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.
Officials are scratching their heads over ways to stop staff from spending their whole working day down on the farm, and have resorted to a number of draconian measures.
While Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) has politely asked civil servants to “focus more on serving the public,” in true Stalinist fashion Minister of Injustice Wang Ching-feng (王清峰) announced that her ministry had banned Facebook.
Other local governments have already banned the game, with Kaohsiung County officials saying it had been blocked by their firewall.
But it was left to Ministry of Education officials to show how grossly out of touch with reality one can become after a life spent in education when, at a press conference last week, they said young people should not play the game because “stealing” vegetables is unethical. One official added that the ministry would suggest the game’s developers modify it by having players rent, not steal, vegetables from other players.
Rent vegetables? Has this guy ever left his office?
With ministries and local governments up and down the country cracking down on staff, I would suggest any disgruntled employees immediately apply for a transfer to Yahoo. Any company that treats its workers to lap dances while on a brainstorming session, as detailed in an AFP report on Tuesday, gets my vote — though I suspect ideas weren’t the only things popping up during that particular meeting.
As with most things in life, you always get one or two people who take things too seriously.
According to the Central News Agency, one idiot is even trying to sue Facebook after being “deceived” into spending NT$2,000 in a week trying to protect his Happy Farm harvest.
The disgruntled “Webmong” accused the company of “luring consumers into spending money on the game” after he bought four guard dogs to protect his farm but ended up forking out real cash to feed them after the dogs failed to deter his “friends” from pilfering his plums. So far there has been no response from Facebook.
Old Johnny has some advice for this cybergeek: Get some better friends, get out more or, better still, get a life.
One solution to this national crisis would be to take anyone caught playing during office hours and send them down, Cultural Revolution-style, to deepest, darkest Yunlin County for a couple of weeks of re-education on a real farm. A few days of picking bona fide pineapples on my buddy Fat Chang’s farm will cure these wannabe green thumbs of their agricultural urgings for good.
Another piece of news that caught my attention this week was Taipei City’s plans to start legislating how people should look after their dogs.
According to a Tuesday piece in this fair rag, city officials will consult “veterinarians and academics” to design rules on how much time owners should spend walking their dog, as well as what kind of food and drink they should be fed.
After listening to me read the article out loud, I could have sworn my downtrodden hound Punkspleen’s slavering chops briefly formed a cheeky grin.
Well, I’ve got news for you, my dear mutt. Your diet of discarded chicken-feet bones and betel nut spittle is not going to change anytime soon. Any complaints and I’ll auction you off to the highest bidding Happy Farmer.
Seriously, though, what is it about the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and its desire to control absolutely everything?
And what next? A law stipulating that renegade KMT Legislator Lo Shu-lei (羅淑蕾) wear a muzzle in public?
Anyway, gotta dash. My Twitter followers (or twats, as I call them) are waiting for my next tweet. Sayonara.
Got something to tell Johnny? Get it off your chest: Write to dearjohnny@taipeitimes.com, but put “Dear Johnny” in the subject line or he’ll mark your bouquets and brickbats as spam.
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