Page 165 - A Banker Down the Rabbit Hole

Though I enjoyed Hong Kong food yet it has been a long lasting struggle
for me with words and their irony and connotations while asking for the
right kind of food. Wanting to be as polite as possible made things a little
more difficult at times. But all in all, the humour lying underneath made
it a memorable experience.

Going the machine way-

An interesting case of technology adoption in early
childhood by the Hongkongese.

One day I just found my Junior Manager Ms Mandy looking at a long
sheet of entries of figures and observed her fingers moving very efficiently
at the keys of a medium sized calculator simultaneously. She did not look
at the keys for long and continued pressing different keys of the medium
sized calculator. Out of curiosity, I asked her what she was doing. She
nodded her head indicating me to wait for a while. I did not disturb her.

She turned to me when she finished her task and told that she was to
taling up the long list of figures from printout for reconciliation purpose.
Astonished at her reply, I asked her, "How come you could press the keys
of calculator so accurately without looking at them?" I told her further,
"I am so impressed with your this kind of ability." She said, "I am also
impressed with the ability of Indians who can keep looking at a long list
of figures and keep to taling them mentally and finally write one last
figure as a total in a few seconds."

She also disclosed that they learnt to use calculators like this since
childhood in the school and thereafter. They could not do it mentally
without using calculator and reverse was true with Indians totaling
mentally without using calculator. So, this was a big differentiation in
technology adoption between Indians and Hongkongese, also known as
Hongkongers.

162 | A Banker down the Rabbit Hole