People From Countryside

Last Saturday, I was underway with a taxi. A bicycle came unexpected crossing the road, so the taxi driver had to break strongly. He screamed: “Another guy from countryside! Once from countryside, always from countryside!”

I could not say with 100% certainty that this guy really is from countryside. He was well addressed and looked pretty like a city boy.

As we stopped at the crossing waiting at the left turn lane, the light for the left turn changed to green, while the light for strait forward traffic remained red. The car before us did not recognise the change and stayed there.

“Another guy from countryside”, I joked to the taxi driver. He laughed and said: “The car is from good brand, an Opel. He may not be from countryside. I do not understand, people who can afford Opel can not drive.”

Over the weekend, a building during the construction in Shanghai failed down. I am ashamed that such thing can happen in Shanghai. I never heard anything like this happened anywhere in the world. I am not sure how the Shanghai Chinese would think about it. They might say that the building was built by people from countryside.

That phenomena stimulated me to think about some groups of people in Germany who blame the foreigners, when the unemployment rate is going up. Or when something in the company went wrong, we tend to finger point other organisations.

But studies show that when we face a problem, 80% of the issues can be addressed inside the system. When people are young they try to fix the world, when they are getting older and wiser they tend to fix themselves. Maybe I am just getting older :-)