When it becomes too much to take in, I hand her the credit card and slip out to the pub. After all, she doesn’t need me around while she’s getting polished and buffed.
But during one of my most recent escapes, I learned that linguistic differences can cost you much more than the price of a foot scrub.
At the pub I ran into an old pal, and we got to chatting about mutual friends, the old banking scene and the best deals hitting the markets these days. The last of those was bittersweet for my chum, who is an executive at one of the smaller international banks.
He ended up missing out on one of this year’s hottest deals for a Chinese name. All seemed promising when the borrower said it would send his outfit the documentation and accounts. But that hope turned to despair when it arrived, as all the material was in Chinese — and his bank must be the only one in Hong Kong to employ not a single Chinese-speaking member of staff.
Having issued a suitable dressing down to whoever was standing near him at the time, my mate is now trying to get some extra budget to hire someone that can actually do business with the world’s second largest economy.
Maybe his shop could look into hiring a couple of those youngsters from Occupy Central to translate. They’ve certainly got time on their hands and I’m sure they would not cost as much as the credit card bill that TaiTai racked up.