Lemur Life

Northeast China is currently tidying up its image. Most cities are in competition to find out which city is the most civilised. The northeast has a bad image in China. The locals up this way are not the skinny short Chinese in the Western imagination, but rather most of them are tall and fairly solid types. It isn’t far from where Genghis Khan is from and of course the Russian border is also nearby. There is a saying that in the south of China when people have a problem it might slowly escalate into a yelling match, whereas in the north it is more likely that someone will hit your first and then you discover that there is something annoying them.

In my city, Changchun, all the lines on the roads have been re-painted in the vain hope that drivers will actually obey them now. At street crossings there are flag waving whistle blowing Nazis that try to keep the pedestrians under control. Fences have been placed down the centre of many roads where either pedestrians have been unable to stop themselves from J walking, or where drivers frustrated with being in a traffic jam often decide that the empty oncoming traffic lane looks like the better option (it’s only empty because the traffic light up ahead is temporarily red and you can imagine the ensuing chaos). We also have all new rubbish lines lining the street, and many pedestrian areas have been re-paved. Unfortunately the re-paving has made many areas suddenly become attractive looking parking lots with many drivers leaving their cars blocking the sidewalk.

Probably my favourite driving trick is the left hand turn. In China people drive on the right hand side, so making a left hand turn at the traffic light involves crossing the oncoming traffic and hence waiting for a gap in the traffic – or so it should. When the light turns red most drivers won’t stay in the turning lane waiting for the light to turn green, but will instead park themselves directly in front of the oncoming traffic. This method guarantees that when the light turns green, they get to go first, as they have now successfully blocked all oncoming traffic. The only drawback of this method is if the road they are turning into has a traffic jam…

Anyway, back to the main reason for this post. As part of the be civilised competition a neighbouring town (Tonghua) has decided to upgrade their police uniforms (hopefully you can see the picture). What I’m not sure about is whether policewomen in miniskirts and boots should get them additional points or whether points should be subtracted…

I haven't really had much experience in interviewing people for jobs, but I found these comments in Malcolm Gladwell’s “What The Dog Saw” really interesting. Gladwell interviews Justin Menkes who suggests a slightly different way to ask interview questions. Let me quote the examples, and then we can draw our own conclusions.

I’m sure we’ve all prepared ourselves for the following fairly standard interview questions:

·         “Describe a few situations in which your work was criticised. How did you handle the criticism?”

·          “Tell me about a time when you had to do several things at once. How did you handle the situation? How did you decide what to do first?”

Menkes suggests the following variations:

·         “At your weekly team meetings, your boss unexpectedly begins aggressively critiquing your performance on a current project. What do you do?”

·         “You’re in a situation where you have two very important responsibilities that both have a deadline that is impossible to meet. You cannot accomplish both. How do you handle that situation?”

On the one hand they are not hugely different, but maybe different enough to throw the interviewee off and make them forget their pre-prepared answers. On the upside you might get a more honest response, but then again these are responses to imagined situations.

There are two more examples of standard questions, but Gladwell doesn’t mentioned if Menkes have an enhanced version of these two questions:

·         “What is your greatest weakness?”

·         “What would your friends say about you?”

I wonder how they could be made into the Menke’s mould:

·         “Your wife wants to divorce you. What reasons does she give?”

·         “If you write your own obituary, what do you think you would write?”