韩国总统李明博近日表示，政府工作人员就是仆人，仆人理应比主人早起；而如果政府官员打高尔夫，很有可能就证明他们工作不够努力。

If South Korea's bureaucrats are playing golf, chances are they are not working hard enough, President Lee Myung-bak's spokesman quoted him as saying on yesterday.

Lee, a former construction boss, is a widely known workaholic who has started work at 7:30 am every day since his landslide victory on December 19 election.

Bureaucrats in his government, which was launched just two weeks ago, have been showing signs of burnout.

"We're starting a meeting at 7:30 am so you're thinking maybe it'll be like this for the next five years," Lee said yesterday before a briefing from the Ministry of Strategy and Finance "Government workers are supposed to be servants.

"Servants are supposed to get up before the masters, who are in this case the people of this country. When you have servants getting up later than the masters, you're not doing your job right."

Lee's chief of staff, Yu Woo-ik, has pleaded with his boss to have a later start. Yu has now all but banned golf for the presidential staff, according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency. "There is no ban of that kind," presidential spokesman Lee Dong-kwan said. "That's the kind of thing that was done under authoritarian regimes," said Lee, but quoted the president as saying: "You're working hard and there's never enough time. It would be a feat to be playing golf."

(China Daily/Agencies)

Vocabulary:

workaholic：工作狂

(英语点津Celene编辑)