Singapore—On Monday, April 20, a post on the Facebook page of Ho Ching, wife of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and CEO of Temasek Holdings left netizens a bit puzzled.
It had laughter (Heehee heehee heeheehee!) and laughing emojis (? ? ?) and a rather mysterious, “More later as I’m rotfl” but no explanation as to what she found so funny.
Now, Madam Ho is normally a prolific poster on Facebook, and during this circuit breaker where everyone is at home, she has upped the number of her posts, sometimes sharing over a hundred articles per day.
These articles vary in length and topic—from history to recipes to scientific discoveries to popular culture to local news, sometimes sharing the articles with no comment, at other times adding short comments here and there. Most of the time Madam Ho’s comments are straightforward and clear.
Therefore it is no surprise that she later edited her post (as she did write she’d be back for ‘more later’) and wrote that some friends were concerned that her account had been hacked, which she found laughable.
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1411949665659530&id=100005335308340
Madam Ho then went on to recount that her team from Temasek Foundation is hard at work to provide “zero alcohol” hand sanitizers for prisons. But this is proving to be complicated logistics-wise, because of the need to arrange for the prisoners to fill the bottles themselves, “like how Harry’s bar is filling up sanitizers for our dorm residents,” she wrote.
And then she added that hand sanitizers would also be needed for the wardens. And then face masks was also needed to be taken into account, causing the team to calculate how many reusable masks were coming in and how many needed to be ordered.
Apparently the cause for the hilarity was a question that was asked during the discussion, “Errrr … may i know if we are talking about millions or thousands?” which gave everyone on the teleconference pause.
Madam Ho wrote, “Puzzled looks all around, and silence over the air waves from the dial in folks.
Oh! Oops! Oh dear! Yah!
Silly me! My numeracy went out the window! Yah! Long day, lah!
We had lost track of the number of zeroes, and of course we can cover them – well within the number of reusable masks coming in next week, all the way through August.
Yay! We can easily cover them!
We all laughed – a good end to a good day.”
The team went on with their planning, and then later, when Madam Ho said she was “catching up on some reading,” someone told her that she should not be posting so much on Facebook because she is married to the highest official in Singapore, and she is the CEO of an important investment company owned by the government of Singapore.
Madam Ho wrote that she “couldn’t help” but be so tickled at this, and apparently was set off into another bout of laughter.
She wrote, “Folks who blocked others from posting contrarians views on their sites, while they try to mouth the slogan of free speech – they now want to deprive yours truly from posting on my own FB page?
Awwww …. that’s pretty rich, don’t you think?
Heehee heehee heeheehee!
??????????”
She then explained that she “was born a maverick – coming feet first instead of head first,” and that “irreverence is in her blood.”
Madam Ho ended her post thanking those who had watched over her, and everyone else who was looking out for each other.
One thing we’re all learning about the Prime Minister’s wife in this season is that we can never expect what we’ll get! —/TISG
POFMA correction directions issued to Lim Tean and two others over falsehoods