Efficient when familiar, unhelpful in uncharted waters

That's the gist of the CNA article "Singapore civil servants ranked most efficient in Asia: survey" (Posted: 03 June 2009 1948 hrs).

SINGAPORE : A business survey on 12 Asian cities found that civil servants in Singapore are the most efficient.

The survey, conducted by Hong Kong-based Political & Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC), also found that Singaporean bureaucrats are unhelpful when things go wrong.

How very true. The Singapore civil service could be manned with rule-based robots and nobody would notice the difference. To be fair, a decent number of civil servants at least smile and try to be nice, at least from my experiences so far. Then again, once you have exceptional situations for them to handle, the smiles fade rather quickly ...