More SARS

The building where I work has people lurking in the lift lobbies to clean the lift buttons after you press them. In fact, if you apply a little charm, i.e. say 'Jou San! (Good Morning!)', they'll push the button for you. All part of the new, hygienically aware Hong Kong.

Of course, I've never seen them clean the buttons *inside* the lift, so it's probably a good idea to wash your hands after you get to work anyway.

Personally, I wear a mask in the MTR because its crowded, and if some twit with SARS were to start coughing on one train, he could infect 84,000 people, which is the capacity of one MTR train when fully packed. And, believe me, it's fully packed in the mornings when I'm going to work. So I wear a mask. And I keep it on when going through the station because, again, it's a pretty crowded situation. I keep it on while getting my coffee from the local Starbucks and going into work, because, having been in a situation with dense crowds, my mask would be contaminated, if there were any contaminants around. When I get into work, I chuck the mask, and wash my face and hands (my face feels icky after having re-breathed air on it for the 20 minutes into work.)

Then, at work, the first thing I have to do of a morning is to muck out the spam traps. (Anything tagged by the SpamAssassin system is passed on to me, to check that it's not tagging legitimate mail as spam.) This is probably more damaging to my health that any virulent disease. I can usually count on many offers of penis or breast enlargement, free mortgages, and tons of spam in Chinese send to non-Chinese users. Not to mention clueless local businesses who try to drum up work and suddenly find themselves without internet connections. (Most HK ISPs will respond to a LART: it's just the really bad few, like hutchcity.com, who either don't understand or don't care that they're blocklisted worldwide. Note to self: make a page of decent Hong Kong ISPs. Start with netfront.net, who are clueful, intolerant of spam, and reliable. Their servers run FreeBSD. After using Netvigator for a while, dealing with guys with Clue was great. Their broadband service is good: I think I've had only a few outages in the eighteen months or so I've had their broadband service.)