Tech Tarik: Cut to the chase

2009/11/11

RIDZWAN A. RAHIM

P1 practically owns the word ‘potong’ now, thanks to its successful P1 WiMax ad campaign. RIDZWAN A. RAHIM reminisces about the time he went under the knife. DILBERT creator Scott Adams in his book The Joy of Work offers a few tips to writing humour.

One of these is that if you intend to tell a naughty joke in a public sphere such as TV or newspaper, the way to do it is by planting ideas in people’s minds without actually saying it.

That way, the joke gets told, nobody gets offended and everyone’s happy. And the funnier the joke, the more you can get away with.

This was the technique used by broadband service provider P1 when it recently began using a series of “potong” ads to market its WiMax service.

You must have have heard or seen the “potong” or cut ads. They’re everywhere — on prime time radio and TV, and on billboards.

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One spot has a Chinese guy boasting to everyone about his “speed” after he has “cut”. “Baby, yours is so fast now!” says his girlfriend.

The entire ad is in Manglish.

There’s also another chap, a Malay, at a wedding who raises a commotion when he reveals to his friend that he has yet to “cut”.

The friend is so horrified that he breaks into a common Muslim expression to show his disgust.

These ads have been mostly met with positive feedback and are so funny and memorable that nowadays, the mere mention of “potong” gets everyone thinking of P1 WiMax.

What makes the ads funny is the sexual connotation that the word “potong” carries. There’s little doubt as to what P1 wants us to be thinking: the male circumcision, a rite of passage or initiation to manhood for young Muslim boys that other races in Malaysia have started to latch on to.

The idea behind the ads is not only to make people laugh at uncut wiggies but also to bring along their non-P1 broadband bills and switch to P1 WiMax.

But since I am not into Internet access at home because I think it’s a waste of time, the ads did nothing to persuade me to “cut the wires, cut the charges, cut the lag”.

Instead, I took the message literally and thought about the day I underwent my own circumcision at age 11.

It was a harrowing experience. First the surgery itself. You get three jabs of anaesthetics — there — which allowed the surgery to be completely painless but which made it almost unbearably painful later on when the anesthetics had worn off.

Then, the recovery part. I went through the procedure with my brother and two of our friends.

They were all younger than me, yet I was the last one to heal from the surgery.

For about a month, I was lying down at home with little to do, while my fellow potong pals were out in their underwears and playing football, galah panjang and badminton.

I was bored. And it didn’t help that I had wear the sarong and hold it up all the time.

That was when I hit upon an idea that got me excited. Using a cloth hanger and clothes peg, I fashioned a simple device that would hold my sarong up.

It was, I believe, the world’s first hands-free circumcision sarong.

By cutting the wires, I freed my hands to do other things and was able to become more mobile.

I was so proud of my invention that I went walking around the neighbourhood with it.

In a way, I was P1 long before P1 was even conceived.