The first week of January has been a real busy one. This really started from Christmas eve from the Chinese clients who dont celebrate Christmas and "western" new year.
Essentially it's a huge proposal for a major project and quite possibly the largest one we had to put together. Because I'm country head of China, this proposal became my baby. Had to arrange for a conference call with all the heads of marketing, sales, operations, technical services, F&B and my COO in the US. These including my Singapore colleagues. This means i was chairing the call with more than 10 people in it. Ardent readers would remember the horrible conference call i had in March 2008.
Telling all the HODs what to do wasnt difficult cos the Americans are quite open minded to have a junior staff telling what needs to be done in order to meet the client's needs. But the bad news was i needed their parts in 12 hours! Wahahaha.. literally everyone gasped and then my COO overruled me and said impossible to give in 12 hours. The earliest is 36 hours. So i had to hustle my mandarin translators to work within a shorter deadline.
Which was why i was almost working in the US and Singapore time zones this entire week. Yawn..
And in between after my normal working hours i had to go interview some people and I probably interviewed like 30 people last week. It was quite depressing really cos most of the people were jobless and were quite underqualified with the various positions and i found it quite difficult to not shortlist them for the second round. And these are people who had been waiting for 4.5 hours by the time i got to see them. There was a young girl who didnt work for the last 5 years cos she was home to take care of her cancer-stricken mum and now she can come out to work cos her mum has passed away. Man, how can i not put her through to second round?
It was a tough week and i was glad for it to be over.
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