South Korea new President Lee Myung-bak
 
If South Korea's bureaucrats¹ are playing golf, chances are they are not working hard enough, President Lee Myung-bak's spokesman quoted him as saying on Monday.

Lee, a former construction boss, is a widely known workaholic who has started work at 7:30 a.m local time every day since his landslide² victory on December 19 election.

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

"We're starting a meeting at 7:30 a.m. so you're thinking maybe it'll be like this for the next five years," Lee said on Monday before a briefing from the Ministry³ 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 for the working day due to complaints from staff members, but to no avail.

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 authoritarian⁴ regimes," Lee said, but quoted the president as saying: "You're working hard and there's never enough time. It would be a feat⁵ to be playing golf."

韩国总统李明博的发言人于本周一援引他的话说，如果政府官员还有时间去打高尔夫，那他们工作可能还不够努力。

曾任某建筑公司总裁的李明博是个公认的工作狂，他于去年12月19日以压倒性优势当选韩国总统后，每天早上7点半就开始工作。

李明博的新内阁刚成立两周，内阁官员们已经开始有些招架不住了。

李明博在本周一的企划财政部报告会开始前说：“今天我们7点半开始开会，所以大家一定在想今后的五年可能都是这样。政府工作人员本应该是‘仆人’。”

“仆人理应比主人起得早，我们的主人是国民。如果仆人比主人起得还晚，那这个仆人就不称职了。”

由于一些官员抱怨上班太早，李明博的总统秘书长柳佑益恳请总统推迟上班时间，但没有得到应允。

据韩国联合通讯社报道，柳佑益现在几乎已禁止总统府工作人员打高尔夫。

总统发言人李东宫说：“政府并没有颁布这样的禁令，那是专制政体下才会有的事。”李东宫援引总统的话说：“你如果努力工作，肯定会觉得时间不够用，那么打高尔夫就是一件很奢侈的事了。”

Vocabulary:

burnout:the state of being extremely tired or ill, either physically or mentally, because you have worked too hard（劳累；体力或精力透支）

all but:几乎；差不多