While browsing Facebook, I came across this little game. Should it be called a game, or more of a trick? It’s one of those things that asks you to upload your photo, then it analyses how much you resemble a certain celebrity, or what you’ll look like in fifty years. The difference is that it doesn’t analyse your appearance; it analyses your life and then gives you a life score.
Needless to say, having a program rate your life is ridiculous. After all, it’s just a game. If you take it too seriously, you’ve lost.
Say, for example, my customer. She’s a purchasing manager of a large furniture store, managing a team of eight. Smart, capable, and straight to the point, but drinks a bit too much. That evening, more than usual, she slouched in a corner of the bar, her suit jacket thrown aside. A turquoise necklace hung over her chest. Underneath her white blouse, a grey bra was faintly visible. Pouting, she sat motionless. Then she straightened up and started tapping the table with her right index finger. Two new male customers glanced at her; she glared back at them.
“I’ll gouge your eyeballs out,” she said.
The two men gave an apologetic smile and pretended nothing happened. I brought them a plate of nuts. “Sorry, the girl’s in a bad mood today.”
I return to the bar to continue polishing glasses. She said to me, “I’m not in a bad mood.”
“This is a bar, not an organ harvesting centre, don’t go gouging out my customers’ eyes.”
“It’s their fault, why were they looking at me? What am I, a Chinese white dolphin? Let me tell you, women don’t exist for men to ogle. Women are independent beings, not living for someone else’s gaze.”
Making sure the wine glasses I’d wiped had no water stains, I put them back on the glass hanger.
“There’s no need to reference feminism,” I said. “You look at cute guys, too. It’s all fair.”
She turned to look at those two men, making a disgusted face. I brought them more nuts.
“It’s the same all over the world,” she said.
Then she started talking about that Facebook game. In the morning, a colleague asked her to play it when she had just arrived at the office. The colleague said, just answer thirty questions, and you can find out your life score. Some questions were factual, like where you were born, your height and weight, education level, and some were about personality, like whether you’re easily angered. No need to connect to social networks or enter personal data, so it was safe privacy-wise, just meaningless.
She said no. But by lunchtime, the game had become a hot topic in the office. After playing, everyone printed their scores in large font, wearing them like athletes with their numbers on their chests. Some scored 89, others only 18, and they teased each other. A colleague asked her score, and she said she hadn’t played. By the end of the workday, another clueless person joked, “You can’t leave until you play!” That annoyed her, and she fled straight to my bar.
“A bunch of idiots with nothing better to do in their lives.” She put down her Margarita with a ‘thud’.
“Don’t smash my glass,” I said.
“Thirty questions, each one problematic. What does the place of birth matter? Do French get extra points, and Indians get deducted? Are people with university degrees necessarily better than those without? That’s discrimination!”
“Discrimination.”
“Moreover, all my colleagues have roughly the same educational level, the same job, so why do some score eighty or ninety, and others only get ten?”
“It’s nonsense.”
“Complete nonsense, and yet those people were excited like they were possessed, even wasting the company’s paper and ink cartridges. Bad for the environment. They were killing the Earth!”
I nodded.
She picked up the lime wedge from the edge of her glass and tapped the air in front of me. “Do you have a life philosophy?”
“Do I have a life philosophy?”
“I’ll tell you mine.”
“Alright.”
“My life philosophy is that no one in this world can score me, except one person, and that person is myself. Don’t you think?”
“Should I say?”
“You say, I let you speak.”
“If I were to say, it might not be that simple. Look, the value of a bar comes from its customers. Without customers, I can’t be a bartender. If those two guys’ eyes were gouged out and they gave me a zero rating on Google Map out of dissatisfaction, I would doubt myself.”
“How could I gouge out those two guys’ eyes? Don’t blame me for getting zero.”
“Let’s put it this way.” I took a fresh lime from the fridge, sliced it, and arranged the pieces in a plastic box. “If you really don’t care about that score, what’s the harm in playing?”
She pursed her lips like a duck and furrowed her brows. Only when tired of pouting did she say, “If I don’t care about that score, why play? It’s a waste of time!”
This “waste of time” probably had a double meaning. It referred both to the game and talking to me, because right after saying this, she threw down two hundred dollars and left. She drank a lot that night; two hundred dollars actually wasn’t enough, but she’d make it up next time. She comes three to four times a week, after all.
I cleared away her glass and took out my phone to search for that life score game. Indeed, many people were playing, and several of my friends had shared their scores on Facebook. Those with high scores were proud, while those with low scores mocked themselves. Others reacted to their posts with likes, hearts, and laughs.
I played it too. After answering thirty questions, a yellow duck appeared on the screen, walking from left to right, with a message: “Evaluating your life, please wait.” The two customers who had been scolded asked for the bill. As I handed it to them, I apologised again. They smiled and said, “No worries, but that girl, she seemed angry when she left.” I said not to worry, next time I’ll treat her to a sweetened Nothing, and her anger will be Nothing. It works every time. They asked, “Does she get angry often?” I replied, three to four times a week.
After taking their money and giving change, clearing their glasses, and washing and putting them back in place, only a couple remained in the bar. They sat in a corner, being affectionate, probably not paying much attention to what had happened earlier.
I poured myself a cup of oolong tea and opened my phone. The duck had finished its journey, and the screen displayed a two-digit number, like a number on a fortune slip.
I pocketed my phone, finished cutting the rest of the limes, and put the plastic box back in the fridge.