Ordinary Gweilo

There has been a lot of fuss in Europe about the cost of mobile phone roaming. Some poor unfortunates have taken their phones to Spain on holiday and come back to find that their mobile phone bills cost more than the holiday.  The catch being that whilst there are no charges for incoming calls when you are in the UK, they cost an arm and leg when you go overseas. 

Now the European Commission has threatened to cap the cost of roaming.  This has been met with predictable complaints from the phone companies about "interfering with the free market".  However they have also decided that perhaps they should reduce their charges. 

I suppose we have a similar situation with Hong Kong and China, but here the problem really has been solved by the market.  Rather than paying roaming charges, you can subscribe to a "Call Forward Roaming" service that will divert your calls to a China mobile number.  Of course they charge for this service, but much less than the mobile phone companies.

The only problem with this arrangement is that you either need to have two phones, or you have to do the "Lo Wu shuffle" and take out your Hong Kong SIM card and replace it with the China SIM card (and then do the reverse on the way home).  I can’t imagine why Nokia or Motorola haven’t come up with a phone that can use 2 SIM cards, but I suppose it will happen one day.  That or at least a phone which allows you to take out the SIM card without taking the phone apart…

As an aside, in my latest in a long line of weird conversations with Hong Kong companies, I called one company advertising "Call Forward Roaming" and asked them about the HK$8/month plan that I had found on their website.

"Sorry sir, that offer is not available any more." 

At this point I would expect them to tell me their latest offer, but I had to ask.  I was expecting bad news.  Not so – they now charge HK$20 per year.  So why didn’t he tell me that straight away rather than apologizing?  Still at least I did manage to get the information – the first time I called they told me to try another (wrong) number, and the second time they promised to call me back but never did so.  It really is a struggle sometimes.   

One thing that makes all this worthwhile is when I write about something* and end up learning more about it in the process.  I hadn’t realized that Hong Kong did used to have Summer Time, but Dave kindly pointed this out to me on the Observatory’s website:

Summer Time in Hong Kong was first introduced in 1941.  Hong Kong Summer Time = Hong Kong Standard Time + 1 hour.

You will notice that during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Summer Time applied for the whole year, and then events in the Middle East and the resulting rise in oil prices prompted them to introduce it for the winter of 1972/73.  Apart from that it was in force from Spring until Autumn. 

Which is about as exact as it gets, because the start and end dates seem to have been somewhat random (starting any time from mid-March to mid-May, and ending from late October to early December).  Then they appear to have given up on it in 1977 and 1978 only to bring it back in 1979 for one final fling.

It’s bad enough having to remember to put your clocks forwards and backwards each year, but the least you would expect is that there would be some logic and consistency to it.  Obviously I wasn’t here when this mad experiment was taking place, but maybe one or two of my older readers (Fumier, perhaps) would have some amusing anecdotes about arriving at the Dim Sum restaurant way too early or being late for work on Monday morning.

* Preferably something trivial and unimportant.

There was something in the SCMP recently (sorry, I can’t find the reference) suggesting that Hong Kong should introduce "Daylight Saving"  so that people could enjoy the summer evenings more – the idea is that you take some daylight away from the early morning and have it in the evening instead (the UK has done this for more than 80 years).

If you have lived in Hong Kong (or around this part of the world) all your life, it is quite strange to find that in London it is still light after 9pm. in the summer.  Of course, this is only partially because of "Daylight Saving", but it does help.  The flipside is that in winter it can be dark at 4pm (and often cold and wet as well).

The UK uses a different time zone to countries such as France and Germany, but there has been one small piece of standarization – for a long time the UK and the rest of Europe all had "Daylight Saving" in the summer, but starting and ending on different dates (meaning that for a few weeks each year, the UK and France had no time difference, and for a few weeks there was a 2 hour difference).  Now there is a common date for the changeover and a permanent 1 hour difference between the UK and France, Germany, etc.

Mind you, the UK did experiment with British Standard Time ("Daylight Saving" throughout the year), but this was unpopular in places such as Scotland because it meant that it was still dark at 10 a.m. in January. 

Australia seems to have the strangest arrangements – they have three time zones, and in some of them one state will have "Daylight Saving" whereas another will not (Queensland does not, New South Wales does).  How confusing is that, especially on the Gold Coast, most of which is in Queensland whereas the southern part (and the airport, I think) is in NSW.

Of course, there’s no chance at all of Hong Kong introducing "Daylight Saving".  The whole of China and all the way from here to Singapore (apart from Thailand) operates on one common time zone, so it would be crazy for Hong Kong to do anything different.  Plus, there’s no real need.