas.

Dengan memberikan iPhone3G ini, kami berharap akan mendapatkan umpan balik yang berharga dari para pelanggan dan mendapatkan efek promosi berantai yang besar.
Yang harus anda lakukan adalah:

- Fowardkan pesan ini kepada 20 orang teman. Setelah 2 minggu waktu pengiriman, anda akan menerima sebuah iPhone3G. Sebelumnya kami akan mengontak anda untuk alamat detail pengiriman, atau
- Forwardkan pesan ini kepada 40 orang, anda akan menerima 2 produk: 1 bh iPhone3G + 1 bh iPod classic berkapasitas 120GB. Detail produk iPod classic kunjungi: http://www.apple.com/ipodclassic/
Harap dikirimkan sebuah copy / Cc email kepada:jkt.applecorp@asia.com agar kami mengetahui bahwa anda telah memforward pesan ini.

Hormat kami,
Julia Christvanie
Regional Sales Manager
Apple Corporation – Jakarta Office
Sudirman Square Office Tower, Tower B Lt. 23
JI. Jend Sudirman Kav. 45-46 Jakarta Selatan 12930
Email: jkt.applecorp@asia.com

Sounds promising, doesn’t it? Even for us who already owned ourselves a first-generation iPhone, the iPhone 3G is always interesting. But here’s my take. This mail or chain letter or spam or whatever you want to call it, is an idiotic hoax. Why? Here’s why:

• Apple’s official name is Apple Inc. and not Apple Corporation. For your information, the closest we can get to Apple Corporation is Apple Corps Ltd., which is a Beatles-founded multimedia company founded in January 1968.
• Apple never did refer its iPhone with the term “Hand Phone”. No, people, “Hand Phone” is just a term we often use in our community, the official jargon for that device is a cellphone, or a mobile phone. As far as I know, the “Hand Phone” term was probably created by someone in ITC Roxymas who went all the way from selling Ericsson cellphones in the past to dirt cheap Chinese cellphones that breaks apart after 3 months.
• Apple specifically branded their latest iPhone iteration as “iPhone 3G” and not “iPhone3G”, notice that it’s supposed to have a space between “iPhone” and “3G”. I believe Apple is quite a neat-freak in terms like this.
• Apple is a company with billions of cash in hand, do you think they will risk their brand consistency by using an asia.com email address? For the record, Asia.com, is owned by World Media Group. I don’t see any relations to Apple here, and I don’t even know what they’re up to with this. And who the fuck is Julia Christvanie anyway?
• And just like Yona said, I don’t think Apple would use a cheap way to give out iPhone-related promotions like this. They sold more than 10 million units, do you think they even need crappy promotions like this?

So, please, and I mean PLEASE, stop filling out other people’s mailboxes with useless junk like this hoax. I thought we’re all smarter than that? The way I see it, this is just one lame person’s attempt to collect your personal information. So would you care to give that out to a total stranger? Well, I don’t.

But if you still want to forward that mail to 40 or more people, be my guest, knock yourself dead.