the relish dish

A few weeks ago, I met up with a couple of old friends at a restaurant within the vicinity of Suria KLCC. Anna, who now resides in Switzerland, had briefly returned to Kuala Lumpur to solemnise her marriage to a German citizen. Magda, the other friend, and I attended the same university -- oh my God -- aeons ago.

After dinner and coffee, which was rather late, they began fidgeting. It turned out that they were both nervous about fetching their cars from the shopping centre’s underground car park.

They told me that they had read, and heard, many horror stories about the KLCC car park: from tales about riff raffs and rogues to rapes and robberies, all transmitted to as far as Geneva and Munich via the Internet.

I walked them to their cars and told them not to believe everything that they read, or heard, especially if the stories came via the Net. Most of them were the products of over-imaginative, and sometimes demented, minds.

Admittedly, the cyberspace has become the fastest and most efficient conduit for news and information, whether they are true or conjectured. Because people have this perverse habit of forwarding information or email -- the more horrible or exaggerated the content, the better -- something that originates in Kuala Lumpur on Monday may find its way to email boxes in Los Angeles on Tuesday, if not sooner.

It is not so bad if the information is valid and would actually benefit the recipient. However, it could be quite disastrous if the forwarded mail contains little else but lies, or if it is meant only for a limited circle of recipients.

I came across some newspaper reports about some guys who got fired from their jobs after the email they sent to trusted friends boasting about their sexual adventures made the rounds across the globe, tarnishing both their reputation as well as that of their employers’.

The first case involved an executive of a New York-based financial institution who had just been transferred to Hong Kong. Life -- especially the sexual part of it -- in that former colony was apparently so, well, satisfying, that he had to share it with his friends in the Big Apple.

And his friends thought the good news were just too good not to share with everyone else, on a world scale. Yes, we are living in a borderless global village, after all. After his bosses found out, they decided that they’d have no place in their employment for this potential liability.

The other two cases I read about happened in the UK; one had become a national sex triangle fiasco!
And there are those email from some exotic countries in Africa, soliciting for assistance in what would be the transfer of money – sometimes to the tune of hundreds of millions of US dollars – out of these destinations.

The stories are similar, whether the mail is sent from the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, or South Africa. The senders would claim that they are relatives – and sometimes lawyers – of some deceased, formerly high-powered persons who had during their service or tenure in these countries amassed a small fortune.

Somehow, this huge amount of money cannot be accessed unless it is transferred into a foreign bank account, and that’s where they would like the recipients of their mail to come in. If you help, a handsome percentage of the money would belong to you, they entice.

I would send a short, curt reply, something along this line: “Please stop sending unsolicited nonsense like this to us. We are not idiots.”

But you would be surprised that quite a few Malaysians have fallen for this scam. Some time ago, a local daily carried a story about a lady who became a victim. And she was a lawyer, no less, who ought to know better.

When she responded to the email sent to her, she was asked to electronically transfer a few thousand dollars, a few times, as certain fees before she would receive her share of the fortune.

The poor woman (well, she is, now) followed the instructions, blindly. In the end, she gained nothing, and lost tens of thousands of ringgit.

Hmm, a fool and her money are soon parted, you’d say? Me, I’d only say: “Orang tamak selalu rugi."

Note: A longer version of this post was previously published elsewhere.