Meeting of body parts and reminiscing

Yesterday, there was a meeting of body parts at the Curve. There were also honorary guests present.These body parts had known each other for coming to 27 years!!

At the top is Khoo TL, who does not seem to have aged!! Now, how can a Khoo be a body part. Well... in Cantonese, Khoo is part of the male anatomy - as in ku ku jiao! Khoo interviewed me for a position in HP in 1981 as a Customer Engineer. I must have exceeded his expectations when I was posted in Singapore for a month, one month after I had joined HP. I was there to back up the CE there who was on national Service (reservist training). With no training (and often no initial understanding of the instruments), I managed to attend to a majority of service calls and installations for both Medical and Analytical products. On my third month with HP, Khoo gave me a 25% pay increment - that was RM300 extra!!

Lip WT was the Sales Engineer for Analytical products. How appropriate - he pays LIP service to customers to get them to purchase our products. His hair is silvery grey now and thinning. He used to say that a sign of success of a man is that he either lose his hair by 30 or have his hair turn grey.

Toh HK was my senior in Support. He used to be a sanitation engineer when he was studying in the UK. Over here, we call them the rubbish collector la!! Toh uses his TOE to prod customers. Kicks them if they don't behave. And he has very strong political views. Here is a classic shot of the TOE and THUMB

and I am the THUMB who gives the thumbs up whenever I complete my assignments.

And hence we were parts of the body!!!

Honorary guests for the night were Kong PH, Tai Hooi Lin (I guess he also qualifies as the THIGH - though I am not sure how that fits into operations) and a long time customer Jaya from PORIM.

We had dinner at the Bavarian Bierhaus at the Curve - ordered a couple of pork knuckles (delicious but pricey), a bunch of sausages and I lost count of the number of jugs of beer that flowed till 11pm.

Picture above was taken in Oct 1984 when yours truly was only 26 years young! We had the Sales Engineer for medical products (Goh), the admin (Siti), the Medical Support CE (James) and the 2 parts of the body.

There is talk of a arranging a major gathering of all ex HP staff in mid October!. Sure like to see that happen. The photo above is just about ALL of HP Sales Malaysia in early 80s!! Only 2 of those people are still in Agilent - Khor AK (in black standing behind me) and of course me!. The next photo was taken on a company outing to Fraser's Hill. Nobody believes that I was ever THIN in my life!!

And this next visual here has Siti (the one in Yellow)- our admin for a number of years. She was from Penang and spoke Mandarin Chinese, English and Malaylast but not least is the Far East management team for Analytical back in the 80s!! Back then Dick Aal had mgmt responsibilities for the Intercon region (which was Latin Americas, Canada, Japan and Far East Asia).

I can't for the life of me remember the names of those 3 at the back row!!