The film centers on the lives of three socially isolated characters – the newly unemployed Ah Jie (Lee Kang-sheng), the call center counsellor he depends on for support, Chyi (Jane Liao), and Shin (Ivy Yin), one of the team of provocatively dressed girls employed in selling betel nuts and cigarettes to passing customers at a street kiosk below his apartment.

Jie ambles around his almost bare apartment, cooking instant noodles, tending his treasured marijuana plants in their closet nursery and explaining his problems to counsellor Chyi on the suicide hotline.

A former stockbroker, recently fired, he resorts to selling off his remaining designer furniture at a nearby pawn shop to maintain his paltry existence.

Chyi, the counsellor he compulsively requests from the hotline call center, is a young but overweight woman.

Jie fantasises about Chyi, idealising her as beautiful girl in a revealing costume pleasuring herself to the sound of his voice and exhaling the marijuana smoke he breathes onto the telephone handset.

When she leaves work for her marital home she finds her husband in a frenzy of activity, preparing an enormous gourmet meal for her.

Later in the evening, as she walks past the two of them playing pool on her way to the kitchen for a tub of ice cream, the camera pans to reveal that both men are naked from the waist down.

Abruptly, the couple are shown copulating in a number of extraordinarily acrobatic positions, most of which involve Jie suspending Shin completely in his arms.

At the street kiosk one of the more established girls, who has formed a more personal relationship with a regular client in an expensive car, leans in on the promise of another gift and the man attempts to drive off with her.

Jie ends up on the roof of the apartment building in a languid threesome with two betel nut girls.

Shin is outraged by his attitude and pulls his plants out of the cupboard, smashing the pots underfoot and trampling them into the floor with her patent leather boots.

Jie calls the hotline and leaves a message for Chyi, who is eating at a roadside restaurant and watching the cooking program that demonstrated the live carp preparation in the opening sequence of the film.

The exclamation is a wry reference to the film's comically cynical perspective on human relationships, in which a wide variety of unlikely subjects – food, marijuana and live eels, amongst others – become substitute objects of comfort and affection for the protagonists.