A Crazy Life – Part 5 (Crazy TV)

In my part 4 submission, I told of my experiences with Pun – the happy go-lucky gogo dancer, who’s still pounding the dance floors of Nana Plaza as she heads past 40 years old.

Although Pun was (and still is) a good friend, one thing she definitely is not, is a serious girlfriend or wife. By her own admission, she is a free-spirit, in 100% control of her own life and destiny.

But I wanted a long-term girlfriend or wife, not a free-spirit. As an aside, I attribute this desire down to my own insecurity at the time. Why could not I function without the need of the crutch of a soulmate? Nowadays, I scoff at the idea of wanting a wife or girlfriend – I’m very happy on my own and any insecurities vanished from my life many years ago.

So I went back to the dating websites, (and soon spotted the profile of the nutter whom I met in Part3 of my story. I made sure that I blocked any contact from her 🙂

Perusing the many (MANY) profiles of attractive Thai women, I spotted the profile of a pretty young woman called Anne. She was 26 years old, had a ‘real’ job working in a company near Ayuthaya, and spoke reasonable English, (because her job required her to liaise with the company office in Kuala Lumpur).

I fired off a ‘Hi there’ message to her and waited a day or two for a reply.

No reply…. even though I could see from her profile details that she had been online.

I sent a new message…

Still no reply.

Hmm, was I really that ugly?

I had looked at hundreds of profiles on that dating website, and it was her profile that got my heads (big and little!) twitching. I was determined to contact her.

But what to do, since she wasn’t even acknowledging my communications?

This was a website based in Thailand, with a Thai webmaster. So I fired off an email to the webmaster, explaining that I really wanted to contact Anne, and to get to know her.

The webmaster duly replied to me and suggested that I meet him at his office in Bangkok. So it was a few days later that we met up and I explained my background and interests in meeting Anne. The meeting cost me 5,000 baht, as I recall.

Well, that did the trick, because suddenly Anne was replying to me, eager to meet up in Ayuthaya.

(Many years later, I discovered what caused her sudden change of mind regarding our meeting. Having met me in his office, the webmaster contacted Anne and explained that a ‘rich foreigner’ wanted to meet her! Ho hum, always about the money….)

A few weeks later, we met at a hotel in Ayuthaya. I brought some red roses with me and Anne almost burst into tears when she saw them; no-one ever bought flowers for her before.

We ‘hit it off’ straightaway. Anne seemed a very decent young woman, cute as a button, reasonably educated, with good spoken English and an interest in many topics. The difference between our conversations and those very basic conversations with Pun was enormous.

Our relationship grew over the next months. Every Friday evening, I would drive from my condo in Sala Daeng up to the small town of Wang Noi, close to Ayuthaya, pick up Anne and then we would spend the weekend together at my condo. We’d go shopping in Central, eat food in both local and upmarket restaurants, and generally have a very pleasant time together. Anne never asked for excessive amounts of money – she was genuinely very good company.

But there was one thing that she definitely was not good at, and that was sex.

From the look on her face as we bounced on the bed, you would have thought that I was raping here with an elephant’s massive, unlubricated penis! She would close her eyes and grimace in apparent agony until the ‘deed’ was done. As you can imagine, this scenario tended to put me off my stroke.

Looking back on these incidents, I should have accepted the truth that a man cannot live by romantic love alone, and needs decent and satisfying sex in a relationship. I should have perhaps remained just good friends with her, and looked for a more suitable (and randy) mate somewhere else. But I decided that her many good points outweighed the bad, and that hopefully, her interest and pleasure in sex would improve as we got to know each other. (No, it did not!).

To further our relationship, I invited her to come back with me to stay in England for a few weeks. Of course, she jumped at this opportunity, and rushed around to get a Thai passport, and to visit the British Embassy in Bangkok for that all-important visa.

Let me tell you a little about the visa office of the British Embassy in Wireless Road. When a Thai person applies for a visitor visa to the UK, they have to attend an interview at the embassy, where they are ‘grilled’ by a British immigration or visa officer. Those officers usually cannot speak Thai, and it can’t be assumed that the Thai applicant can speak English fluently. So the embassy employs Thai translators, who sit in on the interview, to translate the questions and answers back and forth. Those translators are for the most part, ‘mature’, hi-so women.

I can tell you right now, that these translators can spot a lie on the surface of the moon! If the applicant is female, then the translators have a sixth sense to identify who is a genuine applicant and speaking the truth, and who is a bar-girl and perhaps telling a few lies to mask her real employment.

Don’t lie to these translators! They could successfully replace all the lie detectors used by the FBI!

Suffice to say, Anne passed the interview with flying colours, and was issued with the coveted visitor visa, (unlike my future Thai wife, who although legally married to me, was refused a visa LoL – I’ll cover that in a future submission).

A few weeks later, we flew business class to London Heathrow Airport. Anne had previously travelled with her company to Kuala Lumpur, but England was a new experience. It was December, and the cold weather came as a big shock to her. So our immediate task was to visit Oxford Street and to purchase warm clothes. Then we made our way out to the small cottage that I was renting in the picturesque village of The Lee, in Buckinghamshire.

I better explain exactly what I was doing in the UK at that time. Whilst running my SMS text messaging business, I had also started up a new and related business called ‘Mobile Crazy TV’.
( https://forums.digitalspy.comdiscussion/94921/mobile-crazy-tv-launch ).

I couldn’t find any screenshots of the main channel display with graphics. But here is the main-screen text, as saved by web.archive.org.
Welcome to Mobile Crazy TV!
Hey! Your life just got more fun!! Get your mobile phone ready and hop along to Channel 691 on your Sky Digibox.There’s lots to see and do!
•Text your flirt and chat messages to Mobile Crazy
•Chat with our cool TJs – Always fun, always flirting!
•Textdating message to Date Me! – hot 121 text-chat
•Are you HOT or NOT? Send us your photos now!
•Got a camera-fone? We want to see your crazy photos
•Check out the latest mobile phones and gadgets
•Logo Crazy – The latest logos & picture messages
•Over 18? Check our hot mobile content on Channel GoGo
•Fancy a Thai babe? Then you gotta watch Bangkok Girl!
And don’t forget Happy Hour – our daily program where you can text to the TV for only your standard SMS sending charge!

This was a satellite TV channel, operating on the Sky TV group of channels. It was an SMS-to-TV channel, which allowed viewers to send text-chat messages to the TV screen of the channel for all to watch, (so a ‘one-to-many’ messaging system).

The channel aired these chat messages, scrolling them down the screen, and also offered a range of ringtones for purchase.

Since the channel didn’t air moving video or films, (only these animations), something else was needed to keep the viewers’ interest. So the channel employed a ‘TJ’ or text jockey. This was apparently a very cute and sexy young woman (or so it seemed from her photo that was displayed on the screen). Her job was to intersperse the viewers’ text messages with her own, suggestive and sometimes blatantly sexual chat messages, to encourage (mainly male) viewers to keep on texting at 1 UK pound per message.

Many viewers would assume that this TV channel employed perhaps 10-20 staff. The truth in fact, was that the whole TV channel was operated and managed by just 1 member of staff, which was ………. myself! Yes, that even includes the sexy, hot TJ!!

(I will take a moment to offer my profuse apologies to all the hunky guys who sent me suggestive text messages and were heartened by my response and willingness to describe my tight body and oh-so-sexy knickers. I promise to go into therapy…..)

This satellite TV channel operated 24 hours a day, and the heart of the system was a very expensive ‘blade’ server computer, that consisted of 8 separate servers mounted into a single unit. This was a beautiful piece of kit. At that time (2003), it cost me about 16,000 UK pounds to buy. I programmed it to interface with the mobile phone networks (to receive the incoming text messages), to create the on-screen graphics and TJ chat, and to interface with the ‘uplink’ computer at the satellite ground station facility in the middle of a wood in deepest Buckinghamshire, where the channel audio and video was combined and sent up to the Astra satellite, for downlinking and reception by viewers.

There was one further function that was compulsory for this channel. Although adult chat was allowed in the late evening, it was necessary to manually moderate every incoming text message, to ensure that the worst swear words or perhaps racial abuse was not aired on the channel.

That function was also performed by me, even when I was in Thailand! Every incoming text message that was received by my blade server was immediately forwarded to my mobile phone. I would check the message and then bounce it back to my server if it was OK for airing.

So when Anne and I were in the UK, most evenings would find us in a Thai restaurant in the nearby town of Chesham. As we savoured our chicken satay and tasty curry, I would receive text messages from my blade server ‘Hi Hun, I want to f**k you up backside’ (That one’s no good). ‘Hello baby, what sexy clothes are you wearing? (That one’s OK for airing, with the reply from me of ‘Hey babe, I’ve got my sexy red knickers on, just for you. Do you want me to strip??’)

Anne was well aware of the business that I was involved in, and never expressed any concerns. If she did have any worries, I think the ‘good life’ put her mind at rest.

I had an idea for a new, late-night programme on Mobile Crazy TV. This was to be called ‘Bangkok Girl’, and would feature real-time sex-chat with a genuine gogo girl in Bangkok. How could I implement this idea?

The answer was staring me in the face. Pun!! She was a good friend and was always happy to earn some extra money.

So I called Pun and explained my idea to her. I would forward these text messages to her mobile phone, she would reply in Tinglish with the usual suggestive content, and we would share the revenue together for that Bangkok Girl programme.

She was very keen on this idea. But there was only one problem. She could not read English…. Yes, she could speak and write basic English, but reading the language was way beyond her skills.

‘No problem’ I said. Just reply back ‘Hey, I want to f**k your big d**k’ to every message that you receive!!

So again, I must apologise to anyone who sent a polite text message to Pun, asking about Thai food and culture, and then received a highly suggestive sex-chat reply 🙂

Anne and I stayed in the UK for 6 months. I had intended to return to Thailand well before that time, but there was a serious issue. Mobile Crazy TV wasn’t making enough money to cover the bills. It actually cost me about 30,000 UK pounds every month to run the channel. (Most of those costs were for the satellite broadcast link from the Astra satellite). The channel had income from the text messages and the sale of ringtones, but although the income was steadily rising, the channel was still running at a loss. More seriously, there was a technical ‘glitch’ at the satellite uplink station, which would cause the channel display to freeze. So I was forced to keep an eye on the TV screen night and day, and call up the ground station engineer whenever the screen froze.

It was very frustrating, and the long days and nights began to take their toll on me. You may recall from my previous tales that I had contracted the lung illness Aspergillosis, which left me open to going down with pneumonia.

And so it happened. I contracted pneumonia (for the umpteenth time in the UK) and was laid up on the sofa of our rented cottage in the village. I still had to moderate the incoming text messages, and monitor the TV night and day, in case the display froze.

One evening, I was totally exhausted. I lay on the sofa, hardly able to walk. Anne sat next to me, very concerned about my health and unsure what we could do.

At that moment, the TV display froze, due to the ground station glitch. I reached for my mobile phone to call up the engineer at the ground station to reboot his equipment.

I looked at Anne.

She looked at me

I thought for a moment and then said ‘Fcuk it, let’s go for a drink…’

And that was the end of Mobile Crazy TV.

The author can be contacted at : help@myanteach.com