Profiling

In my previous post I forgot to mention that for the past two days I'v been picking up my sister from her new school, PTEB. Let me just tell you one thing, the traffic is horrible. Yesterday I spent close to 30 minutes to move the car for about 800 or so metres. Today was bettter but still took quite a while.

But looking on the bright side, I had company along the way. Before picking up my sister, I usually pick up my brother first. So yesterday when we were stuck in traffic, he and I came up with this game (actually I was the one who came up with the game and he just played along). The game was called 'profiling'. The rules were to look at the drivers of cars passing by and assess them of who they were by just a glance. It was a lot of fun and hilarious too. My brother didn't get it at first so he just decided to describe the person. "Moustache" or "funny shirt" was what he said first. But as the game progressed he soon got the gist of it.

Ok so you might think I'm kinda shallow judging people by their looks. Yeah I'm aware of the phrase "don't judge a book by it's cover" but that wasn't it (at least not all of it). It was sort of like an analysis of a person's personality, status, occupation etc through assessing what they drive, what they were wearing, how old they were, their mannerisms and body-language or if they had company in the car. The only thing we didn't take into account was the race because I guess it would be just bland as we'd come up with boring stereotypical perspectives of the people. So it was sort of like playing detective like in the TV show 'Criminal Minds' (you might have seen this show before but it used to air a lot on Star World).

For example, what would you think of a man, early 40s, buttoned down formal shirt (presumably tucked in) with the top buttons undone, side-parted hair, flashy watch and car and not at work at 4 pm? First thought I had was that the guy wasn't a government official, was a busines type person (maybe did not own one but was one of the highly-ranked) and picking up his only child (probably his daughter because he was punctual). That was my assessment of the guy and my brother did quite a good job doing it too. He said that the guy looked like someone who sold cars. Not bad for 9 year old I thought.

Next was a lady driving a compact car, with a son inside wearing 'sekolah ugama' clothes sleeping. It was (about) 4.15pm and the lady was in her late 40s. She didn't wear anything fancy from what I saw. She clutched the steering wheel close to her body. She didn't lean back on her chair, was sitting up straight and seemed kind of jittery. What I could come up with was that she was a stay at home mom, because she was able to pick up her son at 3.15pm then be there stuck in traffic at Berakas/Lambak. So she wasn't in a hurry (to get back to work at least). But the way she held the steering wheel and sitting in the driver's seat, it seemed that she was late to get back home. And also I thought since she was this late and got caught up in traffic, she must've stopped by somewhere and maybe bought some groceries. When I mentioned this my brother added "maybe she has to prepare dinner or something" and I was quite impressed. Again not bad for a 9 year old.

The last one was not at all tricky. There was a guy, late teens (not a day over 20 I presume), looked ravaged and bored. This was a no-brainer. I instantaneously desxribed him in one word: "ME!". He fit the profile of a guy who had nothing to do. Didn't wear working clothes, hair messed up, car was not new but also not really old and he was damn right BORED!!! But then my brother got me again. He said "Yup he is you.... without me to play this game!". Then I guess we burst out into this laughing fit and as soon as we knew it, my sister had just seen the car and was on her way.

Well the point here is that my brother is quite an awesome person. Although annoying at times, he serves good company when you're bored. He never fails to make me laugh (out of joy or irritation). But he also never fails to make me wanna strangle him like Homer does to Bart. HAHAHAHA!

And oh yeah, profiling is cool in a weird but fun way.