Ordinary Gweilo

It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writing (mainly) about Hong Kong

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  • Over-thinking

    Some tasks on The Apprentice just scream out ‘product placement’.  It’s almost as if the producers are willing to organize any old task as long as it suits their sponsors.

    Hence we had the weirdest task so far – the teams were asked to select an unsigned singer, write a song with him and then record a demo.  Both would be played on XM Cafe, which is apparently an alternative rock channel (one of a mere 150 channels available on subscription from XM Radio).  Did I mention that it is on XM Radio?  Oh, I did.

    Simple and straightforward task.  Three steps

    1. Find an artist who would be at home on XM Cafe
    2. Write a song that would fit with the format of XM Cafe
    3. Record the song in a style that would fit with XM Cafe

    Nothing else to worry about.  No surprise that Team Excel over-thought the task and decided that they would "challenge" the audience by finding an R&B artist.  No surprise that the audience and the executives didn’t really want to be challenged. 

    Capital Edge seemed to be more aware of what was required, and had the sense to remind the artist and the producer that they didn’t want any of that funny jazz sound thanks very much.  They won.  Clay was fired for being the most irritating contestant left.

  • A big fuss about nothing

    I think we have this every year.  TVB wants to show The Oscars live, but the rules say that TVB Pearl has to show educational programs from 12 noon, just as the big awards are being handed out on in Los Angeles.

    This year TVB has been making a big fuss because Ang Lee might win the ‘Best Director’ award and they would not be able to show this live.  Which, of course, would be a Bad Thing.  Apparently.

    Which is all very well, but (1) how many people are really watching TV in Hong Kong at this time of day?  How many of them want to watch The Oscars live?  Is it that important?  Isn’t it being shown live on Star Movies? 

    If there really is a large potential audience, TVB have a very simple remedy – transmit the final hour or so of The Oscars on TVB Jade. I rather doubt that they will do that…

  • More choice, less function

    Here’s a strange thing.

    If you go to the cinema in Hong Kong and watch a foreign or Chinese film there will be both English and Chinese subtitles.  If the same film is shown on TV you also get two sets of subtitles.  If you watch a VCD you will again see two sets of subtitles.

    However, if you watch it on DVD you will most likely get a wider choice of subtitles (and the option to switch them off).  However, you cannot have two different languages shown simultaneously, as you would in the cinema, on TV or on a cheap old VCD. Which is a bit odd, really.

    Or perhaps someone makes a DVD player that offers this function?  It can’t be difficult!

  • Walking and Talking

    It was said of President Gerald Ford that he couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

    Now, admittedly having a conversation on your mobile phone is slightly more complex than chewing gum, but it’s not really that difficult, is it?  So how come it is apparently such a challenge for so many people to walk along in a straight line at a constant speed whilst engaging in a conversation on their mobile phone? 

    Admittedly most of my mobile phone conversations go something like this:

    "Hello"

    "I’m near (name of station)."

    "About 30 minutes"

    "Bye"

    so walking and talking is not something that causes me too many problems.  Perhaps I’m not typical, but I’d hazard a guess that 99% of mobile phone conversations use only a small part of the brain, leaving plenty of spare capacity for controlling your limbs and processing visual information about where to go.  On the rare occasions that someone asks you a really difficult question (such as why Graeme Souness keeps getting offered jobs in football management) there’s always the option of stopping to think.  Especially if I’m walking nearby.   

  • I hate Heathrow

    It seems that Hong Kong is soon to have a new budget airline, called Oasis [via salty water].  I am not sure that "budget airline" actually means anything very much in Asia, because each company seems to have its own business model, none of which are quite the same as the well-established US and UK companies.  Oasis say will they will offer non-stop flights for the price of flights with an inconvenient stopover, which means a modest discount to what you would currently pay with Cathay/BA/Virgin – better than nothing, but hardly earth-shattering. 

    What is interesting about Oasis is that they plan to fly to Europe and the States rather than within Asia.  Destinations include Gatwick and Cologne/Bonn (which they helpfully point out is in Germany, for anyone planning to fly there maybe thinking that it was in Canada).

    Having used both of those airports, I can confidently say that they are a hundred times better than Heathrow and most of the other large airports in Europe.  Gatwick is next to the mainline London-Brighton railway, and these days Easyjet fly to many European destinations from there.  Now, obviously it’s not as much of a "hub" as Heathrow, so if you want bigger crowds and a wider choice of more expensive flights then it may not be what you’re looking for, but it would suit me just fine.

    The airline claim that the seat pitch will be "generous", but they haven’t explained what that means.  If it’s better than cattle class in BA/Virgin/Cathay then I forsee a price war, which has got to be good news.   

  • Babbling incoherently

    Funniest moment(s) so far in series 4 of The Apprentice came after Trump had fired Markus.  It is traditional at this point to thank "Mr Trump" for the opportunity, or maybe to walk out looking shocked.  Instead, but true to form, Markus babbled incoherently and in the taxi on his way "home" he couldn’t put together even one coherent sentence in attempting to justify his performance.  If anyone doubted why he had to go, here was the proof.

    Frankly, I’d have fired all three of them – Clay is another one who whines too much without contributing anything of value, and Adam is just too young and inexperienced to be any use.

    Regular viewers will know that every week Donald Trump has to say "…and the losing team will meet me in the boardroom where someone will be fired."  Woe betide anyone from the losing team who tries to argue that they only lost narrowly or that they did a good job.  Yet the reality is that the margin between victory and defeat is often extremely narrow, often based on entirely subjective factors, and sometimes both.  So it can be rather annoying when Trump (or more often Carolyn) treats the losers as if they have done something very wrong, when maybe they have made a small mistake or just been unlucky.

    Not always, though, as Excel proved when they completely missed the point of one of the challenges.  They staged a fairly spectacular baseball event in a sporting goods store, but amusingly this actually reduced sales.  Possibly not quite the ideal result, and the other team achieved a respectable sales increase, so for once Trump and his sidekicks were fully entitled to give the losing team a hard time.

    Typically, TVB managed to spoil the fun by running a trailer for the show in which Trump was seen to say "you’re all fired".  Hence the only suspense was finding out whether he meant the whole team or just the PM and the one or two people he brought back.  Or (as it turned out) something inbetween.

    Of course, the cynical amongst us might have suspected that the culling was inevitable given that they started with 18 contestants and the show only runs for 13 weeks.  But, hey, Trump likes to look as if he is charge.

  • Kung Hei Fat Choi

    Enjoy the cookies

  • On the buses

    Last Saturday the SCMP published a letter from New World First Bus in response to a letter last Wednesday that said that they "get completely free use of the roads" (whereas the MTR and KCR have to pay for the railbeds).  It was quite a short letter, but it made two splendidly ludicrous claims: 

    In fact, bus companies and their passengers pay dearly for using roads in Hong Kong, in the form of a congestion (time) charge that serves to increase operating costs and thereby directly impacts upon fares. This penalty is, of course, mitigated to a great extent by the superior comfort of bus travel in Hong Kong, with most passengers being conveniently chauffeured from door to door in an individual seat space that is climate- controlled, inviting and altogether very relaxing.

    Good grief.  What is an "individual seat space"?  What use is it to have the climate controlled by someone who apparently owns shares in "North Face".  Or a "chauffeur" who accelerates away and then slams on the brakes?  And not even any mention of Idiot TV, I see. 

    As for the congestion on Hong Kong’s roads, even a public transport enthusiast such as myself can see that there are too many buses operating at most times of the day.  Could this possibly be because the bus companies pay so little for fuel?  Would that be a subsidy, perhaps?

    No surprise that Jake van der Kamp and David Webb have both responded to this nonsense, so I’ll leave it to them.

    (more…)

  • Still in the dark ages

    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 few minutes, wondering why this advanced piece of machinery couldn’t tell me the nature of the problem, and also why it was refusing to give me my money, but it steadfastly refused to give me my money or my card back. 

    So today I went back to pick up my card.  Not available.  Apparently it takes a couple of days for the card to travel 50 metres or so from the ATM machine to the customer service desk.  However, amazingly enough when I started screaming and shouting it suddenly appeared from nowhere.

    Next problem is that there is every chance that the next time I try to use the card it will be swallowed again.  So how can we solve the problem?  Well. luckily I had some ideas.

    I can see that it may take a few days to create a new card, so how about we set up my credit card (from the same bank) so that I can withdraw cash from my savings account?  Oh, and advise me of the PIN because I’ve forgotten it.  Shouldn’t take long, should it?  Oh no, sir, it probably can’t be done before Chinese New Year.  WTF?

    Watching the staff try to deal with these simple requests is quite something.  My name and account number have to be manually copied from a computer screen on to a printed form so that I can sign it.  Then this paper request has ‘Top Urgent’ (= "shouting Gweilo") stamped on it and then I suppose it is passed across to the clerks with the quill pens to deal with it at their leisure    

    Hey, guys, ever thought of designing a software program that could print out the form with my difficult Gweilo name and my account number on it?  Surely that can’t be too hard?  Then you could investigate automating the whole process so that the request is sent electronically to the appropriate person to deal with it.  Maybe it could be done in hours rather than days.   

    No, I thought not.  Maybe all this technology stuff will never catch on – there’s nothing wrong with paper and pen, after all. 

  • A small misunderstanding

    The government has come up with an altogether more sensible explanation for what they are trying to achieve with new legislation about discrimination and expat salaries, as the SCMP reports:

    Provisions for expat packages in the proposed anti-racism law will help rather than hinder companies’ recruitment of the best employees for the job, the deputy secretary for home affairs said yesterday.

    Mr Fisher said yesterday the proposal did not intend to make expatriate terms more difficult to get, nor would it add any more "bureaucracy" to the process, as some head hunters feared. Instead the exception was aimed at protecting companies.  "When the law is passed, a person who feels aggrieved [by a colleague getting differential pay terms] can bring a case against the employer," Mr Fisher said.

    "We want to provide an exception in the bill to ensure people cannot bring a claim without good reason. The defence, if the case is brought against the employer, is that the staff have skills not readily available in Hong Kong and the staff are from overseas and not a Hong Kong permanent resident."

    This does at least make some sense, though there are still some obvious absurdities here – surely it will make it more difficult to get expat terms (assuming anyone takes notice of the legislation), and it also seem to imply that the employer might want to stop their expat employees getting permanent residence.  Could you have an employment contract that specified certain benefits would cease if the employee became a permanent resident?  If that is possible, would the employer know whether the individual had become a permanent resident?  Would people really be asked to make the choice between the expat package or taking permanent residence?

    I suppose we have to wait for the actual legislation will say, but I still find it hard to see how this is all going to work. 

    What amuses me is that both the SCMP and The Standard came to the same conclusion about the intention of the planned legislation, and now the government is saying that it was all a misunderstanding.  It’s not unknown for governments to float ideas in "off the record" briefings and deny them later, but it’s a different matter when a senior civil servant is quoted directly.  What’s going on here?