BELLAMYBUDIMAN

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.