3rd December week - what a looonnnggg week

Either age is catching up on me or I am truly pooped by the events of this week!! Probably both are true. APFO mgmt decided to hold the annual APFO kickoff in Kuala Lumpur - Shangri-La hotel. This meant that besides all the Sales and Support managers meeting in one spot, we also had the Solution Units managers, HR and WW LSCA staff as guest. Amongst the people attending were Miki Abe, my current manager, Mark Doak - soon to be my future manager, Leong Tan, my current manager's manager and Bill Hou, new kid on the block and Mark Doak's manager. With so many managers above me - could not skip the meeting and get togethers!! This made for a very stressful week. On top of that my new assignment and role has still not been finalized or approved.

Since Monday, it has been lavish dinners every day. Monday, we had 8 guests in the office having a separate meeting.Being the defacto host, I had to entertain them for dinner. I roped in Oi Chan to help with transportation and we ended up in Pantai Seafood. Everyone enjoyed that.

Tuesday was dinner at Madam Kwan's in KLCC with the APFO support managers and team. I had to give that a miss as this was the first day of meetings and I had been eating breakfast, tea breaks, lunch and tea the whole day of the meeting - all catered for!! Burppp!!

Wednesday - it was APFO kickoff dinner in the hotel. The theme was Golden and it was more like the Phantom of the Opera. As usual, the ladies were dressed to the nines. The highlights for me was NOT the food - it was so so only. The real highlight was a performance by Joanne Yeoh. If ever I had to vote on someone who is talented, beautiful, with the right height and with an almost perfect body proportion, Joanne Yeoh would have my vote - anytime. Go Google her and see her list of achievements. It almost makes me want to take up music!!!

Thursday - the CSO team had dinner at Saloma's, Jalan Ampang. The restaurant was a 10 min walk from the hotel - but it had been raining the whole day and still drizzling at the appointed time. I ended up ferrying 9 people in my car at one go!!. Everyone manage to get there within an hour (from a 10 min walk away- sheesh!!)

Friday was a bit of a respite from all that gorging. Took my immediate manager (soon to be immediate past manager) to Umaiya for a Japanese dinner.

Saturday, my family and I were invited to an Aloha nite. I have been sponsoring some "special children" to be educated and trained at a center called Sri Eden house. Please go to this site for more information on Sri Eden House http://www.geocities.com/sri_eden_house/
This center catered for "special children" who are mentally and physically challenged. This year, they invited their sponsors and the families of the "special children" to a Christmas party in Seri Pacific (a hotel in KL). The members of New Life Church group and their pastors were also on hand as volunteers and host.

And finally, to end the week (or was it to begin the next week??), I ferried 6 office mates from KL to Sungei Bakap (Penang) to attend an office mate's wedding dinner. We started at almost 1pm and arrived at almost 6pm - slow drive for the last 2 hours. After dinner, at 10pm, I got us all to the office by 1.15am. That would be another blog.

Now, I need to skip dinner for the rest of December!!

Christmas is near!!

Singapore's Orchard road was already decorated for Christmas 2 weeks ago when I was there to audit a LC level 1 class.

Christmas decor has finally been put up in the shopping complexes of KL!! Wunderbar!! Spent last weekend going to Mid Valley Megamall with Alex and wife. Center Court has a very nice setting, with tall Christmas tress , a willowy looking bush and leaves gleaming in Autumn gold. North Court had large mushrooms all over and even had a life show of fairies showing up to do a song and dance. They should have picked more petite girls for the fairies. The ones I saw looked more like the fairies mum!! We must have walked more than 12000 steps because Alex and mum were complaining that they were dead tired at the end of the day.

So the next day - Sunday, only Alex wanted to follow me to I-Utama. Alex was sure glad to have gone. The toy soldiers display was even better than the Midvalley decor. The giant soldier's head moved from side to side as he played on the drums. They even had a beefeater standing around for shoppers to take photos with him.

And since we were near to the Curve, we just had to skedaddle over after 3 hours of exploring the old and new wings of I Utama. After I Utama, the decor of the Curve looked ordinary. The Curve put on a winter wonderland effect, They seriously lack space to put in a bigger theme display. Over at Ikano Power Center, the decor was so so only.

Next week - time permitting, there is still KLCC, Sunway Pyramid and..........

My last day - really!!!

Today, 30th Nov 2007 is my last day. My last day as the Support Assist Manager for Asia Pacific that is. Next month , my whole team of Support Assists will report to new managers in Santa Clara (California), Little Falls (Delaware) and Waldbron (Germany), I still have one team to manage at this time - the E Authoring team in India.

So what lies ahead? There is a proposal to setup a new Global help desk team, but at this time, I am in a holding pattern, waiting for the control tower to advice me which airport I should be landing in. Hope I don't run out of fuel before that happens.

Almost 5 years ago, I took over the management of the Support Assist team and the Sales assist teams and had our combined team meeting in Hachioji, Japan in Jan 2003. The team was pretty big then - disparate and culturally dissimilar. We had Sales assist teams in Japan serving Japan and another team in Singapore serving the rest of AP. AP had 2 Support Assist members who had to merge with the Japan based team with more than a handful. This photo just shows most of the team members at that time,

Over the next 5 years, Sales assist moved over to Marketing. I added Lab Informatics team to my management for a while and then transferred them to Pleasanton last year. The number of AP Support Assist were slowly increased over time. I transfer this current team with 2 members from China, 1 from Taiwan, 1 in Malaysia, 1 in India and 1 in Australia. Japan still had 5 members.

I met up with a future Pongo team member in Beijing in Sept 2003. Nancy - you don't seem to have changed much. I still remember confusing you with Cristina Knebl.

This was the first joint CSO meeting between Asia Pacific and the Solution Units. So we had every CSO manager and most of the decision makers from SU in one room.

That was one big meeting and the team building was just as enjoyable.
Here is one of the team up one section of the Great Wall in Beijing called Mutianyou (not the Badaling section).

Over the years I have had numerous collaboration with China's CSO team. I had utilized their training facilities in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou to the max. We used weekends and public holidays to deliver technical trainings. There was one year when I visited China almost every month to deliver trainings!! Due to the close working relationship, I guess, China CSO treated me as part of their team and for a number of years, I joined in the CSO and customer training's off site team meetings. This one was last year in Chengdu - Panda country.

My last team meeting this year was held in Fukuoka - but only involved the LCMS support team. It was getting difficult to get all of the team together due to workload and bandwidth.

When all's been said and done, this little plaque we left at one of the temples in Fukuoka just about sums up how work should be done.
Now, if only I knew which airport i am suppose to land in???

Despicable people

The office is running a food donation campaign as part of the Employees Community Activities. We have been asking employees to donate food so that we can share the donated food with less fortunate families. Six families are selected to receive the food donations once the collection period is completed. That will be a blog for another day when we make the donations.

What I want to mention here is the despicable and disgusting behaviour of at least one unknown individual. 2 days ago, in the early hours of the day, 2 plastic bags of foodstuff was left in the cubicle next to the food collection room. Inside the bags were bottles of chilli sauce, cans of raspberries and so on. Hey, that's a nice addition to the collection, some of us thought.

Today, we decided to move the food into the collection room and one of the committee members noticed that all of the food in the plastic bag had exceeded their expiry dates. #*&$#%$*- how can anyone be so callous?? It looks like someone did some spring cleaning and decided to "DONATE" the expired foodstuff.

To add salt to injury, one of the bottles of chilli had been opened and used. I postulate that the person giving these may have tested the sauce to see if they would die from consumming it. I hope they had a &#*%$@ stomach ache after that!!

All because we are targeting to donate to poor families, it does not mean that we should be giving them stuff which is potentially not edible. For the person who did this - I hope you can live with your conscience. It is either very small or non existent.

Sheeesssh!!

No mood to blog for a while

It's been a long time since a ratchety persistent cough got to me. My last visit to Singapore, I seem to have caught the flu bug that is prevalent all year round. First it came on like a hay fever symptom. Itchy eyes, raspy throat and sneezing spells. Asked the company clinic for anti-histamines and symptoms cleared except for the cough.

By the time I got back home, cough became more persistent and frequent. See the doc again. Diagnosed as flu of the month. Got a bunch of antibiotics, anti inflammatory pills, muco-solvant and a cough mixture to be taken at night as it makes one sleepy. I am very much awake after taking this!!

By this time, the cough is so bad that my sides are aching from the persistent coughing. Hope this clears by Friday when I have to send off my last day message.