Empty petrol tanks

At one time when working in Hong Kong, we had a well educated English speaking Chinese employee who was our contact man with the local business community and attended to any problem that arose in the general running of a new business, in slang terms, our gofer! He had the use of our two motor vehicles if the need arose, but he had one very strange quirk, for some reason he would go to any lengths to avoid pulling into a petrol outlet and filling up!

This procedure was simple enough, both vehicles had a petrol coupon book in the glove box, and it was a simple matter to fill the details in, vehicle rego number, date, petrol outlet, and finally number of gallons taken and a signature. The petrol outlets were few and far between in the area, and running out of petrol was a considerable inconvenience as it was almost impossible to get anyone to retrieve the stranded car. You had to do it yourself or risk having the vehicle sit at the roadside for several days. In our first days in Hong Kong we could never figure out why so many cars were on the streets of Kowloon and Hong Kong, out of petrol or broken down. One local remark that we took to be facetious was that the 'E' on the petrol gauge did not denote empty, but rather ENOUGH! But we came to wonder if it was actually considered fact!

But back to our employee. In the first couple of weeks on the job it became apparent that he always had reason for considerable use of the vehicles and this seemed reasonable as we were introducing the firm to as many contacts as possible, but there seemed to be times when he would diligently refuse to leave the office, and it soon became apparent that both vehicles would be dangerously low on fuel on these occasions. The gentle rebukes by the boss and myself over this matter suddenly exploded one morning when the boss in a tearing hurry (normal!) had rushed to the garage and taken off into the crazy Kowloon rush hour traffic on his way to an out of town appointment. On a particularly bad uphill section on a multi-lane highway overpass, the car spluttered and stopped in a sea of traffic, and after somehow allowing the car to run back to the kerb he had managed to hail a taxi and return to the office where I had difficulty in restraining him from demolishing our cowering gofer who had used the car for the whole of the previous day!

A heated debriefing of the incident brought to light the fact that executives never filled their cars with petrol! It was a menial job carried out by the underlings and as such carried a considerable social stigma or loss of 'face'! We never had an underling! Casey was the lowest rung on our corporate ladder that only boasted Laurie, myself, the office girl and now Casey. From this time on we found that Casey as he had been nicknamed (as close as we could get to the sound of his Chinese name) seldom requested a vehicle, this reinforced our observation of the previous couple of weeks that he was spending a lot of his time joy riding and did most of our business by telephone in any case!

I left Hong Kong for several months and when I returned Casey had elevated his position in the firm somewhat, but I was assured that though he used company cars on a regular basis, he had become adept at changing cars for various reasons and making sure that his journeys never saw the petrol gauges fall below a quarter full which had been declared the point at which tanks had to be replenished – failure to do so would mean instant dismissal! Casey became manager of the project at a later date after Laurie and I had moved on, and eventually immigrated to Canada with his wife and children. I often wonder if he makes his wife fill up the family car over there!

Footnote – When a car breaks down (read out of petrol!) in Hong Kong, the procedure is simple. The driver simply raises the boot lid and takes out a sheet of newspaper which is always stored there in readiness, this is left hanging out of the closed boot lid, hopefully the vehicle will be at the kerb, but not necessarily so! This is accepted as a God like indication of trouble by the police and traffic force, it appears to be a sort of privilege that drivers enjoy! There is little doubt that the desperate lack of legal parking spaces in city streets is eased by cars parked roughly on kerbs and other places, the mandatory sheet of newspaper displayed, although sometimes a small branch of greenery stripped from the roadside herbage is used as a substitute, especially in the case of a truck or bus. We Australians were quick to catch on to this lurk, and employed it at odd times!
When the first tiny Suzuki 4WDs arrived we were quick to add one to our fleet, and I used it most of the time. We had no garage space and I found that I could squeeze it into odd corners in the back streets behind our flat, sometimes this involved lifting the back end off the ground and bouncing it sideways into some tight corner – we even took to parking it on a small traffic island overnight until a blitz saw it covered in parking tickets.
My daughter Shelley will well remember when on holiday in Hong Kong helping me to hop the Suzy sideways into a parking spot, much to the amusement of the Chinese bystanders!

The acquisition of the small Suzuki prompted our Chinese office girl to ask if I could teach her to drive, she often accompanied me to a work site where an interpreter was likely to be needed. Laurie figured it would be an advantage if she could drive, as she was basically running the company and quite often we would be obliged to take her somewhere on company business, and so late one afternoon we diverted to a deserted new construction site for her first driving lesson. She took her place in the driving seat, and after a few instructions (she spoke excellent English), the Suzuki was put into bottom gear and after a few kangaroo hops she was off! Unfortunately it soon transpired that she hadn't the remotest idea of how to steer a mechanical contrivance and it seemed that there was no way that she possessed the qualities to master the art.

We had plenty of room with no obstacles in sight, but after an hour I was forced to admit defeat, and we hadn't been out of bottom gear! She just could not grasp the basics of steering! She really was a lovely intelligent young woman – but driving a car just didn't appear to be a possibility at that point and so the matter was forgotten in the frantic day to day hassles of running a new company. I forgot all about it, and several years went by, with her writing the odd letter, keeping me informed of her life, which had always been directed towards marrying a Chinese boyfriend who had immigrated to the USA before I knew her. Suddenly a letter! She was married and had a child and was living in San Francisco, had her licence and was DRIVING A CAR! I think that must have been the pinnacle of her achievement as I have never heard from her since!