THE HIP

A Thinker's Shared Spot of Stories of Living



Sunday, February 26, 2006

Day 56, 2006

by Eko Prasetyo @ 11:18 AM

Completed all missions intented to be done yesterday :)

First mission is to put my aging Siemens M65 cellphone to Siemens Mobile Service Center (actually, Siemens Mobile is now Benq Mobile, after acquisition by BenQ). It turned out that the keypad section of the cellphone was penetrated by a kind of oily substance. Hmm...wonder where's that oily substance have come from...Anyway, the customer service girl told me that I can call them later on sunday to make sure whether I can have my cellphone tomorrow and whether I have to pay for something for the reparation. Hopefully, it will be up and running again on monday.

Second mission is to get me a new cellphone: Siemens S75!! Yep, I long for replacing my aging (tough, but aging) Siemens S65 with a cellphone that can play MP3. Generation 75 cellphones from Siemens, from CX75 all the way to SXG75, all have MP3 playing capabilities. I was waiting for SXG75, cause this one is the next all in one cellphones after Siemens SX1 but since SXG75 has been said to will not be sold in Indonesia, I have to chose for other phones.

I have to chose between M75, the next tough phone after M65, or S75, the S class (exclusive) of 75 series, which has dedicated music player buttons.
The price difference is about US$20, so I chose S75. With that US$20 difference, you have music playing buttons and 128 MB of RS-MMC included in the package (M75 only has 32 MB). So I chose S75.

The cellphone turned out excellent, albeit a small screen resolution of only 132x176 pixels. What makes this thing turn out excellent is the quality of the speaker: It is good (for a cellphone). Although monophonic, the acoustic design of the cellphone makes the sound that comes out of the speaker can be heard as if it's surround sterophonic. It will be AMAZING if the speaker is stereo, but being able to mimic surround stereophonic while still monophonic is a COOL feat on its own.

For now, I'm still learning nuts and bolts of this superb cellphones. Oh yeah, the MP3 players can be put on the background, so you can still hear the music playing while you're typing SMS. Cool eh?

And now, for the third mission. The last mission felt like a covert mission for me, cause I have to misuse a device on a hypermarket to fulfill office duties. Sounds interesting? Continue reading.

The story goes like this: My office, being a petroleum field operator, needs to use a heavy density, solid free completion fluid that will be used to complete a gas well. So my office opened a tender, and bidders come forward.

There are only two bidders. These two bidders got themselves into a lawsuit war during the tender process, so my boss has to take comprehensive measures to pick the winner. One of the measurement is to evaluate the suitability of the completion fluid itself.

The first evaluation is component and property analysists. Those were done on an independent professional laboratory.
After the results came, my boss suddenly came out with other ideas to test the fluid itself that can be done on the office: precipiation tests (done with putting the samples in a bottle and put them where the temperature ranges are the widest: office window :P ), and corrosion test.

The corrosion test is where my covert mission came in. You see, the corrosion test done with putting slabs of metal inside inside the sample fluids which are put inside their containers. The objective of the test is to measure differences between the weights before and after the immersions.

So I have to know the initial weight of each slab, right? Right....

This is where my problem arose: the field lab guy, the one who sent the slabs, forget to measure the weights of the slabs...so I have to found a way to measure them.

And fruits counter weighting scale came in mind.

So I went to hypermarket, paper napkin from my bento dinner, labelled by using a pen on a stationary store, accompanied by the slabs of metals on my pockets, and hunting instinct on my eyes. Not even the pretties girl in the world with bare 36C breasts could divert my eyes from looking for a scale. I finally found it, but not fruits weighting scale, and not the exact kind of scale, but it will do.

So I turned the electricity on the scale on; put out the firs slab,put it on the scale; ripped a portion of the paper napkin which labelled 1; get the camera on my new S75 ready; took a picture which captured the paper napkin, the slab, and the weight of the slab displayed; wrapped the slab with the paper napkin, and put it into my pocket.

With high degree of self confidence and a strong willpower to make myself invisible (which is somehow useless..but you could feel the warning "STAY AWAY FROM ME" emitted strongly from my person), I repeat the whole process twice more.

After the third, with all three slabs properly label..er...covered in paper napkins, I went to other sections and bought 4 packs of Tango Wafers and one pack of Instant Ginger Ale sachets, went to the cashier, paid them, and get out of the hypermarket, with all of my missions accomplished.

What a day :)