I always tried to be one of the good ones. Aggressive when needed, but only at work. At the end of the day, I left my rudeness behind in the office before heading home. TaiTai would not have tolerated anything else.
But one chum of mine recently saw a pretty nasty side of a banker outside work.
No doubt you remember good ol’ Bill, him of the golfing faux pas. Well, when recently travelling on a busy tram (who says bankers can't be humble?) in Hong Kong, a woman began to berate him, demanding that he give her more space.
Of course, with barely enough standing room anyway, all Bill could do was shrug and smile. What he didn’t expect was the string of profanities that she directed at him — all in Cantonese.
Now Bill is certainly no linguist, but during his years in Hong Kong even he has grasped the basics of a good Canto swear word. Needless to say he gave as good as he got.
So imagine Bill’s surprise when he turned on a financial news channel just a few days later to see an interview with none other than the hostile trammer, who turned out to be a rival banker.
Not one to miss an opportunity to get his own back, Bill immediately sent her a message on Bloomberg chat to express his hope that she had been more polite to the journalist than she had been to him. By way of reply, there was only a welcome silence.
Faht dōu yáuh fó, as the locals might say!