office notes

Under the guise of reportage and superficial analysis, I think I've been complaining a lot about the city government lately. But I just want to point out that the people I work with here are, for the most part, just lovely. Everybody's out at meetings today, it's just me and Che in the office, he's teaching me how to blow someone off in Taiwanese (tioh ah tioh ah li kong eh long tioh, “right, right, everything you say is right”) and joking about how all of the copyediting people want me to do has to go through him—so he can collect a little processing fee for each case, just like a real, traditional style bureaucrat. I sit back down to work on the English website and a few minutes later yelp and jump out of my chair: JT, the most childish forty-year-old I know, has snuck up behind me and boo'ed the hell out of me. I go into my exaggerated boxer’s crouch and start punching him on the arm, and we have a little mock fight as Che yells encouragement at me in Taiwanese and George admonishes everyone to stop picking on the poor foreigner. Certainly the most fun office environment I’ve ever worked in (if not the most productive).

Last Saturday a big story broke about someone in the urban survey section of our department who had been accused of a big little bit of corruption. Although it’s not technically up to the urban survey section to determine land prices, he managed to convince a major buyer—the Taiwan Electric Power Company—that a piece of land worth some amount of money was actually worth much more than that. He probably managed to do this by having friends in the accounting office. When Taipower bought the land, it cut a check for the higher amount. The seller received a check for the official, lower value of the land. The guy in our department is accused of getting NT$6,000,000 (about US$176,470) out of the deal; the rest apparently went to his accomplices in Taipower and it’s unclear who else. This excited a discussion about how much was enough to buy the consciences of the people in my section. The generally agreed-upon price was reported to me as 200 million NT dollars, with a rueful comment along the lines of, “So I guess we’ll never even have the chance to be corrupt.” Nothing we do is worth that much money.