So near yet so feared: why playing it safe doesn't pay
Cecilie Gamst Berg
As many people grow older, they seem to become more tolerant. My theory: old people are actually less tolerant than ever but realise time is running out, therefore they can't be bothered to make a fuss every time there is something to get all curmudgeonly about.
Although apoplectically intolerant of a million things, I am trying to stop wasting my time on lost causes, such as asking people on Facebook to write plural "s" without an apostrophe and "your" instead of "you're". Life's too short.
I try to practise Zen-like breathing when I see some of my other pet peeves. "Be safe!" and "Stay safe!" people inanely post. "Take care" obviously wasn't idiotic enough for them - they had to invent something even more meaningless. "Be safe" - like by never going out? By becoming unborn again?
I thought about this as I was sitting down for a heavenly dim sum breakfast in the Lo Wu Railway Hotel Restaurant with my friends S and R. This establishment, as mentioned in this column many times before, is a strange mixture of indescribably horrendous Western food and fantastic dim sum, much better than the Hong Kong standard.
When you check in to the hotel you get a voucher for a free Western breakfast the next day - giving them away is surely the only way they can get rid of the foul substances. In fact, they should pay people to eat this vile fare.
But play your cards right and you get a 10 yuan (HK$12.5) voucher for the dim sum restaurant. That, of course, is what we did.
After a pub-crawl the night before - small but intense and involving quite a lot of beer - deep-fried, pan-fried, stodgy dim sum was what our bodies craved. Restored, we asked for the bill, which came to a very tolerable 55 yuan. Which would have been 35 yuan, after subtracting the value of our two vouchers.
"Er, yes, about that," R said. "We locked our voucher in the room safe and now it won't open." What? Were they worried someone would break into the room and steal a breakfast voucher?
Fortunately, that wasn't it; they had merely thought it would be smart to lock their passports and paperwork in the safe.
And that paperwork was certainly safe, now nobody could get hold of their passports, including S and R.
Having travelled extensively in China for 25 years, I can safely say all the mainland hotels I have ever stayed in have had one thing in common: the staff never take anything. Oh, make that two things: technical and mechanical items will break down.
So we ended up having to pay 45 yuan instead of 35 yuan that morning, all for the sake of "being safe". That still rankles.
