Ordinary Gweilo
It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writiing (mainly) about Hong Kong
about
Category: Rants
-
On Sky News tonight they seem to have replaced the news bulletins with wall-to-wall coverage of a rich old woman walking around Windsor and being given flowers. Apparently she got 20,000 birthday cards and 17,000 emails (unfortunately 16,999 of them were actually offers of V/I/A/G/R/A from the likes of Osvaldo Blackmon and Mireria Goggin). What…
-
The SCMP is such an easy target, so here we go again. They currently have a letter column and also a section called ‘Talkback’ (for emails). I cannot figure out what difference there is between them – presumably most of the letters they receive come via email, so it can’t be that. You might think…
-
It’s a simple word, but what does it mean? We should be happy when someone writes "thanks", shouldn’t we? Except that it is often used in emails to mean that someone expects you to do something, rather than expressing gratitude for a job well done. I suppose it has grown out of the weasel phrase…
-
My ATM card has been slightly broken for several months, but I’ve never quite got round to going to the bank to request a new one. Well, it worked, so why bother? Until Sunday, that is, when the machine swallowed the card and was unable to return it to me. I stood there for a…
-
I just knew this would happen. After being given 90 days credit for my pizza, I forgot to pay the bill when it eventually arrived. So the nice people at DBS charged me HK$150 "late fee" and HK$10 "finance charges". Yes, I know it’s my own stupid fault, but I can’t help wondering what kind…
-
Put a Hong Kong person near a lift, and they will jab compulsively at the buttons. Outside the lift they will press the button to go up or down (probably both), even if someone has already pressed it. They even press the button when the light goes out because the lift door are about to…
-
Animated films are invariably dubbed into Cantonese by local performers, and it is this version of the film that plays on most screens in Hong Kong – without English subtitles. Fortunately, the original English version is available in a few places, which for those of us in the Kowloon and the New Territories means the…
-
Couples who have a shared email address. What’s that all about, then? I suppose it made sense a few years ago, but these days there are plenty of perfectly good free email services, most notably GMail (more storage space than you could possibly need, and the option to save copies of emails in Outlook), and…
-
Where I live, they have some speed humps in the road. Damn stupid things – many drivers (especially taxi drivers) drive fast and then brake just before the speed humps. Drivers of small vans just ignore them completely. So, what’s the point? This report in The Observer says that it’s much better to replace speed…
-
A curious postscript to my recent rant about trying to order stuff from companies with websites that don’t work very well. The goods that were sent to the less well-known New Territories in Canada have finally turned up with ‘try Hong Kong’ scrawled on the label. Good thinking, that man. After my complaint they had…
Ordinary Gweilo 