As a freelance web designer, I receive average of 5 to 20 emails/calls each week with inquiry on web design for small to big companies. While most of the calls were genuine, occasionally I would still receive amusing requests like the following:

Hi i would like to have a website like e-bay. Could you quote me a price, in total for everything to be in place. Inclusive of membership n reply mails and payment.

A website like eBay.com requires a truck-load of programmers, a couple of months if not years, and a couple of million dollars to build. The person who made the above request was either new to the internet, or new to the world. But for being polite, I replied to his email along with the explanation, let’s see what he’d say about it.

There are many ways to show off to the world that you have a new laptop that has built-in WiFi that lets you access to internet from Starbucks. You can do things like checking emails, looking up the map for direction, post a blog, update your calendar, run some shell commands, even build a website! But please do not use it to watch YouTube videos. Why? Because you are fxxking hogging the fxxking bandwidth as if you are the only person who needs internet access!

(Blogged from one of the Starbucks outlets in Malaysia, after waited 20 minutes for Gmail to load, and another 20 minutes for this blog to load, and realizing the guy sitting next to my table watching YouTube on his laptop.)

But I’ll let this one do the dirty job instead…