Too Cheap

Last night, while driving to pick up the boys from their tuition class, I heard the most appalling travesty over the radio.

KFC is sponsoring a promotion on MIX where they ask people to submit their most memorable KFC moment. The most outstanding submission would be awarded a – wow! – KFC voucher.

Yesterday's winning submission came from this woman whose husband asked her to be his girlfriend over a serving of nuggets and pop. Nine years later they were married. A year later, he was dead. Now she can't listen to any KFC jingle without recalling that day 10 years ago.

Forgive me if I am wrong but my immediate reaction was sheer disbelief and such distaste that the hairs on the back of my neck stood. Surely she made it all up. I could never reveal something so intimate, so personal, so tragic for the whole world to see – all in the hopes of winning a voucher for free food.

I call this the Oprah syndrome. It's so pervasive that even here in Malaysia, where the collective culture is one that values dignity, we're becoming positively loose-lipped about our deepest emotions.

Yuck!