In Your Face!

Despite the potential $500 fine for unauthorised use of the KCR's First Class car, some people think they can break the rules and get away with it.

I've seen plenty of folks escorted out of First Class to be ticketed by conductors for not having authorised Octopus cards or proper tickets, but it's easy to think there might be an honest mistake, because it can happen.

When my wife once forgot to scan her card because she'd been distracted (the train had just rolled to a stop and as the doors were opening she received a phone call), she had to obtain a printout of her transaction history to prove to the station manager that when she travels First Class, she always pays the surcharge. In that instance she was able to get the fine waived, and rightly so: Mabel isn't a cheat or a cheapskate.

But others are, and when they get caught they deserve what's coming to them.

On a northbound train, a couple boarded at the Mong Kok station and sat across from me. The woman looked at her Standard Class ticket to Lo Wu and pointed to the sign displaying the fine for improper use of First Class. Instead of moving to another car, they laughed it off (they were speaking Mandarin and although I only understood a few words their body language was clear).

Had they been genuinely confused I would have tried to help them avoid trouble, but they knew their actions were wrong so I said nothing; hassling them would have accomplished nothing.

Sure enough, two stops later three conductors boarded the train and began checking tickets. Seeing the couple's tickets were invalid, they pointed to the sign.

It took just half a second for the con to begin; the couple feigned innocence, playing dumb with pleas of "we didn't know" and "sorry", which weren't enough to spare them the humiliation of being tossed at the next station. Their flimsy defence couldn't forestall the impending fine. The First Class surcharge was HK$66 (about US$8.45 for two people); ignoring it got them slapped with a whopping penalty of about US$128.

The Chinese idiom hahng joi lohk woh (幸災樂禍) can be loosely translated as "pleased calamity delighted disaster"; in other words, enjoying other people's distress and laughing at their misfortune, an idea not unlike the German concept of shadenfreude: taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others.

I wouldn't go as far as to say I was delighted, but liken what I felt to the emotion you'd feel if you observed a driver who was speeding, tailgating and making dangerous lane changes get pulled over by a cop manning a radar gun.

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