Ring of Fire

Ring! Ring!

Call time!

In our never ending quest to provide event organziers with a comprehensive catalog of security agencies, we first need to... Find out which ones even do Event Security in the first place.

As one would expect, not all companies work on an ad-hoc basis and thus we need to filter out those that do not provide security for events.

Number of issues cropped up here:

• How to call them?

Calling 150+ companies through our handphones is going to be expensive. We could do it from home but then we'd lose a good amount of communication between team members. Thankfully wee leong suggested Media Ring to us. Free calls! All from the comfort of our laptops. So we can work together as a team and start prank callin... I mean doing our field research. Oh but media ring can be quite difficult to use, everytime we used it we needed like 5 updates and only 2 people in the whole of RP could do the updates. Like what?!

• What to ask them?

So besides asking them the main question;"Do you provide security for events?", we should also ask them more questions to make the most use of our call. Wee leong to the rescue again here, he suggested we ask them some of the major events that they have done. We should also try asking for prices.

• What to tell them?

Do we come clean and say we are students doing our final year project? Or do we throw a smoke bomb and say we're from some event company, we're planning our budget and thus we're calling to find out what they charge? Its evil but i like it. No seriously, If we come clean, the quality of our information and the co-operativeness of the security companies is going to be adversely affected. From my past FYP, I basically got the feeling that they aren't too keen on helping us students. So, time to be sneaky, but that brings its own disadvantages as well. Its unlikely that we can follow up, by interviewing the companies... Especially if they know we were the ones that called.

So the first week was Kun Rong and Sok Hong's turn at calling the companies.

Choon hua and I took the next week.

Fun stuff. It was difficult getting started, getting our story right and all. We also had a few hiccups along the way. Someone had difficult controlling their laughter. Totally understandable given the situation, trust me. But as we went along we also got more confident and calls were easier to make. Though a few companies seemed like they were on to us... Were we too obvious?

But we were racing against the time too. We planned our calls between 1pm and 5pm. Just after lunch and clearly within office hours. So that companies would have no excuse not to answer us. Still we got a few hang-ups without even answering, a few wrong numbers, a few no answers.

We finished well within time. We compiled the information and another milestone reached.

To Socks!