Speaking in code.

My day to day job is based around ecommerce working for one of the banks here in Singapore. Let’s call it ShiezerBank Corp to keep some anonymity here. Our financial competition is formed of the usual suspects of Mighty Yank Bank, Shittybank and Briecrap, all of which have great towering offices here.

Working in IT and especially banking IT everyone talks in acronyms for reasons I’ve never really understood. Perhaps it’s because were a bit lazy and can’t string full incondite sentences together using the proper words. Perhaps it makes us sound a little bit more clever or in a unique clan using three abbreviated letters when those around us have absolutely no idea on what is being discussed. I put it down to people having too much to say and not enough time to say it so using them gets the maximum amount of information expended into the air with the minimal amount of conversational dexterity. Of course it could simply be that people in banking IT are complete twats.

So as I was flaneuring down the road the other day in a taxi the local radio DJ was reading out the local travel bulletin and it caught my ear. Funnily enough, even the DJs here have that mid-Atlantic nasal sound like UK DJ’s did back in the 90’s. He was reading out the travel bulletins and they are the same as you’d expect everywhere else. Too many cars, too many pillions having altercations with other peoples bumpers and the odd thoroughfare or byway being blocked by bumbling bystanders.
The one thing that stood out though was the sheer number of acronyms being used in the delivery. The entire bulletin must have been less than 30 seconds and he must have dropped in about 20 between words like avoid, sunny, overturned and flabbelation. Ok I’m lying about the last one but it’s a great sounding word and if you heard that on a travel bulletin you’d probably crash through excitement and end up in the next bulletin.

After being here almost a year, I’ve picked up that Singaporeans love acronyms. They just can’t get enough of them. Everywhere you go, from the banks, to the roads, to your personal status to the food you eat - it’s all using acronyms.

Now in the travel bulletin – I worked out about half of what was being said seeing as a lot of them are traffic related to the many highways and expressways that spider out in all directions over the island.
The funny thing is, you end up picking them up and regurgitating them when you least expect it.

Since I arrived I’d come in via SIA on an EP visa hoping to get my PR from the MOM. Working hard all day saves me enough money to think about buying a HDB near the CBD, hopefully close enough to the MRT as it’s too damn expensive paying the ERP going on the PIE when the ECP is backed up. It’s not as if I can even afford the car COE as a what’s left in my DBS and UOB accounts after my CPF an SPG took anyway. Still I better not complain too much as the PAP might not be AOK with it.

There’s a small game there to see how many you can get right.

It takes a while to pick up the patois of the local pericombobulation being spouted in a tonal splurry of shortened words. I’m still very confused half the time and I’m often saying to myself - WTF?

When you intermingle it all together with bit of Singlish it makes for an interesting conversation, even if you really don’t have much of an idea of what is being said – Ken?