Two weeks ago, Ha Noi City’s Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union sent about 1,000 young volunteers to build a 700-metre stretch of rural road in Phung Xa Commune.
The plan was to finish the road in three days. The 1,000 youngsters used 10 concrete mixers to cover the stretch at high speed.
However, due to the large number of people on such a short stretch of road, people started getting in each others’ way – slowing things down instead of speeding them up. This meant that it took three days to do the job.
A civil engineer calculated that only 150 workers could have finished the job in same time. A case of “Too many cooks spoil the broth”!
Famous general needs a leg up
My southern cousin phoned me recently with the odd comment: “Sister, the ‘symbol of national power’ has broken his right leg.” At first I didn’t know what she meant, but it soon became obvious she was referring to General Tran Nguyen Han, one of the several eternal heroes famous for repelling invaders from the North.
For the uninitiated, Tran Nguyen Han helped Emperor Le Loi repel a Chinese invasion in the middle of the 15th century.
While travelling near Ben Thanh Market in HCM City on Sunday, she noticed that a statue of the fearsome gent riding a horse and releasing a dove at the same time was marred by a missing right leg.
The reason? The statue was erected 50 years ago but, being made of concrete, it is not as durable as marble or stone. When cracks started to appear, no one took much notice until, as my startled relative noticed, his leg fell off!.
“Not a very auspicious omen,” the experts finally agreed. “Not the sort of message we wish to promote;” they added. However, General Han will have to go hopping for a while yet because the city’s Culture, Sports and Tourism Department is unsure whether he needs repairing – or replacing.
Satellite tracks cheating wife
A 30-year-old female bank clerk in Ha Noi was staggered to see her husband standing outside the very hotel she had just visited with her new lover. The impatient cuckold had already phoned and asked her where she was several times, but she always said she was at work.
The woman only admitted to adultery when hubby showed her that he had installed Global Positioning System software on both his and her Iphones so that he could keep track of her.
After being given the “runaround” by his errant wife, he tuned in to the satellite device and noticed she was kilometres away from the bank at lunch time – on more than a dozen occasions.
We didn’t know that GPS could be such a deadly weapon!
Education does a back-flip
The Ministry of Education has declared that any locality with a higher pass ratio than last year will automatically be downgraded. This, oddly enough, is meant to stop schools from catching “the achievement disease”.
For those who have just arrived in Viet Nam, this ailment describes the phenomenon whereby every teacher is under pressure to churn out more and more top students. This, of course, leads to promotion – and more money.
But few parents or students agree with the move to change the system. Their whole world of achieving more … and more .. and more has been turned upside down. It’s a nightmare that is shaking them to the core! — VNS
Đăng ký: VietNam News
