HK Maid Jailed for Serving Urine Cocktail
I can’t help but think of that old, horribly racist rhyme we used to say as kids. You know the one that went, “Me Chinese, me play joke, me put pee-pee in your Coke.” Even while these were the pre-political correctness days, I still shudder with embarrassment thinking about that. In Hong Kong, the opposite happened though with water instead of Coke. An Indonesian house maid played the joke and put the pee-pee into the drink of her Chinese employer. A Hong Kong magistrate has sentenced the maid to six days in jail for her pee-pee joke. According to a Reuters report Wednesday:
The 29-year-old pleaded guilty to a charge of “administering poison or other destructive or noxious substance with intent to injure,” but insisted she had used the urine to treat a skin condition and its appearance in her employer’s cup was a mistake.
Her boss, Szeto Ching-han, smelled the urine after asking for a cup of water, and then asked the maid to drink it — which she did. Szeto, however, kept the liquid to have it tested in a lab, the South China Morning Post said.
The defense argued that the maid’s employer had not drunk the urine and the substance was not poisonous.
While it’s certainly wrong to piss in someone’s drink, I’m pretty sure urine isn’t poison. And while the toxicity of urine may be of interest to the court, it is certainly not the most interesting element of this story to me. How about the fact that when asked, the maid drank her own piss? At that point, maybe it’s time to bow out, admit you were caught and apologize. And second, what a bad lie about the skin condition. The man asked her for a glass of water, a very simple request. You go to the water cooler or the sink and you fill a glass with water. There’s really no room for a mistake that results in a glass of urine. The ruling magistrate acknowledged the maid was not trying to poison her boss but sentenced her anyway saying the court “must send a message to the public.”
•Reuters: Maid Jailed for Serving Up Urine