You know that familiar feeling when you’re walking down the street in Hong Kong and an unidentifiable liquid splatters onto the top of your head? You look up thinking, “what the heck, is it raining?”, only to catch another drip right in your eye.
Yeah, leaking air con units are a plague of daily life here, and it seems some of us have just had ENOUGH!
The SCMP posted a loooong article about it yesterday, warning about the health risks of air con drips and the corresponding pools of water that can “play host to bacteria and fungi, and lead to the spread of Legionnaires’ disease”. Yikes! Really?
The article also features the adorably forthright Mary Mulvihill, a woman dedicated to resolving this chaotic issue. “You have to go around, sometimes take photographs of the location, email, then you get the kind of ‘fob off’ response,” says Mulvihill, explaining her frustrations with reporting the issue to the authorities.
“And then you have to follow up on it and follow up on it again and go back again and look at the situation if it has improved or not, and if it hasn’t improved you have to start all over again.”
That’s some dedication right there. You go, gurl!
Meanwhile, others are taking less direct action by ranting online. Last wednesday, Reddit user sonastyinc took to the internet in his outrage, complaining that despite his many attempts to avoid the wet spots on the the streets, he “got hit square between [his] eyes by another drip of smelly air-con jizz”. He complains, “I’m still getting hit [with aircon jizz] frequently like Chris Brown’s girlfriends”. Because domestic abuse is hilarious!
Some commenters took a more serious note below, hastening Hongkongers to mobilise en masse. “Maybe if we hold a protest group and rush the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department head??” radishlaw suggests.
“The bukkake must stop” continues sonastyinc, clearly refusing to give up the cum jokes.
To be fair, Hong Kong’s high-rise design doesn’t help the issue, as hundreds of defective air conditioners are stacked above one another for 30+ floors, all working together to produce a waterfall of gross air con sweat.
We’re pretty confident it’s just water, guys, but please, do fix your own air conditioner if you notice that you’re a culprit.
We don’t want: any more sexual or demeaning jokes about this online; an Occupy movement with arguably less important motives; or to have to break it to old Mary that fixing all the air conditioners in our densely packed city is probably never going to happen.
Photo: Nicolas Lannuzel via Flickr
