Impatient Singaporeans

I’ve noticed a tendency in Singaporeans with whom I chat over Whatsapp, Line, Facebook Messenger, etc. It seems that Singaporeans are very impatient people, and eager to let people know they have something to say, like they can’t finish the whole thing before talking (or hitting the send button for that matter).

Whenever I chat with Japanese people, their messages come in one big long chunks. My phone rings once and I take my time to read what they want to say before responding with an appropriate reply. Singaporeans way of messaging gets on my nerves at times, because they like to send one word at a time.

This is what chat with a Singaporean looks like:

This is what chat with a Japanese looks like:

* Names and message content have been blurred for privacy reasons.

See what I mean? When chatting with a Singaporean, my phone rings and rings and rings, and it’s very disturbing and stressful for me. Sometimes, I read the messages after 10 straight rings, and the person hasn’t even raised the main point. They see that I’ve read the messages and when I don’t respond, they go “Why aren’t you replying!?” My reply is, with a chunk of messages that combine to not make a point yet, “there’s nothing to reply to!”

I get happy and excited whenever I receive your messages, but please organize your thoughts into one message and send them once, because it irritates when the phone rings so many times. It also makes me less willing to read it immediately since there’s no point reading incomplete content.

And to calm slow people down, I sometimes deliberately take a long time to reply. It’s a trick I learned to deal with boisterous children.

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