International Law

Sweating the Details

By Stan

This really looked weird when I read it on the Foreign Policy blog:

Whatever considerable flaws China may have as Olympic hosts, you can’t accuse them of not sweating the details. Just ask Brazilian triple jumper Jadel Gregorio:

His Chinese hosts, who are wowing foreign guests with their organizational feats, had already figured out Gregorio’s 2.03 meter (6 ft 8 in) frame would overhang the Olympic Village beds and had tacked on a special half-meter extension.

They had also raised his shower head — to as high as they could without lifting the ceiling. "These people think of every little thing," Gregorio told Reuters as he finished a high-carb pasta lunch in the Olympic Village, his impossibly long legs somehow folded under the table.

I’m the first to admit that service in Asia, and increasingly in China, is much better than the crappy customer service you get in the West these days, and not just the airlines and hotels.

At the same time, however, I also have to admit that China has yet to "get it" when it comes to the little things, those details that can make all the difference.

Some examples of the little things that make you wince: crappy or nonexistent landscaping around a mega-luxury building; small formatting errors in a glitzy brochure; translation errors.

Maybe the Olympics is raising the bar on all this stuff.

Full post as published by China Hearsay on August 07, 2008 (boomark / email).