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SCMP Reporter

IT was standing room only at Jardine Fleming's offices in Jardine House yesterday morning.

   Most of Hongkong financial press stood poised with notebooks and cameras as JF's A-Team unleashed their wonderful new dial-in service, called MasterLine.

  Phone up MasterLine, a sort of voice-mail type robot, and you can make all sorts of unit trust transactions by just tapping the buttons on your phone.

  The firm spent $15 million and 40,000 man-hours developing it.

  Unit Trusts general manager Blair Pickerell had the honour of demonstrating it.

  He punched a confidential code, and MasterLine's synthesised female voice read out all the up-to-date figures of someone's portfolio.

  The climax came when he showed how you could even reach a Jardine Fleming human being.

  ''And you can speak directly to an investment adviser, and talk with them,'' Mr Blair said excitedly, tapping the final digit.

  Silence.

  ''This is so technologically complex, it naturally takes time,'' he assured us.

  More silence.

  Colleague Dudley Howard started to look a little uneasy.

  Finally the telephone clicked into life, saying: ''You have called JF Unit Trusts. I'm sorry, but there's nobody to take your call right now.''   The voice asked the listening multitude to call back during office hours. It was 11.30 am at the time.

  Don't be downcast chaps. Your machine worked perfectly.

  It was the humans who let the side down, as usual.

  Destiny was just proving the truth of the maxim:   The probability of failure is directly proportional to the number and importance of the people watching the test.

   Existentialism  JOURNALIST Paul Williams of Happy Valley spotted a sign in Al's Diner, Lan Kwai Fong.

  Have a order of   Lowenbrau Draught   beer to get the   following gifts:   1 pint: Tie Pin   2 pints: Calculator   3 pints: Umbrella   Prizes valid till   stock exists.

  ''This seems to be from the Jean Paul Sartre School of Marketing,'' said Paul.

   Cashing in  A TORRENT of faxes received yesterday reveal that Hongkong people really hate the bank charges that are now attached to simple transactions.

  Gone are the days when a banker's life could be boiled down to the ''three-four-five'' rule - lend at five (per cent), borrow at four, and be on the golf course by three.

  In Hongkong, it is a case of lend at eight per cent, borrow at two per cent and buy a flat for $10 million - giving yourself a cheap loan for the purpose.

  Bank loan margins in Hongkong must be among the highest in the world, yet banks insist on charging an ''arrangement'' fee for customers seeking a loan. This borders on the criminal.

  Cue greedy banker joke:   Two bankers are walking down Ice House Street. One asks the other: ''If a friend just stopped you on the street and asked you for some off-the-cuff advice, would you charge them for it?''   ''Let me think about it,'' says the second banker.

  Two days later, the first banker receives a letter. It says:   ''Yes.

  ''That'll be $288, please.''    It's terminal  YOU would think that a day room was somewhere to spend the daylight hours.

  But no. A service has opened in Bangkok Airport called ''Louis's Day Room (24-hour service)''. We heard this from Lisa Humphries of Phoenix, the travel agency in Kowloon.

  According to an announcement from the Thai Tourism Service, Louis's Day Room is available for transit and transfer passengers who have not gone through ''entry fatalities''.

  Lisa said: ''There must be quite a number of terminal passengers in the day room just avoiding entry fatalities''.

  Goodness. And we thought Kai Tak was tough to negotiate.

   Bondage  A BIG debate is raging in South Korea, we hear from Diane Stormont of Reuters: what will be the official nickname for the country's bonds?   Japan has samurai bonds, the Americans have yankee bonds and so on.

  Philip Smiley of Jardine Fleming Securities proposed ''kimchi bonds'' in honour of South Korea's fiery cabbage appetiser.

  But kimchi leaves a sour taste in the mouth. To name an investment after this could be too close to the truth.

  Someone else suggested Turtle Bonds, after the country's historic armoured ships.

  But there's no hurry to find a nickname as the bond is unlikely to see the light of day until 1995.

  ''There's another reason I like [the name] turtle bonds,'' a British broker told Diane. ''It sums up the pace of financial deregulation here.''    If the shoe fits  LE Saunda, the shoe shop chain, is advertising for an assistant merchandiser.

  Top of the list of qualifications for the role: she must have size 36 feet.

  The ad was spotted by Simon Clennell of Rowland Co. ''Perhaps they need her to step into someone else's shoes,'' he said.

  ''Of course, we're used to ads such as 'pretty young Filipina maid wanted' in Hongkong, that would be ruled out in the UK or US on grounds of sexism, racism and ageism, not to mention being derogatory to the facially challenged. But footism?'' 



Jardines proves that to err is human