User Comments - soom

Posted on: International Women's Day

Our office in Beijing celebrated Women's Day by giving all female employees an electric rice cooker (empowering women to get cookin' in the kitchen!) A male Chinese coworker got one because he has a female name. I've since found that many males in China have "female" names and vice-versa.

Posted on: Pin Number

大家好

first post, hope it works!

I wanted to share an error message I got from an ATM in Beijing on one of my first days in China a couple years back. I had a lot of trouble using foreign cards when I arrived, even when the machine displayed international network logos (Plus, Maestro, etc.) I've never seen an error message like this before; obviously someone with a twisted sense of humour...

I never checked what the Chinese message was before, but just got inspired: 非法终端号　fei1 fa3 zhong1 duan1 hao2

Pleco gives me: illegal terminal number; invalid seems more appropriate - wait a sec... it says "Invailid" 

That "hahaha" kind of sums up my experience all round with banking in China...