191sms

I was heading to Fitzroy on the very crowded peak hour tram. As I sat in my seat, the pungent aroma of urea wafted in around me. Phooo-eeey... It was hard to determine where the source was. I looked around. No obvious candidates. Very strange.




I gently leaned to my left and took a little whiff. The intensity was even stronger. Echhh. I slowly leaned back but the intensity did not decrease. Very strange indeed. So I tilted my head in the other direction. The intensity still did not decrease. Hmmm, so it's not any weaker on my left nor on my right. This makes no sense. Then a horrible thought popped into my head. "Ohhhhhh no, it's not possible". I started very discreetly sniffing my clothes. Phew, I thought to myself. It's not me. As I looked up, these passengers across from me were looking at me with an expression best described as sour. "No, no, no", I violently shook my head. "It's not me", I assured them. I think my denials must have been quite convincing cos they all quickly looked away. I had to get off the tram soon after and so never got to figure out who or what it was that was the source of the smell. I hope the fact that the smell remained after I got off would have convinced my fellow passengers that it was not me. I hope the smell remained after I got off. I hope.

Ah well. Anyway, was meeting indecisive Simon for dinner. Half way to the pasta place, he reckons he feels like Indian instead. Now I had heard a lot about Indian Chinese food and how great it was. This is the Indianfied version of Chinese food. I've spoken to many many Indians (from India) and they rave about how great it is. Many Indians. One even ventured to opine that if he had to give up Indian or Indian Chinese, he'd give up Indian food. Quite a call. Now after hearing such consistently high praise from so many varied sources was making me really curious about this food. After numerous enquiries, I finally found one place which cooks this so called Indian Chinese food, in Malvern. "I know just the place", I said. Small problem was that I only knew the name of the restaurant but not the address. And then, a lightbulb moment! Telstra offers a service where if you SMS 191SMS with a command like b banjara vic, it will sms you back with business names with the word banjara in it's listings. I've never used this before(*). So I waved goodbye to my 55 cents and lo and behold, it sent me back the address I asked for. I've never been so excited before. Why? Because I sort of worked on the system last year. Boyd did the b(usiness), p(erson) and m(ovies). I did the sn(ow), w(eather) and su(rf). One of the very rare times where something I do at work (or ex-work, in this case) is actually useful in real life. I is happy. I explained all this in great detail to Simon but he didnt seemed all that impressed. Maybe cos he had to concentrate on driving. Anyway, we found the place no problems at all. It's near the train lines, cnr Glenferrie and Dandenong Rd.

Piece of trivia. Did you know that beep when you get receive an SMS is S M S in morse code? You did? Gee, I must have been the only person on earth who didnt know that. Disclaimer : AFAIK, it's like this at least on the Nokia phones.

How was the food, I hear you ask? I'll write a review of the meal at WDCoF soon. When I brush up on my adjectives, that is. Till then. Oh yeah, if any of you would like to be part of the WDCoF motley crew, let me know. We have low (actually, no) standards.

Viral marketing? What's that?

(*) OK, technically I have, in the lab. But I've never paid my own money to use it before.