Changing of the guards - coming soon

This week, the week of 24th Sept., we had more managers than usual visiting the LSCA team in the Uptown Sales office. Sonti came along with Chaiyapat, Roger Koh and Leong Tan. The occasion - to officially announce that Roger Koh and Chaiyapat was switching jobs. Roger would take over the management of the Support operations in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand (SMT) and Chaiyapat to take on projects management within the Support Operations Engineering (SOE) team. Understandably, many of the younger team members were a little apprehensive. For most of them, they had known no other manager except Chaiyapat - who had held that position for about 10 years. So who was this Roger Koh who was taking over?

He is actually a dinosaur who once roam the support operations in Hewlett Packard 30 years ago!!. My goodness, almost all the staff in LSCA Malaysia's Support today were not even born when Roger started his career as a Customer Engineer - supporting Analytical and Medical products. He was one of those who interviewed me for the job when I applied to join HP in 1981. Roger had gone from Customer Engineer to as high as the Far East Service Manager (not including Japan), switched to Marketing and Sales and now has turned full circle back to managing Support. As Leong Tan manages both of them and was instrumental in the decision for them to swap jobs, he was on hand to explain his rationale on the job swap.

It was also an opportunity for me to update Leong on project Pongo. The way Pongo is developing, I would be out of a job by the time the plans are implemented. I had asked Leong to consider giving me a severance package if they need to lay off anyone because of Pongo. That would probably not likely to happen as I am still the cheapest manager around delivering as good as any other managers in AP. But no harm in asking. At the current rate, the severance package is worth about 30 months of my current salary. I still have my fall back plan of concentrating on my unit trust business and engage in another business too.

After a morning of meeting and debriefing, all of the team members who were present took the opportunity to have a group photo taken with Roger. Actually, this was more for Roger's benefit, as he struggles to remember all the people that he shall be inheriting from Chaiyapat on 1st Nov 2007.

One last thing - I normally try to write about things uplifting, positive and optimistic. But for this posting, I really really feel so strongly about the lousy food served at one outlet that I must write about how bad it is. At the end of the morning's meeting, the whole department adjourned to a restaurant in Damansara Uptown. We had Bak Kut Teh, Vinegar Pig's trotters (chu geok cho), fried green veg, asam fish and a sort of an egg/ meat concoction. The Bak Kut Teh was tasteless, the soup taste more like water. The Pig's trotters was too sourish (according to those who tried it - I didn't). I can fry my greens better than what we got. The Asam Fish tasted sweet (price of sugar must have come down). And the egg concoction was essentially egg fried thin like a pancake, then you plaster minced pork over the whole egg platter, roil it up and then steam it. Problem was that the "chef" preparing it did not add salt and pepper to the minced pork, making the whole dish flat and tasteless. I know because I have cooked this dish before.

The outlet to avoid - BKT house - located just before Koon Kee and Farmasi Utama along Jalan SS 21/37 in Damansara Uptown. AVOID it like the plague!!!