Bookmarks from Holland Village

If you've ever been to Holland Village lately, you'd probably have been approached by one or two flers trying to sell you something, and you might or might not have stopped to find out what they were hawking.

It was one of those days where I had a bit of time, because Naomi and I had our first haircuts for the longest time, and we were at the hair place for the longest time too. We went in some time before Chinese New Year, I think. But now we have updated hairstyles befitting the season (spring, I believe), and we were in a pretty good mood.

So.

This fler sees that I have a brand spanking new haircut and a smug look on my face because I'm looking so trendy, comes up to me and says, “excuse me sir, I’m not try­ing to sell you anything”, to which I say “sorry, not inter­ested”. But because I wasn’t about to go any­where, see­ing as I had free park­ing for the evening thanks to the valet arrange­ment the hair place had with the car valet ser­vice, I lis­tened to him tell me some­thing about sell­ing book­marks to help for­mer convicts.

“$2 a book­mark”, says Nash, the fler, “to give peo­ple like me a sec­ond chance”. So I went and gave him some money in return for all the book­marks he had with him so he could go home and stop both­er­ing peo­ple hav­ing a good time in the Vil­lage. Then his friend Arshad comes along and says he’s got only one book­mark left, so I give him $2 to let him go home too.

I now have a dozen book­marks I can use, which is very good because I really hate los­ing the page of all the mag­a­zines and books I read halfway and never fin­ish because I lose the page and get fed up. So what if they’re really ugly book­marks that look like they’ve been printed from web­sites like <a href=“http://123mycodes.com” onclick=“javascript:_gaq.push([’_trackEvent’,‘outbound-article’,‘http://123mycodes.com’]);urchinTracker(“/outbound/123mycodes.com’);”>123mycodes.com, or if Nash and Arshad are sim­ply mak­ing a quick buck and are really up to no good because I can’t find any­thing to do with RBC Ser­vices (which is the name printed on the book­marks) on the net or on the brand spank­ing new SPH search engine, <a href=“http://rednano.sg” onclick=“javascript:_gaq.push([’_trackEvent’,‘outbound-article’,‘http://rednano.sg’]);urchinTracker(“/outbound/rednano.sg’);”>Red Neneh, that has any­thing to do with book­marks and ex-convicts.

Book­marks are use­ful, and those flers needed to go home and count their tak­ings for the day.