Friday, December 29, 2006

Office improvement and a vibrating belt

I have a few days off in honor of Christmas, New Year's, and Idul Adha (more on that later), so today we got a dangerous notion to use all that free time to organize the office. Off we went to Carrefour to buy files, file boxes, reading lamps, scotch tape, etc.

Carrefour is a Walmartish sort of place, only, in Jakarta style, it's a bit louder and more chaotic. Today they had a Surf laundry detergent demonstration with loud music and some guy talking up the glories of Surf, and they had employees wandering around with hot dog samples and soda pop samples and best of all, ice cream samples.


They also had a vibrating belt, modeled by the woman on the right. She seemed pretty cheerful even though she had to wear a vibrating belt in public, and even though nobody was asking her about her vibrating belt. That's Chad in the background, by the way.

Carrefour's slogan is "Ke Carrefour aja, ahhhh!" or roughly, "Let's just go to Carrefour, ahhhh!" I think it's meant to imply a sense of relief that instead of running around to lots of stores, you can go to Carrefour and find everything you need. Which is sort of true. For example, we found scotch tape. The files, file boxes, and reading lamps, however, were a different story. Carrefour seems to specialize in having a lot of stuff that's kind of like what you want, but isn't really what you want. Which is why, in my mind, the slogan reads, "Ke Carrefour aja, aggggh!"

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

ha! that reminds me of the office chain store "Staples" whose current motto is "That was easy."

somehow, although the store carries 49,000 items, they never have what I need when I go in there. so I end up getting something close to what I wanted instead, after searching around their jet hangar sized building for a half an hour.

"staples: that was annoying."

Anonymous said...

by the way, did you find out what the vibrating belt was supposed to do?

Trish said...

Weight loss, I'm pretty sure.

There's something about the fluorescent lighting in those places - Staples, Carrefour - that sucks every brain cell from my head. The pain sets in soon thereafter. "Staples: that was a headache."