After 17 months of ineptitude I think I’ve finally hit upon the reason behind the government’s piss-poor performance.
It’s called Happy Farm.
Yes, dear reader. An addictive application located in the bowels of one of those social-networking thingamajigs has become this year’s Portuguese egg tart — and the reason why this country’s bureaucracy has almost ground to a halt.
Want to know the reason why the economy has tanked? Or why the Typhoon Morakot relief effort was so slow in getting started? What about the recent delay in talks on an economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA)?
Look no further than the screen of your nearest civil servant’s PC. If there is evidence of vegetables, bags of fertilizer or guard dogs chasing away wannabe crop rustlers then Happy Farm is the explanation.
Hell, Happy Farm might also explain the disappearance of People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) from the public eye — and maybe even the bags under former chief China-baiter Lee Teng-hui’s (李登輝) eyes.
The nation’s highly paid, benefit-burdened civil servants have found a new alternative to their traditional daily pastime. Instead of “stroking fish” (摸魚), they now fritter their working day away stealing vegetables from their colleagues while the latter are off on a toilet or smoke break.
Just in case you’ve been away from Earth for a while and have no idea what I’m talking about, Happy Farm is a game on Facebook, which, for the Luddites among you, is a Web site that young people use instead of their mouths to communicate with each other.
Being a dedicated journalist I decided to do some research, enlisting the help of Johnny Neihu III (age four-and-a-half) to help me switch on a PC, sign up to Facebook and start sowing my seed, so to speak.
One thing that immediately struck me as a Web novice was how many of my buddies were already well and truly submerged in this cyber netherworld. No sooner had I signed up to Facebook than I was bombarded with requests from dozens of old acquaintances wanting to be my “friend.” Being a grumpy old sod, I rejected the lot of them.
For Matsu’s sake, I don’t even want to talk to half of these bastards in person, never mind converse with them via fiber optic cable.
But the thing that really began to make me feel like a dinosaur was when junior said that resident Green Card fetishist Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) has recently released a new book documenting his experiences on Plurk, the local version of another social networking tool, Twitter.
Mental note to self: Must become more Web-savvy.
Anyway, back to Happy Farm.
The idea of the game is to tend to a farm where you win points and experience by growing crops and selling them at the market, but I guess the excitement comes from the fact that you can supplement your income by stealing from rival farmers.
But Age of Empires or online mahjong it is not, and after twiddling with it for 10 minutes, harvesting some radishes and planting a few roses and carrots, I was rather bored. Not one vegetable raider to set my virtual guard dog onto, so I turned it off. The whole experience was about as rewarding as a trip on the renamed, but still cursed, Wenhu MRT line.
It turns out, however, that I am in the minority.
According to a recent report from Agence France-Presse (AFP), out of the 3.7 million players of Happy Farm, Taiwanese make up about 80 percent, and it appears the great majority of them are civil servants.
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