A Letter from Hong Kong
The power of social media, and can your boss expect you to answer his calls all weekend?
My wife has taken a bit of a shine to Bakehouse, the new baked goods stores that have taken off in Hong Kong. It's not uncommon to see fifty or even a hundred folks lined up to buy, and just as many taking photos of the shop from outside.
In Soho they vie for top billing with Vission, but both are doing a roaring trade, with locals sure, but especially with Korean and mainland tourists.
I was chatting to a nearby restaurant owner as we watched the opening of Vission's extension, a production facility and cake shop twice the size of their original premises next door and I said, we should have been knocking out baked goods, with queues like that there must be a tidy quid in it.
Yes, he said, it's a shame I'm a pizza man.
If you are curious, it's the sourdough egg tarts that are the favourites at Bakehouse, and Lord knows at Vission, I've never seen a queue short enough to join so I could find out.
It's a reminder of the power of social media marketing to drive business. These crowds of tourists are finding these stores and buying on the back of it. The same is happening with restaurants, Yat Lok in Central and Kam's in Wan Chai are serving up flocks of roast goose every day to satisfy the lines of tourists, and they will line up in Jordan for plain scrambled eggs at venerable cha chaan teng The Australian Dairy Company.
A changing world, and a sign that traditional media is losing it's power to drive business, and with that will go the revenue it needs to pay for the journalists.
There has been a bit of media argument about the commencement of the Australian Government's new Right to Disconnect legislation, which will restrict an employer's right to contact employees out of normal work hours.
This legislation gives employees the right to ignore late night calls from the boss, but only when measured under a range of circumstances specific to the working relationship, including:
the reason for the contact or attempted contact;
how the contact is made and the level of disruption it causes the employee;
the extent to which an employee’s remuneration compensates them to remain available to perform work during the period in which the contact is made or work additional hours outside their ordinary hours of work;
the nature of the employee’s role and their level of responsibility; and
their personal circumstances (including family or caring responsibilities).
It makes me slightly nostalgic for my days as a young lawyer.
Almost no-one had a mobile phone, which were the size of a house brick, no emails, letters were sent by mail or AusDoc, a sort of post service for lawyers, or hand-delivered by clerks employed to do this and to file documents at the courts.
Incoming phone calls went through to support staff unless the caller was well-connected enough to have the direct line, and that was restricted to frequent business contacts and family and friends.
It all worked well enough. No-one expected an immediate response to a letter the way we do with an email today, or at least it was rare to do so. A benefit of that, which has been largely lost, is that when appropriate it was possible to take the time to consider the response before sending.
Each morning the mail would be opened and, unless it was urgent would be put on the pile for the next afternoon or morning mail. It would be read by the lawyer and a response or further action dictated into a small Dictaphone, a little device that could be popped into a suit pocket and which went everywhere with you.
This seems slow and cumbersome, and it was, but the new tech has not speeded up the resolution of litigation so far as I can see.
Before pagers we could nearly always be found. It was standard practice to tell your staff where you were, even if you were having a social lunch with some colleagues and pals, and the cafe's, bars and restaurants all had phones which they answered and would call you to the phone if the office called. There were Red Phones scattered around the courts so that you could call back to the office, and a few courts had special sound deadened booths for delicate calls.
If a pal called your office and got put through to your staff, they would answer, Sorry, Mr H is out of the office. Oh, it's you Ross, he's at QCs having a longish lunch with some barristers.
This is an old practice. The first time I worked in a pub was in a small country town. The side bar where I worked held about fifty people, but usually we had twenty or so customers of an evening. I knew nearly all of them in one way or another, from the football or cricket clubs, or from a day job, or as neighbours.
One bloke was always getting calls from his wife, who I knew as well, and I would say Edna, you want George, let me check, hold the phone against my chest, and look at George for guidance, and he would signal back, and I could say, Edna, I haven't seen him all day, or he just left, or he was here earlier I think, as the case may be.
Edna always seemed satisfied with the call, even if she added with some asperity, Jack, when he Does come in tell him I need him at home immediately.
Now George was six feet four and a bit hard to miss in a crowd of twenty. All of us knew what was happening, but no-one felt compelled to breach the peace and say it out loud, and they both got most of what they wanted.
As to the Right to Disconnect, I suppose it is necessary these days, the expectation that people will be available 24/7 is not suitable for most jobs, and working back from that, if you can't find a way to make that relationship work through a bit of common sense give and take, then legislation might not help you. What do they say on social media, you can't fix stupid.
I was surfing some music on Youtube the other day and up popped a classic song from 45 years ago, Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall, and I have to say it still stands up well.
We don't need no education
We dont need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.
It was written by Roger Waters, at least in part as a protest against the rigidity of schooling in his time, and appealed to the young who always have contained a good number who are rebellious and who are resistant to being told what to think and what to do.
What has changed in the 45 years since I first heard it is that the schools are now run by the progressives, as are the universities and the media companies. The anti-establishment of then are the establishment of now. The interesting thing is that now they are in charge they are as fond of rigidity and as keen to root out apostasy as their forbears were in the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies.
The Hong Kong Government has issued some new teaching materials including a module titled Adolescents and Intimate Relationships for Secondary Year 3, which suggests that teenagers who wanted to have sex with each other could "go out to play badminton together" instead.
Pleasingly, social media has been flooded with jokes centered around "playing badminton", as the BBC reported.
"FWB [Friends with benefits]?? Friends with badminton," read one comment on Instagram that had more than 1,000 likes.
"In English: Netflix and chill? In Cantonese, play badminton together?" read a Facebook post which was shared more than 500 times.
Even Olympics badminton player Tse Ying Suet could not resist a comment.
"Everyone is making an appointment to play badminton. Is everyone really into badminton?" she asked on Threads with a smirking face emoji.
Reminds me of the years I spent at a Catholic Boys Boarding School in rural Australia. We were allowed, even encouraged to spend some spare time hiking in the bush around the town, but always we were required to go in a group of at least three. Apparently it was thought that three boys were much less likely to be overcome with passion and commit an act of gross indecency than were two.
The one inevitable result of rules like this. The people coming up with the rules are thought to be idiots by nearly all those the rules are aimed at, and by most of the teachers.
Stay well.