There is nothing I like better than a slow Sunday morning at home. Relaxed after a good nights sleep, according to my Fitbit anyway, with the smells of fresh bread baking in the oven this really is a good time of the week.
A time to reflect on the week just gone and begin to look ahead to the week ahead. A time to catch up on emails, make some of those changes to the on line accounts that you’ve been meaning to do for a while (and will be thinking about again next week) and to have a look around the internet for something interesting.
And nothing shatters that peace more quickly than the howls of anguish from your wife as she tries to make some US websites work in Hong Kong. For reasons that have been long documented and lamented some US enterprises still don’t understand that there users, while speaking English, may actually live overseas. So when you finally get around to changing your address on the system to Hong Kong the helpfully designed system automatically redirects you to the local Chinese site. In Mandarin which is of course not the local language in Hong Kong as most native speakers use Cantonese.
And to be very helpful the site itself doesn’t have a translate facility into English. And once your browser thinks your in Hong Kong it doesn’t really matter what you do the helpful system will redirect you back to the Hong Kong site, in Mandarin.
There really is no excuse for this – working overseas should not stop your ability to work. And the US companies who insist on making this difficult need to get a globe. On it they will find Asia Pacific and right in the center they will find China. The future. Lets hope the Chinese are a little more flexible on languages otherwise the whole world is about to come to a rapid stop.
The Burble 