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Don’t react, overreact

Nury Vittachi on the world’s biggest overreactions

The human body is 63 percent water, so people who drink H2O are basically cannibals, right? Okay, it’s not the most logical argument in the world, but it worked for me as an excuse to spend Friday nights drinking stuff other than water in my younger days. Bar room discussions are always fun, since logic goes out the window and over-reaction becomes the normal mode of discussion.

On that topic, we have a new contender in the “Biggest Overreaction Ever” category of amazing-but-true news reports sent in by readers. Zooming into joint second place is Canada, sharing the position with a story from a different part of the same country.

Students at Ottawa’s Carleton University played a party game which involved popping balloons. The sound caused an armed police response, a lockdown of university buildings, and the start of World War III. Okay, well, maybe not the last bit, but the rest is true. Police with guns arrived and the university was locked down.

Sharing the top spot in our overreactions list is a 2015 incident in which a US man popping bubble wrap caused the army to surround his building. (Also true. I am not making any of this up.) In second place we find an incident in Winnipeg in which a man who slammed a door caused his block to be surrounded by 12 police cars and a tactical attack squad.

Basically Canada is so peaceful that the making of ANY kind of audible noise causes the army to be called out. Sneeze or cough at your own risk. Hong Kong is also very calm, and over-reactions are the norm.

When one of my family members choked on some food, we phoned for help and a fire engine turned up. True. Not sure that large men carrying ladders is the right response to the problem. Then police turned up, presumably to arrest the bit of food causing the problem. The ambulance was the third arrival – and got there when it was no longer needed, as family members had fixed the problem by then.

The rest of Asia outside Hong Kong is very different. There is so much drama that people are totally blasé about everything. When I was a news editor phoning foreign correspondents around Asia, conversations would go like this.

Me: “Anything interesting or unusual in your neck of the woods?”

Reporter: “Not really, except for a government coup, an earthquake and a civil war.”

Me: “So that’s a no from you.”

But Asia also has a particular style of localised, official over-reaction with unique logic. An example is a case in which a Beijing man noticed a foreigner in his district. Suspicious, he went to tip off the CounterTerrorism Department. Officers pounced on the visitor and did an exhaustive check which revealed that the man was guilty of nothing at all.

But officials still gave the accuser a reward of 3,000 yuan and announced in the national media that they had made a cash award in the name of the China Anti-Terrorism Act. The fact that you can be completely wrong and still get the reward intrigued the masses. One foreign gentleman said he plans to report all 1.3 billion mainland citizens, in the hope of getting 3,000 yuan (US$460) for each of them, which would be 3.9 trillion yuan.

On a personal note, this reporter’s carefulness is often misinterpreted as overreacting. For example, I’m tempted to call the police right now, since I just discovered that my neighbor keeps an envelope on her bedside for HUMAN BODY PARTS. Just because she’s six and claims they’re for the tooth fairy doesn’t make bodypart trafficking okay, right?

Nury Vittachi is an award-winning author and journalist based in Hong Kong. He is best known for his comedy-crime novel series, The Feng Shui Detective. Contact him via nury@vittachi.com or through his public Facebook page.