Volunteers find little food available for on-line ordering in SAR

Take two Hong Kong twenty-somethings. Remove mobile phones, pagers and any devices for contact with the outside world - other than a Web browser. Take away access to television, compact discs, radios or any other form of entertainment. Place into separate hotel rooms for 48 hours, and what do you get? If the hotel is in Hong Kong, you get some pretty hungry people, for one thing. It seems no pizza or any kind of restaurant food can be ordered on-line in Hong Kong. Groceries, on the other hand, take hours to order and days before they can be delivered.

The volunteers, Jonathan Chan and Amy Lam, participating in a publicity event by Web portal Sina.com, resorted to desperate measures.

Jonathan, a 21-year-old computer science student, had friends run to a cafe, grab a menu, scan it in and e-mail it to him. By e-mailing back his preferences and having his friends arrange delivery to the Tsim Sha Tsui YMCA, where Sina put him and Amy up, Jonathan managed to keep up his strength, which he needed to complete a task list that included commenting on news stories, hosting Web chats and reviewing a book.

Amy, a 24-year-old aspiring actress who also hosts a Web chat show, had it tougher. After trying both the Wellcome and ParknShop Web sites - to no avail - Amy was finally able to order some food from the adMart Web site. Then came the hard part. The operator told her that delivery would be made on Wednesday - the day after the two-day exercise was scheduled to end.

According to Sina spokesman Pamela Mak, the only way Amy could get next-day delivery was to threaten adMart by claiming that she was a newspaper reporter doing a rating on the on-line grocery services.

'She said 'if you don't get the food delivered to me right away, I'm going to write a bad report on you',' Ms Mak said.