Ah, HSBC. The world’s local bank – except it’s closing down about two outlets or branches or whatever, every day.
But I suppose it’s local in the sense that it assumes that for example 95-year old illiterate women picking up discarded cardboard for a living all have internet banking , i.e. everybody has their own bank in their living room, and don’t need the physical banks anymore.
That must be why my particular local HSBC-bank is only open four days a week, and why they’ve got rid of the person they used to have standing in the dorway bowing you in and showing the directions of the the three teller windows – easy to miss in the 30 square feet room. And that must be why it costs HK$ 150 to transfer money with a few days’ gap between transaction and the actual transfer, manually by teller. Do it by computer or die, democratic HSBC says.
But I digress. What this rantiscule is about is … not anagrams but abbreviations; companies’ names that are letters. Like HSBC. And PCCW, AIA, DKNY…
Why can’t they just have names?
It took me several months to be able to say “PCCW” with ease, and that after having called it “PPCCW,” “PWWWC”etc, making people look at me like a total berk. I still don’t know what it stands for and I don’t care. Hong Kong Telecom – what’s wrong with that? I could say it the second or third time I tried!
And Hong Kong Bank. One syllable less than HSBC! Is that progress? All right, so the sniffy stiffs over at Midland Bank (another word easy to remember) didn’t want to have the words Hong Kong (or was that Shanghai? Or both?) in their bank’s name. But come on - it’s still called Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation really, isn’t it, and you’d have to tell people that if they asked what HSBC stood for.
How many abbreviations can a brain hold? In my case, five. So bring back names, I say. Original, inventive names. Names which express the true nature of the company. Like Wanko (a clothes chain.)
One way to do it is to enter the abbreviation into your mobile phone. Try that with HSBC and out comes a perfect name: GRAB.
HSBC
Yes, they are not perfect, but why do people go around moaning and groaning about them? If it’s because they close branches here and there when they need too, or is it because they emply too many staff that people cant communicate with, or is it because they won’t give everone a Premier account, so that they can ALL queue up in the ‘fast lane’. Or is it because they send out to many circulars to their customers. Or perhaps it because they are really any good at banking. I for oe like their service. I nver have a communication problem, they give me what I ask (even a rebate on my creit card annual fee), they even have an fantastic Internet banking service, which means I can do everything I possibly want, far more than I could do in UK with Lloyds TSB or any other bank!
Ah Sin doesn’t like them because they are just an acronym.
PCCW
There are issues with the abbreviation for this compnay. But for those who do not know or their brains cannot absorb to much PCCW stands for Pacific Century Cyberworks. Yes, it easier to say PCCW, its easy to say HSBC and I really can’t imagine people will want to say, ” I am just popping to Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank to get some money from the ATM”. Oops! ther another abbreviation there. I should say Automatic Teller Machine?
Isn’t it a sign of old age when people start saying like how many of this and that a brain can hold? Perhaps that’s why Cantonese expressions have so many contracted terms: gei dor chin arr? – gei chin arr?
All i can say is TGIF, now what does that mean?
Acronym! That’s the word I was looking for. No they wouldn’t say “popping down to the Hong KOng and Shanghai Banking Corporation” – they’d just say “Hong Kong Bank.” In fact many people still do.
Yes these acronyms are just like numbers – much more difficult to remember in the right sequence than letters made to form a word.
Telecom. Something Bank. Freaky Fashion. Overpriced Crapshop. That’s the kind of names that roll off the tongue.
Cashpoint is a good name for A.. A.. what was it again?
Cantonese doesn’t have the letter r.
I thought HSBC meant Horrible Service at Bank Counters. No?
Ciao!
“Cantonese doesn’t have the letter ‘r’.”
Neither does it have X, Z, D, T, etc.
And I thought I was the only one who was tongue tied!
Ciao!
… ahrrghhh. Yes. Cantonese doesn’t have any LETTERS at all, quite right. As soon as I’d sent off my comment, I knew there’d be trouble.
I’ll rephrase it: Cantonese dooesn’t have the SOUND “r”.
Ah we’re all tongue-tied, innit. Why else would we keep writing all this stuff.
I think the actual service, once you get to a counter, is very good actually. It’s the standing in line for up to an hour (in Central) and the ridiculous surcharges on everything, that gets me.
Cantonese does have an “r” sound. It can be be produced easily in the word 亞皆老.
So not strictly true ah sin.
I actually don’t mind HSBC, but if anyone can tell me how I can actually stop their mailers from arriving in my letterbox, please let me know. I have asked them a million times and they just keep on coming in.
Damn, I must have pissed you off bad.
What I meant was Cantonese doesn’t have a lot of pronunciation we take for granted.
And strangely, while they do have 9 tones to almost every word, they don’t use pronunciations that we do to differentiate things. Forget symbolic, go alphabetic!
No, I was not criticizing your mistake. In fact, I didn’t even realize that ‘letter’ was a mistake until you said so.
Ciao!
Pissed off? Not at all. Never. I like these little pedantic discussions about nothing. Makes my dreary life seem like I’m living in Seinfeld.
Oh yeah, the mailers. Tricky one. Don’t ask, tell? As in “Stop sending me this crap or I’ll convert to Bank Of China which has a real, walk-in bank with service, at the airport”?
Cantonese does not have the sound r. Not one single character has an r in its sound.
Cecilie,
Now you understand why they can’t pronounce my name and call me Wlong (Wrong) Bad instead (with a funny ‘d’ pronunciation).
Ciao!
Yes I’ve always wondered about that. Not! So your name is Ron, ha? Yes that would be Wong. And Ricky becomes Wicky, Rain becomes Weng…
In fact the letter R itself is pronounced “Ah-lou.”
I love this stream of crapiousness. It started out complaining about random letters thrown together and now we’re talking about letters in a completely different language, and non-existant ones at that!
This is so much better than picking up discarded plastic bags on the beach.