The morning starts with my first visit to the new Government Headquarters at Tamar. I have been looking forward to seeing Rocco Yim’s newly opened HK$5.5 billion complex and its amusing-sounding teething problems. The two towers joined by a crossbar at the top bring to mind the image of a pair of deformed legs, perhaps dangling from a tree branch after a lynching. I’m sorry – I’ll rephrase that: the two towers joined by a crossbar at the top bring to mind a doorway, representing the openness and accessibility of the Big Lychee’s government. That’s it.
The security system is dedicated to countering the threat of news reporters sneaking in to show how pitifully inept the security system is. After a minute or so, I am admitted in good time for my 9am appointment with ever-enchanting Administrative Officer Winky Ip on the 10th floor, where I intend to investigate the inhabitants’ morale.
Apparently, the civil servants who have been transferred here from the old CGO on Lower Albert Road are deeply unhappy. Some of the mid-ranking ones no longer have parking spaces for their black, seven-seat, luxury ‘Alp Hard’ mega-vans. No longer can Mr Important Official clog up the streets while looking immensely smug inside his cavernous lounge-on-wheels. It has shattered their self-esteem. Meanwhile, some smaller departments now have to share facilities. Mighty section bosses who used to be able to display their power and influence by commandeering a meeting room at the snap of a finger must now wait until it suits some cunning, empire-building fool from a rival department hungry for other people’s budgets. The loss of face before underlings is intense. In short, I have been drawn here by the bureaucrats’ misery. It gives me a warm, inner glow – a conviction that there is, after all, both a God and a Santa Claus. I have even brought some presents: plastic bags of charcoal briquettes, with the suicide-prevention phone numbers erased.
But disaster strikes. As it rises between the sixth and seventh floors, the elevator makes a strange screeching noise, shudders, and grinds to a halt, swaying slightly as if in a breeze. All is silent. An acne-racked Deputy Principal Information Officer (Sichuan) from the Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau stands frozen in the corner, his mouth agape. A metallic voice from downstairs comes on the intercom to curtly announce that help is coming, then disappears with a click.
I am stuck, with nothing but a copy of today’s Standard for approximately intelligent company.
The front page tells the distinctly news-free story of a woman who will donate part of her liver to save her baby, the operation to be performed by a Queen Mary Hospital surgeon called Chan…
Chan said the baby has an 80 percent chance of survival. But if he gets through the initial period and takes his medication regularly there will be no impact on his growth and intelligence.
I must say, I am somewhat concerned about whether an eight-month-old can be trusted to take medication regularly, especially straight after major surgery. But I am especially intrigued by the doctor’s last comment, at least as reported by the Sing Tao people. By ‘…no impact on his intelligence’ I take it that the little mite will get into the right kindergarten, thence to the right primary and secondary schools, and so on to a suitable university, followed by a career as a high-flying accountant or lawyer. It is a huge relief and very moving, even though the family are strangers.
Over on page 5, TVB is whining about the fact that Mainland censors have banned highly intellectual drama series When Heaven Burns from Chinese television screens. This is a country where people who write essays complaining about persecution by corrupt officials are imprisoned for a dozen years for subverting state power, and you complain because your soap opera (apparently conceived with the 1989 Beijing massacre in mind and featuring, as you would expect from the city that brought the world Womb Ghosts, cannibalism) has been pulled mid-season by communist control freaks? The sense of entitlement among Hong Kong’s tycoon-owned semi-monopolies is a wonder. Screw the dictators of 1.3 billion desperately trying to keep their regime from crumbling – where are our advertising revenues?
Page 6, and with a Year of the Dragon approaching, young couples eager to rear budding accountants and lawyers who play piano and own big apartments are preparing to have babies. More words of wisdom from our healthcare professionals…
“Couples seeking medical advice for pregnancy have increased by 20 percent these past few months,” obstetrics and gynecology specialist Anita Chai Hei-lam said. “However, I strongly recommend that couples think twice before planning to have a child as being parents is a lifelong responsibility.”
How true. They seem so cute and cuddly when you look at them in a shop window, don’t they, with those cheeky grins, pleading eyes and wagging tails, but when you get them home…
Hang on – what was that I saw back on page 3? A familiar looking building, and the headline ‘Ancient civil servant succumbs to deadly Tamar pestilence’. Legionnaire’s disease, right here in this very building, in which I am trapped in this lift.
Taking a close lose look at the small ventilation duct, I notice a strange mutant greenish-slime colour. I remove the Deputy Principal Information Officer (Sichuan)’s spectacles and take a closer look. And there they are. Millions and millions of nasty microbes, wriggling about and multiplying.
I try pressing the emergency buzzer, but the people at the other end have gone to apply for their kids’ overseas education allowance or something. I could stuff the air vent with the Standard. But that would be a waste. I move the Deputy Principal Information Officer (Sichuan) over to that side of the elevator, and place his hand flat over the grille. Now all I can do is record these events for posterity on my laptop, and wonder… will I be rescued by this time tomorrow?
I’m surprised the Standard didn’t report that the case of legionaire’s disease that befell Michael Suen from his private bathroom wasn’t all part of a subversive pan-democrat plot to bump off government officials!
Either that or it is another Long Hair Leung Kwok Hung publicity stunt.
Why did Suen get Legionnaire’s Disease?
Because he’s trapped in a racist, colonial organisation,
no one knows who he is and he’s always given impossible
assignments (educating Hong Kong people).
Boom boom!
I have yet to visit Donald’s “I’ll get the job done” (or is it build it and they will come) new $5.5B complex at Tamar, so I have some questions;
1. Are those lovely landscaped lawns underneath the monstrosity finished yet ?
2. If they are can anyone confirm whether the masses are having picnics on the lawn yet as those wonderful artists impressions of the building led us to believe would occur ?
3. What administrative grade do you have to attain to get your own personal bathroom at the office ?
4. Why the ckuf hasn’t Michael Suen retired and / or taken up gainful employment with New World and/or Henderson Land yet ?
Why move them to Tamar when they could have done the decent thing along the Australian and Malaysian lines[1] and shoved the buggers out into the Hinterland? Couldn’t they have used that pestilential loop of land up near Lo Wu? Wouldn’t that have killed two birds with one stone and bought off the Shenzenese at the same time? After all, of your putting beurocrats up there then there’s no need for expensive decontamination is there? 😉
1) Canberra and Putrajaya respectively. Both conveniently miles away from anywhere and they make the buggers live the to boot.
Mr Suen has been a disease waiting to be named since leaving the Jesuits to join the civil service in 1966. may I suggest calling the bug Legionella suenphila.
@ Stephen
Amen and amen
Crying shame that Suen’s legionnaire’s dose didn’t originate from an air-con fixed to an illegal structure appended to his mid-levels flat. That would really have been a most delicious irony. Especially if the disease had killed the cruel bastard.
@ Mary H.
I must say say I agree except that would add
1. Suen is not cruel : he’s just witless ( and dishonest)
2. I would not like to see him die – even a dumb dog deserves a second chance in life. But he should be retired before he does any more damage . And all top civil servants and those imbecile “ministers-who-never-resign-no-matter- how -we fuck-up” should be FORCED to have their children educated in govt – run schools in HK so that at last they pay some attention to the air and education quality in HK where the rest of us plebs have to educate our kids
As an amusing side note, at a recent dinner one person put forth the view that Henery is gaining ground on CY because he has “admitted his weaknesses” . Someone else pointed out that if Henery really HAD done the full Monty on his weaknesses he would also have to admit that
1. He has nothing between his ears
2, The only reason old Tung appointed him in the first place was that Tung wanted a FS who didn’t show up Tung for the dimwit Tung was, so he was forced to appoint someone with even less between the ears than Tung himself. And in the whole of HK only Henery fitted the bill. QED
As an after- thought…
Wouldn’t it delicious if they can’t find the source of Legionniare Suenphilia and so everyone based at Tamar refuses to work there until the whole place is quarantined for 30 days …..
Then they send in Donald as a volunteer alone to be the guinea pig to work alone for another 30 days to prove the place is safe
(then he has to do his own email with 2 fingers)
I’m dreaming ………. but it’s a nice dream
So there’s a bug in both the software that runs the high-speed trains and in the tap-water on the ghost-haunted site, which no-one in their right minds would give to their dog? Sounds like foreign bodies at work to me.
HINT : read today’s SCMP Opinion pages : “Changing Minds” also Tom Holland / Monitor