Are you a Hong Kong broker getting ready for a massive bonus cut? Hate to say it, but you just might be in the wrong profession. Our Italian spies tell us that one band of employees have just come into a serious bonus payout: staff at the Vatican City. Their boss is a generous man by the name of Pope John Paul II - and he is clearly keen to share the vast wealth of the business of which he is chairman and CEO, the Roman Catholic Church, with lay workers and clerics alike. The pope has distributed a one-off cash bonus of a million lire (about HK$4,599) to 4,000 employees to mark his 20th anniversary as pontiff. What next? Vatican staff share ownership plans, perhaps, or even papal futures? When it comes to going nowhere, members of the Legislative Council's economic services panel are clearly the ultimate experts. Yesterday, they managed to spend 20 minutes of a planned two-hour session deciding whether to set up a sub-committee to study the power industry, or to have a special meeting of the present committee. At issue was whether enough people would turn up to sub-committee meetings to make them viable. A less than vibrant debate developed which seemed solely directed at helping members of the audience to lose consciousness. And the eventual result of the debate? Ahem . . . nothing. No vote was taken - and the legislators decided to muddle along as before. That's democracy, folks. Involuntary dining-room bathing continues to be an unexpected feature of Cathay Pacific's new First Class and Marco Polo Club lounge. The official launch of the $200 million lounge on Monday did not quite go to plan. A member of the press stepped into the 10-centimetre-deep decorative pool which runs through the dining areas: joining an increasingly imposing list of people to do so. This despite efforts by Cathay to make the pool's presence more obvious by painting its bottom. Word from inside Cathay is that the airline has considered further options to stop involuntary bathing. Favoured options included dyeing the pool's water, or putting large goldfish in it. What makes us think that still won't stop frequent fliers making a splash? Accidental pool-partying was but one of the problems for Cathay at Monday's razzle-dazzle opening. Some other holes in the ground were also causing problems for invited visitors. On a tour of the facility on Monday, one visitor tripped over a light trench as she was being shown a view by a Cathay official. To complicate matters, a renegade telephone thief was also on the loose. The same official revealed that a phone had been stolen, adding: 'I don't know why anyone would go to the danger of doing that.' Ah yes: If it's non-stop action you're looking for, Cathay's upper-class lounge is clearly the place to be. Mobile phones seem to be working as speech prompters these days. Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Harvard Institute for International Development, was talking about the 'four elements of globalisation' at Lingnan College yesterday. He started with trade, and had just moved on to technology when - you guessed it - a mobile phone went off in the audience. With nary a stutter, Mr Sachs commented: 'These relentless beeps that one hears in lecture halls and especially in concerts is another evidence of the technology that brings us together.' Guess that's one way of looking at it, Jeffrey. As tensions rise in Indonesia, one could be excused for some slight confusion about the state of consciousness of one political party. It's name is the National Awakening Party: or, more concisely, Nap. There have been some pretty strange discounting schemes going on in the economy lately. A couple of months back, for instance, we revealed the emergence of half-price escort services in Tsim Sha Tsui. Now, witness the latest price-cutting fad: two-for-one amah services. The advertisement below - spotted by an alert reader - appeared in the latest issue of a local careers magazine. An outfit appropriately named Utopia Overseas Employment Centre is making the offer for overseas maids, gardeners or drivers. It's only a matter of time before they start offering a free set of steak knives into the bargain.
