Overheard Conversations

As much as 'the black swan' has convinced me that making predictions is generally a waste of time, yesterday I got to sit next to two Malay cliche's. One was a fat dude who was loud, the other was a thin dude who was quiet.

The had some group assignment they were working on, the fat dude had done about a paragraph and thus his loudness owed much to listing a whole bunch of excuses. As someone who is also guilty of bullshitting, and using the basic technique of speaking Authoritatively on subjects I know nothing about this guy was like that.

His mate was having none of it though, the guy tried slapping his hand down and speaking fast and loud and finishing every sentence with 'lah!' shifting the blame onto his partner.

You see it more in country towns where some meathead guy emotionally bullies their girlfriend eg. the couple turn up late to the party because the guy overslept. The guy thus attributes blame to his girlfriend for not waking him up early.

The guy was speaking too fast and saying lah too much, but it seemed like he was blaming his partner for not checking that he (the fat guy) had done the work earlier.

To his skinny mate's credit he said 'listen, I don't care just do the fucking work'.

The fat dude sat and fumed, then had another crack at saying the quiet guy never did anything but complain, always complaining, and if he was going to complain then he shouldn't complain now but in the past when he didn't complain and that it wasn't fair that he was complaining now since he didn't complain before. or some bullshit.

I really felt compelled to turn around point to the fat guy and say:

'You act like a know-all but you sound like a know-nothing, and you'll fail pretty quickly in life'

and turn to the thin guy and say:

'Keep your resolve and you'll go really far'

To be honest I wanted to swear more at the fat guy because he was not just a loser, he was a loser that was pissing me off by being a loud loser. Somethings wrong with social convention that nobody picks these dudes off sooner.

Such infantile tactics, like really, the sort of tactics parents are meant to arrest at age 5 at the latest. I might also predict the fat dude's dad is the same and has some how managed to employ his sense of entitlement to forge a heavily subsidized, globally non-competitive business, like Proton.

At any rate it is odd to come across a pair where one is as impressive as the other is unimpressive.