♥a strange call (Wednesday, February 11, 2009 / 11:02 pm)
I received a call few days ago from a woman who claimed to be a customer service representative of Sentosa.
When I picked up the call and said "hello", there were some muffled sounds over the other side of the line but nobody seemed to be talking. So I grew impatient and said "Hey, who's tt on the line?"
Then, the reply came with a woman who spoke in weird sentences. Few seconds later, I figured out that she was asking me in her broken English whether I could speak Mandarin.
So I told her, "Ya, I can" in Mandarin and in split seconds, she started blabbing lots of sentences in Mandarin at an extremely fast speed and in her China accent.
"您好，我是新加坡圣淘沙的市场调查服务专讯员”---〉this sentence is bloody long, can you imagine I would have missed that if I was sleepy that morning.
Thank god, I was alert enough to catch what she was speaking. She introduced herself as a customer service representative from Sentosa, (the way she pronounced Sentosa was weird anyway), doing market research and she asked me one question on which facility I would like best in the upcoming Sentosa resort world. (spa, theme park etc)
I immediately demanded her to tell me where she got my number from, and she told me she retrieved it from an internet database from Sentosa. (since when did I input my number in Sentosa database). I was suspicious that she is up to no good but out of curiosity, I answered her one question on the Sentosa resort world and instantly, she told me that she would like to send me an invitation card to the opening of the Sentosa resort as an appreciation of my participation through phone.
Oh please, the construction in the Sentosa I saw only during the flower fest one week ago seems to be only in the early phases of the project and now you are talking to me about its opening!!!!!! RIDICULOUS!!!!!
She further requested me to give my particulars to her so that she could send the invitation card to me. And the most ridiculous part is she wanted my exact CHINESE name and characters because she said Sentosa (her company) felt that English names are repetitive. Ha...when I told her my name with my surname is hardly repetitive, she still insisted that her company wants her to get my Chinese name.
SO WHEN HAS SENTOSA BECOME SO CHEENA and chinese-operated that only needs Chinese names. Hey, Singapore is a multi-racial country, everything operates mainly by English so that no one is being deprived of. Let alone, a big company like Sentosa.
It was obvious in my sense that she's a SCAM. I refused to give her my particulars and she tried to distract me by asking if I'm a local because I am very eloquent in Mandarin and she realised that the previous calls she made, many could not speak good Mandarin, so they couldn't analyse and argue back to her. (I wonder how many of them were cheated)
In the end, she was begging me to give her my particulars. She told me she had just started on this job few days ago and she needed the money to support her part-time studies in NUS!!!!! (omg) She assured me that this was not a scam and she provided me her own name and the exact Chinese characters (***faint, she can easily come up with any character right...)
Anyway, I made my stand that I was not going to give and ended the call. She still wished me all the best in my studies... (damn weird lah)
It all happened on a busy morning. I guess if it happened when I was still having holidays a few weeks back, I would have called the Sentosa's hotline and enquire if such market survey is really taking place. Nevertheless, I was too busy to find out.
OR probably, the whole thing was just a paranoid part of me. I was just not trusting to anyone who needs my particulars over the phone. If so, the customer service representative just needs to blame her luck for a bad respondent like me...haha...
