'Wait A Minute: Speed, Employment & Year One In Hong Kong'

If I have one hangover from my university days, it is definitely my enthusiasm for the underlying psychologies and sociologies of individuals and micro- macro-societies during World War II. I always wondered how people felt when they were unburdened from the hardline bureaucratic governance of the National Socialists. Having now completed my contract with an un-named educational foundation, I really think I’ve come a long way towards understanding how these people must have felt. Not just how they felt at the demise of Hitler, but also at the demise of his altogether more brutal and underhand henchmen. As I now spiral into (albeit temporary) unemployment, leave my home and bid goodbye to some firmly bonded friendships formed over the last few year, I am quite aware that I should really be off the charts of the Stress Index. And yet, as with all those people who made the best of a bad lot during the Hitler years, I find myself thankful for all those things that made it a good year! I find myself trying to think of one word to best sum up my time in Hong Kong… And if pressed, I think I would have to go for the word… Speed! I arrived in Hong Kong, and will leave it to, on a fairly risqué dosage of amphetamine. Before I make the front page of the Daily Mail (Young Asian Immigrant Junkie Is Not to Be Trusted, Says God) I should point out that this was entirely endorsed by my physician. And by all accounts, he was fairly likely to be the friend of someone whose cousin was once a doctor. So the whole thing was legitimate. My next encounter with speed was with my new employer. Her thinking was so fast that she claimed to know everything about me before having met me and I became suspicious that we may well have had the same physician*. In the face of the ultra-speedy Hong Kong, I was always impressed that she tried to slow it down for me by constantly saying: ‘WAIT A MINUTE! WAIT A MINUTE!’ But then these are just details la! One of the most remarkable things about the speedy city of Hong Kong is that it possesses some of the slowest people on the planet. People will dance behind you like a hypoglycaemic child in frustration at not being able to pass you in the street, they will then reach V2 (Note to self: Confirm this with Cesca) as they go past before developing a strange form of Werner Syndrome as they overtake you which makes them slower than a fat senescent man in a diving suit. ‘WAIT A MINUTE! WAIT A MINUTE!’ This all changes of course when the same people are taking the train. The Mass Transit Railway (MTR) is Hong Kong’s speedy and efficient underground rail network. At most, you have to wait four minutes for a train. However, in the ultra-fast city of Hong Kong four minutes is too long to wait. So even if an osteoperosis suffering antique is poised gingerly inside the door of the train, giant hulks of human beings will pay them scant regard and instead use them as their emergency handbrake as they thrust themselves onto the train to save a moment or two. Arseholes! ‘WAIT A MINUTE! WAIT A MINUTE!’ Yes… Let’s take a minute. A minute to remember the promise made before around sixty other people and I came to Hong Kong that we would enjoy a culturally mediated introduction to employment in Hong Kong. Let’s take a minute to remember the absolute dread that anyone from the foundation might visit my school and make grinding assertions about my moral character and personality. And let’s devote another minute to think of the poor kids who came over at great expense to be fucked over at further expense by a deluded individual whose misguided appropriation of power and delusional self-belief borders on psychopathy**! * In no way do I claim that this individual abuses or has ever abused drugs; only their position. ** I have used the term psychopath in reference to an individual whose own convictions completely and utterly fail to accommodate the obdurate reality of the world.