Ordinary Gweilo

Yes, it’s that time of year again when you need to dress up warm – when you’re in the office:

Today in Hong Kong, the temperature reached about 30 degrees Celsius. Inside our Central office, I wore a woollen sweater to keep warm. The aircon thermostats were turned down in some places as low as 10 degrees — though that frostiness is over-stated because of the whole faulty system. In balmy, stinking hot, near-on-summer Hong Kong, I still managed to be shivering at my desk.

And snivelling. The sudden and unpredictable temperature changes are fucking up my body. I now have a cold, which is making it hard to sleep and harder to concentrate.

And it’s not that I haven’t tried to bring the office room temperatures up to a sane level. But each time I turn that dial to 25 — the recommended level by the government, and one not prone to release such tremendous volumes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — someone (usually a jacket-wearing weakling from sales) turns it back down.

I went to see the doctor recently (ka-ching – here are five small bags of pills) and it was freezing cold in the waiting room.  Why do they do that?  Perhaps it’s a way of drumming up more business…

My theory on this is that the simplest solution would be to re-design aircons so that they provide better ventilation without needing to set the temperature so low.