Lifestyle / Hot Pot Column

Earthquake is all a plot I tell you

By Ken McManus Updated: 2007-01-19 21:33:35

Is this Internet slow-down driving you as crazy as it's driving me? This little earthquake OK, not so little three weeks ago somehow seemed to discriminate against us Americans. We have e-mail accounts on Yahoo or Hotmail. We use Google in the office to research what we need to edit stories here at China Daily. We keep up with news events in the world through CNN's website.

All of them American, and all of them shut down. And since then, progress in getting back to those sites has been agonizingly slow.

All together now: Awwwww.

I'm beginning to think this earthquake thing was planned to punish Americans. Yeah, that's it. But wait by whom and for what?

But this earthquake wasn't a random incident. I just know it.

I was at a birthday party lunch on Saturday for one of my best friends and happened to sit next to an American woman who said she and some of her colleagues talked last week with some of their Chinese counterparts about pollution in China.

One of the Chinese people, she said, actually claimed pollution in China wasn't so bad until "you foreigners" arrived in the 1980s.

Ohhhh, so that's it. It's our fault, and this is China's "revenge".

It's a plot, I tell you. Gmail wasn't so bad, but oh, man, getting to my Yahoo mailbox has been like torture. I finally found a sneaky way to get into my Yahoo mailbox a little more easily go through Yahoo's China website and sign in that way. It actually works.

There actually is an upside, though. I've learned to do so many things through websites that don't have to connect me with the land of McDonald's and KFC. I'm going on vacation next month to my home in Kentucky and have to connect through Shanghai's Pudong Airport. Aside from the fact that I don't want to spend the extra $5 that Expedia.com will charge me if I book through it, the prices on the Chinese travel websites are so much better.

So, I ended up spending 1,440 yuan ($185) for a round-trip connection from Beijing to Pudong. That's much better than what Expedia wanted to charge me.

Now the news is that the cable won't be fixed until the end of the month. I'm old enough to remember when drug addiction on US college campuses was a serious problem, and although I found out I was allergic to marijuana in a unique second-hand way, I now know what withdrawal pains are like.

What did we do before the Internet? Does anyone remember? Oh, yeah! We wrote letters. We did research at the library. What novel concepts.

Please, you crews doing repairs on the ocean floor, work faster. I can't take it anymore. There are only so many Chinese costume dramas I can watch on TV, only so many Australian websites I can read as I scratch my head over what kind of English that is.

Just kidding.

(China Daily 01/19/2007 page20)