English Banditry

So I bought a trackball some months back when I started getting out of control carpal tunnel. One delectable side effect which I failed to anticipate was the sheer dumbfounding perplexity it seems to have brought upon my Chinese co-workers. And I have no idea why, they're all certified computer nerds.  Now it isn't all that often that a coworker needs to come over and operate my terminal in order show me something, ... but today has to be about the twentieth time someone came over to my cubicle and scraped the entire Logitech unit across the bare surface of the desk. (Yes, the same people have done it on multiple occasions each.) It wasn't just that the girl wasn't looking -- after seeing that the cursor had failed to move as she directed it, she perplexedly looked at me and then pointed on the screen to the spot where she wished me to direct the voodoo magic cursor influencer.

Never mind how much it delights me to see their faces flash with exasperation when they try to tap something out on my Dvorak key-mapped keyboard.

(Alternate Title: Maximizing Filthifying Efficiency)

The Chinese Custodial Art Masters' floor mopping techniques are truly 獨一無二 (unique, unparalleled) in this world, not just for their superficiality and face-giving basic purpose and how utterly useless they are when it comes to increasing the degree of sanitation of any facility (including hospitals, no doubt) by even a single degree, but also for their efficiency in contributing to further filthification of the facilities in which they are employed. Since the additional filth is in most cases conveniently siphoned off the shoes of members of the general public, it can also be said that in preparation for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, traditional Chinese Custodial Art mopping (insert random obligatory 5,000 years of history reference) is a kind of public service insofar as it reduces the frequency at which the general public needs to clean the soles of their own shoes. First let's do a run-down of the basic principles followed by Traditional Professional Chinese Custodians across the vast nation of 55 ethnic minorities:

Thinking back a few years, I'm pretty sure I'd read a passage like this and feel annoyed. What arrogance! What silly short-sightedness! (The following applies in no less degree to China)

Rather than talking of a particular region or country, Japanese are notorious for asking "how do people do this abroad" or "what do foreigner think about that" or "if I go abroad, do they have this or that" ? My answer is invariably the same "but where ? in which country ? for whom ?" [Source]

But reading this today, I've realized the behavior is now thoroughly a part of the way I express myself in Mandarin. I haven't put the slightest bit of thought into it for ages, but yet I am sure I speak in this manner on regular basis. I tend to refer to the way anything is outside of China as merely being that way abroad (国外). It's also just dawned on me why I like it so much -- basically it gives me a free license to insult without causing offence! When I say "we do such and such" or something happens in "such and such way" abroad, I am telling the listener that his homeland is uniquely unconventional and bizarre and fails to do things in the "normal" way that the rest of the world does. What gives me the right to claim I know how the whole rest of the world does something? Well, nothing! But no one has called me on it yet, so it's my listener's problem if he lets me get away with this blatant bit of logical fraud.

A few words of admonishment for my would-be elevator riding companions:

Over the course of the past few years I've seen far too much disturbing lemming-like behavior surrounding the office elevator to continue to neglect the chance to bring myself personal pleasure of it. This is just compensation for the times you have ticked me off. Are you amongst the horde that so impatiently presses both the up and down buttons, cram-packedly board at floor 20, ride to 25 under the patently false assumption that the sooner you board the sooner you arrive, and then finally press 0 to proceed to your ground floor destination? Are you one of the dweebs responsible for the fact that anytime I ride from the 25th floor to the ground floor mid-day, when the elevator is hardly in demand, I can expect to stop at a minimum of 2-3 intermediary floors upon which no person will board or alight the elevator car?

I had my sweet revenge today. I boarded on floor 20 and waited calmly without pressing a button. Soon I was shuttled down to the 16th floor to pick up more passengers. They were too trusting to notice I had NOT pressed "1". After two or three more stops and coming awfully close to our ground floor destination, I silently laughed myself to death at the look on their startled faces as the lot of us were shuttled back up to the 25th floor to start our downward journey all over again.

Don't count on me to press the button for you, jackasses.