Aryty, Buffet Line yay!

Saturday, I, along with the country’s most influential bloggers (bear with me), were invited by PinoyCentric’s bureau chief Karla Maquiling for an intimate lunch with Aryty.com’s CEO Nils Johnson and creative director Daniel Neumann at Shangri-La Makati’s Circles event cafe.

I think I’ve mentioned before how things like these make me feel uncomfortable and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was iffy with the idea the whole time. However, I’ve heard a lot of great things about the lunch buffet at Circles and really, there are only a few things in the world that could make me extremely happy and teaching an Israeli boy how to crochet, and being in an awesome buffet line ranks high on the list. (Sex comes in somewhere around 5th spot right below “Arson”)

But yeah, I was still uncomfortable as fuck so with my armpits assured of dryness thanks to two handkerchiefs I stuffed in them, I drove to the Makati Shangri-La and met up with Karla, Jayvee, Gail, Angelo, Ederic, Sasha , Markku, Aileen and Ajay to partake in an extravagant culinary festival brimming with free prepaid phone credits, urine, neuroses and rancour. (I know I’m missing the point here. Whutev.)

When I got in the function room, I felt tense. Afterall, I was with the crème de la crème of local blogging and again, how does a guy who squanders whatever fame and influence he has on hundreds and hundreds of words’ worth of dick/racist jokes fit in? I actually spent a good 30 minutes, talking to nobody as other people who passed by me in the restaurant shot me scowls and shook their heads at me in disgust as I sweat the fuck all over the place and at one point, even spilling roast beef on the floor while my right hand made a sortie down my crotch to touch my genitals–as I am inclined to do whenever I feel uncomfortable or threatened.

(also, the fact that I saw Reema Changco, said hi to her [because I'm famous myself] and got ignored didn’t help ebb my anxiety.)

But eventually, things settled down, I got introduced to Nils and Daniel (Who’s so fucking dreamy by the way, I couldn’t conceal my monster erection when I shook his hand–something he promptly noticed and things got all weird between us thereafter), and realized that we were nothing more but a bunch of geeks gabbing and having lunch.

Soon Nils stood up and I was pretty sure everybody was thinking the same thing “Boo, a presentation just when I want to devour the exorbitant amount of food I helped myself to from the buffet table. Whatever, I’ll just sit through this–Wait is that roast beef on Mike Villar’s plate? And is that maple syrup he’s putting on it? Also, why is he sweating that much?”

So yeah, I got relaxed, nils presented the product to us, asked us for suggestions on how to make it better and best of all, I didn’t make a dick out of myself and that was pretty much it. I know this might sound like a bit of a decline from how I built up the story; and you’re probably expecting me to tell you how I made a dick out of myself by having a panic attack, punching some random guy in the throat, dropping to the floor, peeing my pants before finally bolting out of the function room crying but unfortunately nothing of the sort happened.

And really what a relief. It’s over, I got free lunch, manipulated the CEO of a foreign company to send me free prepaid phone credits and that was that. It actually kinda feels like sex, except that I’m not apologizing profusely, furiously begging my flaccid manhood to get up before finally going through my wallet and pockets saying “It looks like I’m 400 pesos short but if you want, we can go down to the ATM machine and withdraw some money.”

Yeah.

Anyway, since Nils and Daniel gave me one of the best lunches I’ve had in a long time and gave me free prepaid phone credits, I think I owe it to them to at least talk about the product.

Aryty, through tie-ups with major local cellular phone carries Globe, Smart and Sun, is a service that allows friends and relatives from other parts of the globe to send you prepaid phone credits using their credit cards.

Reasonable rates of a little over 3 Dollars for 150 pesos worth of prepaid credits and the convenience Aryty brings to the table makes up for a strong value proposition for mobile phone-crazy Filipinos and their friends and relatives abroad alike.

One more thing I like about Aryty is the ability for a local mobile phone user to ask for prepaid phone credits from anyone in the United States and Canada by sending an SMS containing the person they’re asking prepaid credits from’s mobile number to a local access number. The person they’re asking credits from, in turn, receives a notification via SMS and can either accept or decline to send credits using their phones or Aryty’s web interface.

So yeah, next time you’re bugging your American fiance for prepaid credit money (while you’re bugging him for a green card), don’t bother with remittances! Use Aryty!

I suck at this.

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