Lying there..

Oddly, I found the missing piece of my cufflink in the paper tray of my office printer. Wonder how it got there.

It’s a little depressing to see it lying there. Lifeless and alone.

Trepidation

Next week is one of the three weeks in a year that i know i'd fall sick. It's Board/Exco meetings week.

My CEO and President have just arrived and i just got off the phone with them as i have scheduled some meetings for them.

It's Board meeting on Wednesday and my client told me last week that he was going to sign an LOI with us on Tuesday when he's back in the office. Therefore there's a possibility i could announce our first LOI for the year in the Board meeting if he comes through for me. Another project i have been chasing is likely to make a decision at the end of March. So there's a chance of either heartbreak or elation.

My HCMC meeting went relatively well. Seems like there's an LOI lurking to be signed somewhere.

I hope the week turns out well. *shudder*

Babel

Im so happy to be going back home tomorrow that i bothered to draw this out.

My CEO is in Asia so i dragged him to Vietnam with me. He's German so he speaks German and English. The client is Vietnamese and their consultant is a Vietnamese German so the bugger speaks Vietnamese, German and English.

Here's how the meeting this meeting went.

Im not kidding. Half the time, the conversation went from German to Vietnamese and vice versa.



Most of the time i was starting into space wondering what i was going to wear for golf this weekend.

The title of this entry "Babel", refers to the Tower of Babel a bunch of sinners was trying to build to reach god and god made everyone speak different languages so that they cant communicate.

Until the devil made everyone take two languages in school.

=(

As a continuing slew of bad things to happen to me, one of my favourite cufflinks was damaged. Only realised it when i removed my shirt.



Im in Ho Chi Minh City and staying in the same hotel that offers me four free pieces of free laundry. I even brought two dirty shirts i wore on Monday and Tuesday in Singapore to be laundried here. Wahaha..

Dumbass

I only just realised that all this while, I have been meaning to type “是否“to my clients but I had typed “是佛”instead.

Now my clients must think im either a dumbass or a Buddhist fanatic.

Dilemma

A client gave me this thumbdrive today. It says there's some mother of pearl thingy in it but it's soooo girly. Dont think i'll dare to use it.

But it's 2GB. Argh. Such a dilemma.

Nerds

I saw this Asus repair centre in Adelphi. Somehow i feel that when service centres are designed to be spacious and many seats, Im never confident of the quality of their products cos they're expecting tons of people to send in their products for repairs.

Apparently this particular repair centre took things a little further even after allocating a lot of space. Check out their signboard.



"Royal Club"??? "Rock solid"??? "Heart warming"???

They make the place sound like a premier airline lounge. And hey, it'd warm my heart more if your products are more solid that your signboard. Asus? More like Asses.

The picture was taken at an oblique angle cos there was a geek standing outside and i had to stand further away to take my clandestine pic.

Austerity

For some reason, I've been on a saving mode of late. Sure, those golf games cost a bit, plus the accessories and attire but other than that, i havent bought a non-golf shirt for ages, havent gone to the tailor for 8 months, just changed my wallet after using for 1.5 years, just changed my phone after almost 2 years.

This is compared to my peak of making 2-3 shirts per week, changing wallets/phones after less than a year.

I was glad i managed to save more than half my pay in Feb.

I think the personification of this austerity was exemplified by the state of my golf glove. Play until got holes.



I have another pair of gloves which i wear, depending on the color coordination with my shirt/shorts and it has some holes as well.

Sigh, got to buy 2 gloves now.

In some ways, im glad im travelling a little more now so that i dont have to pay ERP ($6 daily) and my daily meals, etc.

Im going to Vietnam next week again. Yawn.

Checking in

Im on leave today to do my first annual body check up. Decided to do this since now that im over 30, thought it'd be prudent.

Hope nothing bad turns up. Im kinda scared and hungry (from the fasting).

Then it's facial.

Then it's golf tmr in JB.

Then badm.

Then i might have to go Vietnam next week. Bleah

Kio Dio!

We went to Inagiku last weekend. We have been going there quite often cos the lunch there is quite good and I get a 50% discount.

We decided we didnt want the usual tempura we usually eat, nor the usual set, nor the lousy clear soup that came with the other set. So we ordered this set (set 1) that had unagi, pork cutlet, sashimi and miso soup. We ordered another wagyu beef set, which we ordered before (set 2).

The food came. First was simmered vegetables. Alarm bells started ringing for me cos there's no way in hell (heaven has no vegetables) im going to pay for vegetables, when i dont eat vegs! I thought perhaps it was just a very large portion of appetiser. Then came tempura! Now, something was very wrong.

We asked for the manager, cos he was the one who took our order. We asked how come the food that came wasnt what we ordered from the menu. He calmly said that they had a new chef and the new chef changed some items from Set 1 cos he didnt like some of the ingredients in there. So he removed pork cutlet and unagi and added the veg (what???) and tempura. He offered to give us the unagi and pork but we'd have to wait for a while for them to prepare it. Then he said we could have the tempura since it's already made and given to us.

He came back after a while to say that there's no more pork cutlet and he'd give us a large portion of unagi and he wasnt going to charge us for set 1.

So in the end we only paid for set 2 and cos we had 50% discount, we only paid $60! w00t!

Here's the spread we had.

Bagged

Thought i'd give you guys a treat and show you my golf bag.

Vietnam

I was in Ho Chi Minh City for a couple of days. I never really enjoyed my trips there cos it’s such a cowboy town with bad traffic, not very nice food, no shopping, etc. I could go on.

The bulk of my meetings was going to be near the airport so I was deliberating if I should stay in the nicer city centre hotels or nearer the airport in the lousier hotel. I decided to help the company save money and also save the amount of time I spent in the horrible traffic with this hotel near the airport. Managed to get a good rate, upgrade to suite, two-way airport transfer, free internet, use of executive lounge, 1-hour use of meeting room (didn’t think I’d use it but I did eventually), discounts on food eaten at their restaurants. What a steal!

My impression of this cowboy town started even at their immigration when the visa of the angmo in front of me only started the next day (what a dumb angmo), and the immigration officer demanded money from him. It was that blatant. The angmo kept saying he had no money and the immigration officer just stared into blank space for a very long time. Held up the queue for a long time before the officer relented and threw the passport back at him.

My hotel room was pretty decent but like ive mentioned before, I don’t really like suites cos the distance between the bed and the table and the tv is too far that it’s tiring.







I saw this wedding couple standing at the lobby of the hotel underneath some arches that night. Apparently they are waiting for their guests and when the guests come, they can all pose under the arches and take a picture. This is repeated until it’s time to go in. That sounds tiring.



My client brought us to a place to eat in the middle of the city. It was a quaint black and white bungalow and very crowded and no air-con. I felt stupid to be wearing a suit in this place but the client was insistent that the food was very good. The food was indeed very good!





Check out the chendol making process.



Doesn’t my client’s assistant look like Chuck Bartowski from the tv series “Chuck”? Curly hair, side burns, white shirt, dorky face. All he needs is a nerd herd badge.



I also flew to Nha Trang to visit some places. My cowboy clients said they didn’t manage to book our return flight from Nha Trang to HCMC so they said we had to take a car ride back from Nha Trang to HCMC… a 10-hour car ride. I very nearly fainted when I heard that cos I had serious motion sickness. Man, 10 hours.. my longest in a car was 6 hours and I nearly died then. It made me pissy the entire night on this news. I therefore only packed my facial wash and stole a hotel face towel into my laptop bag in preparation for my flight the next day.

The next morning while waiting for the flight to Nha Trang, the client told me that they managed to secure tickets for us. I was elated, before I realised that I didn’t bring a change of clothes, nor my laptop. Means it’d be a night of naked cable tv. Beats a grimy 10-hour car ride.

It was my first time in Nha Trang so I was quite excited that I now can add one more location on my facebook “Where I’ve been” app. The client decided we should have breakfast first before starting work. In deference to us being guests, they opted for a cleaner establishment.



Otherwise, it would have been this roadside stall. *shudder*



This is the bed that I would spend a naked cable tv night.


This is the view from my Nha Trang hotel. Quite nice actually.



This is the city area.



We had lunch at this nice alfresco beach side restaurant, which served damn good fish. We ate three different kinds of fish.



All in all, I spent four nights in Vietnam. I couldn’t wait to get back after the first night.

Sacked

There’s a show out in theatres now featuring George Clooney playing a person whose job is to travel around and telling people that they’re fired. Whilst that’s a pretty weird job in itself, I actually have a better way to do his job.

Saw this in my office today. This is a much easier and less emotionally draining way to sack a person. Of course in this way, you don’t get an excuse to see George Clooney.