CHINA-OCCUPIED HONG KONG – British financial executive Devon Shiresthorpe walked straight down Queen’s Road Central during his lunch break today proudly baring his smug expat banker’s face for the whole word to see, drawing the baleful glares of dozens of fully sanitized and masked Hongkongers said to be fully abiding government directives on the matter despite wanting nothing more to rip off all their clothes, including their masks, and strut around as though societal norms in the time of ginned-up crises don’t really apply to them, either.
Shiresthorpe, who works for waning British banking powerhouse HSBC as an onboarding team manager, a position that requires him to be in constant close contact with commercial clients, said he was fully aware of the risks of contracting the coronavirus but that nothing would stop him from enjoying his noon pint down The Envoy pub on Pottinger Street.
“I’m hardly one to play the sycophant to what looks to be the garden-variety flu,” Shiresthorpe said while averting his eyes from the mean-muggings of passersby. “What I can tell you is the evil eyes I’m getting out on the streets are mostly from HSBC customers who have been denied emergency lines of credit to survive this little economic blip,” he said. “And I can assure you it is nothing more than that – a minor hiccup that will not significantly impact HSBC profits at all.”
To be sure, the sere edges of Hong Kong’s entire financial apparatus have been exposed during the crisis, but none more so than HSBC retail customers who have seen their credit scores plunge in lockstep with HSBC’s new policy to pull back on credit lines, especially for those customers in dire need of daily necessities like 38 dozen packs of Hi-n-Dri toilet paper or a year’s worth of dehydrated mung beans.
Shiresthorpe said he could now tell instantly a person’s credit score merely by the severity of the aggravated stares he received while walking outside in his HSBC-issued and Marks & Spencer mass-produced Old Boys’ Blazer. “He’s a 317,” Shiresthorpe said of a fully masked local shooting him the death glare. “That one’s a 262,” he said of another calling the police to report a noncompliant foreigner. “There’s a 400, tops, and that one’s a 580, which would put him into ‘fair’ territory for a credit handout but doesn’t necessarily mean HSBC has to proffer him as much as a tuppence.”
Shiresthorpe added that although his raging case of Coronavirus Privilege was only somewhat infectious, mostly being passed on to craven foreign journalists and overpreening legal industry headhunters, he would continue risking exposure with glee, likening his chances of actually catching Covid-19 to his risk in getting arrested for going on meth benders and dropping his trou in crowded bars on the weekend, abusing his Indonesian maid for refusing to clean his windows with her soiled panties, or hiding vast troves of information relating to his money-laundering efforts made on behalf of mainland Chinese property magnates and the entire cast of the popular Hong Kong daytime television drama Give Us All Your Money Now Gweilo!
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