Rosa Parks (1913-2005)

A black lady named Rosa Parks has just passed away, aged 92.

Some of you may not know who she is; but the news of her death attained worldwide coverage, obituaries observed in all major newspapers and tributes flown in from every corner. She's again in the limelight, as she was fifty years ago.

The thing she did was truly inspiring. If she had not lived, the world today, and the idea of race equality - something which we take for granted these days - may be totally different.


Read the obituary here (The Telegraph)

Complete story here (The Wikipedia)


Note especially this passage (taken from the Wikipedia article, from her autobiography, My Story):

People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

Three cheers to you, my fair lady.

Small change, anyone?

News just in that some major bank in Hong Kong starts to charge customers $60/month for current accounts with deposits less than $5000.

The reason behind? "The charges were being imposed on cheque accounts to compensate for operating costs" said their CE.

Excuse me? Current accounts (Checking Accounts) already have their interests scrapped, one of the reasons behind is exactly this 'cost' issue of handling cheques.

As for the notion that extra cheques 'create' workload to the bank... I really wonder if the nut-heads could come up with any banking operation that does not involve substantial workload. You need tellers to take deposits, from $1 to $1,000,000; you need staff to count and re-count all those banknotes in the safe; you need internal staff to check and counter-check transactions; these are what banks do - monetary transactions. And they have such audacity to say that clearing cheques involves 'extra costs' and start to charge people using that.

Just because they cannot persuade enough people into borrowing enough money, issue own-brand, co-brand and supplementary credit cards so they can squeeze in outrageous service charges when customers missed repayment by just one minute, and generate ludicrous mortgage revenue from stagnant realty markets, does not mean impecunious account holders need to bear the brunt of it all. I was once really pissed off by some totally unaccountable and exorbitant fees one bank charged me - I've switched all my accounts and I've never returned to that bank since, and am happily having a splendid relationship with other banks. I will not deposit another cent into that obnoxious bank again, and I don't have to - thank God Hong Kong is such a competitive place in terms of banking.

But then, don't they know that there's something called 'Customer Relationship'?